“What have you done with my sister, you son of a bitch!”
Daniel struggles to say something but Julia can’t hear him.
“Tell me!”
He garbles something again but this time the sound is lost in a sudden whoosh as the flames triple in size. The blistering heat is unbearable. She has to get out before the entire van is engulfed. Julia drags Daniel from the van until they are clear of the wreckage.
Breathing hard, Julia stands looking as the van is swallowed by flames.
She can’t even cry.
77
They search all through the night and halfway into the next day. They search the valleys and ravines and canyons and hilltops and caves. They pick through the wreckage and turn over twisted metal and sift through charred debris and smashed-up trees felled when the van careened off the cliff. They look and look and then do it all over again but Toni isn’t anywhere to be found.
By mid-afternoon the decision is made to call off the search. Julia has never felt so hopeless, and standing now at the cliff’s edge and staring at the pitiful wreckage below, she wonders when this nightmare will ever end. Hours earlier a seriously injured Daniel had been winched to safety and taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. He had suffered multiple injuries including broken ribs, a skull fracture, and, most concerning, a tear in his spleen causing serious internal bleeding. Julia never thought she’d be praying so hard for Toni’s captor to live. But they need him alive. He’s the only one who can tell them where Toni is.
Leo appears at her shoulder. “We should go. You need that gash on your hand seen to.”
She glances at her hand, temporarily bandaged by a medic earlier in the morning. She doesn’t know how the laceration occurred but suspects she tore it open when she was dragging Daniel from the van. It’s serious, a severed tendon between the thumb and forefinger on her dominant hand. Not great considering her career choice. Even so, it seems trivial given the circumstances.
“Anything from the hospital?”
Leo shakes his head. “He’s still in surgery.”
“He’d better make it, Leo, because we’re all out of other options.”
Leo looks out across the valley and exhales. “Yeah, I hear you.”
“What about the other avenue of inquiry—where he went after he tried to steal the medication from the clinic?”
Leo glances at Detective Muhtar, who’s standing near the car talking on his phone.
“They’re still working on it. Göreme is not exactly rife with CCTV cameras. They’re relying on witnesses who saw the van after Daniel fled the hospital. On the bright side, they can confirm the time gap between the hospital incident and when the police chase occurred was just under an hour.”
“So where did he go in that time?”
“Wherever it was, it can’t have been far.”
Julia pauses. “What if after fleeing the hospital he hid Toni somewhere nearby? The incident would’ve shaken him, he needed to buy some time until things cooled off and gather his thoughts about what to do next. But for some reason, he left the hiding place and was spotted by police and the chase happened.”
“That’s what they’re thinking, yeah.”
Julia lifts her eyes to the sky, tracks a hawk across the valley. “What if we’re too late, Leo? What if he panicked? What if he’s not hiding her at all but killed Toni instead?”
“You can’t think like that. It’ll make you go crazy. A wise person once told me it’s better to deal with facts than speculation and I think that’s exactly what we should do.”
Close to tears, Julia says, “I had so many things I wanted to tell her.”
“And you will.”
She nods and swallows. “God, I hope so.”
78
Daniel opens his eyes. There’s a searing pain along his left side. He turns his head and sees the IV drip connected to his arm. Confused, he struggles to put his jumbled thoughts together. Then he remembers. The chase, the crash, the fire. He’d been injured. A fuzzy memory of being wheeled into surgery comes to him, the words laceration to your spleen being uttered. Lord, how had things gotten so bad?
He tries lifting his hand to wipe his mouth but his wrist is shackled to the bed. Then he sees the armed guard in the doorway. Oh, this is not good. This is more than a spanner in the works. This is an absolute disaster.
He thinks of Toni. He must get to her. He’d intended to be away from her for only an hour at the most. But depending on how long he’d been unconscious for, it must be at least two nights since he first took her to the hiding place after almost getting caught stealing the medication. That’s when things had unraveled so badly. Once he’d managed to give that hospital worker the slip, he’d been fortunate enough to find somewhere temporary to hole up until nightfall, when he and Toni would have a much better chance of slipping out of Cappadocia unseen. But then he’d made the fatal mistake of deciding to ditch the van to steal another vehicle. In hindsight, it had been a stupid, stupid mistake and resulted in him being recognized by local police, ending in that disastrous chase.
And now Toni has been without food and water and medication for an unacceptable amount of time. Daniel’s heart aches at the thought of her being frightened and all alone. Hold on, Toni. I haven’t left you. Please hold on, my love.
Daniel takes three deep breaths and tells himself to focus. He
