“Did the hotel security team search all the kitchens and laundry rooms too?”
“Apparently, yes.”
Nico sat back and thought about it. “Okay. If she’s not in the hotel, then they won’t use the helicopter, will they?”
“They’d have to bring her back in again in order to get her up to the helicopter, and that would be dangerous.”
“The helicopter being here makes me think Charlotte has to be here too. So the kidnappers must have her hidden somewhere that the hotel’s security people couldn’t find her.”
“Also don’t you think that, even if they had her hidden in the hotel, they would have already moved the helicopter as soon as possible?”
“Unless there was a hitch in those plans,” Nico said thoughtfully. “Anyway, check who owns the helicopter and what its plans are.”
“I’m digging into that. Plus I have something on the two penthouses in this hotel. We’ve got a businessman staying in one, and the other has an ongoing relationship with an import-export company.”
At that, Nico rolled his eyes. Because import and export covered everything from drugs to cars to women. And probably 90 percent of them were legit, but the ones that weren’t gave everything else in that whole business arena a bad name. “Let’s see if there’s a pilot around that we can talk to.”
“On it.”
Nico continued studying all the traffic cameras, looking to see if she’d been smuggled out another way. He kept rubbing his eyes as the vehicles swam on the screen in front of him. It was a stupid system where he had to keep watch on multitudes of vehicles all at the same time. “If they had planned to take the helicopter, they would have stayed in the hotel building. Or at least nearby.”
“Makes sense. But, if they were taking her out in a delivery truck, they would have stashed her until the next one was scheduled.”
“But lots of deliveries were moving all through the night and into the morning. They only needed a place to store her for a few hours, and then they could easily have moved her out in the next laundry or food truck or any other truck.”
“I agree with that,” Keane said. “So, if they’ve taken Charlotte from this hotel, what we need are all the names of all the staff who worked in the kitchen and in the unloading bays and in the laundry and see how many of them are still at work today.”
Nico quickly asked his chat window support for all the related information. Unfortunately this was a huge hotel, and, by the time he got the staff list, he groaned. “Thirty names to check here.”
“Let’s start knocking them off then. We don’t have the luxury of time here, so let’s go by the standard profiling. Cross off anybody who’s married with family here. Anybody who’s been on staff for a year or more.”
So, with the chat’s help, they narrowed the list from that point down to those who were making decent money, then to a list of single males of any age who hadn’t been at the hotel for very long. Less than three months was the time frame they put on that and then checked who would normally have worked today but didn’t show up. Two names came up. Nico quickly twisted the laptop around and said, “Just these two.”
“Let’s find addresses and go check them out.”
That took another three minutes. By the time they had those, they were already fully armed and heading outside. “Time to have a talk with those guys, huh?”
“Depending on what’s going on,” Keane said, “I’m not too sure if these guys will be around to talk to.”
“If they’re smart, they would have gone with the rest of the crew.”
“Maybe, and maybe they’re in the way.”
“Depends if they’ve done this before or if this is a steady operation.”
“Hope you’re not bringing up sex workers or white slavery,” Keane said. “That’s the last thing I want to deal with.”
“I hear you,” Nico said. “But there could be only so many scenarios. Something like this has four likely options.”
“Humanity is a sick place,” Keane said. “There are as many options in this world as you can possibly think of. The trouble is, we can only think of so many, hindered by our apparent lack of evil intent, until a new scenario comes up. Then we realize how logical it is, from a malevolent point of view.”
The two men exited in the same vehicle and pulled out into the night, just about twenty-one hours since she’d gone missing.
“I still think that, if they were smart,” Keane said, “they’d have taken her a long way away by now.”
“If they were smart, they wouldn’t have done this in the first place,” Nico said. “At least not here, not in a public place. Would have been much easier to have run her vehicle off the road and taken her then.”
“She didn’t drive. At least not here. She took cabs.”
“Has anybody checked with the cab companies to make sure she didn’t get a ride somewhere?”
“The team is on it but so far nothing has turned up,” Keane said.
Since Nico wasn’t driving, he sent the request for more information. One thing about jobs like this was their never-ending thirst for answers. And you never knew what you didn’t know until it popped up.
They hit the first employee’s address. It was an apartment in a middle-income neighborhood. Donning another pair of disposable gloves, Nico and Keane checked the area before leaving their car.
Nico picked the locks and defined this place as empty cold, as if nobody had lived here in a while. But food was in the fridge. An air of desolation surrounded the place, and, despite the presence of food, the furniture looked cold, uncomfortable. Nico looked over at Keane and said, “Doesn’t feel like somebody’s been here for a few days.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
They did a quick sweep. Clothes were in the dressers, laundry in the
