“I wonder if that’s the guy who drugged her.”
“Maybe, she said he was a lowlife.”
“Sure, but who knows?” Baylor said, studying the screen and looking at a face with a broken nose. “I don’t remember if she mentioned the nose.”
“And did she see him clearly enough? That’s a bigger question.”
“True enough, but she and her parents were all kept in the one section on the boat. We could ask her mother though. She’s the only one who appears to be cognizant.”
“Let me send it over. Who is at the hospital?” Hudson quickly fired it off and sent it to their team member. He followed it up with a message, asking for the mother to confirm if this was one of their captors.
When the response came back ten minutes later, it was positive.
Hudson said, “Well, that’s a good sign. This is one of them. She said another one hung around with this guy and stared at her daughter way too closely.”
“So, this might have been the one who stopped the perv gunman from going after her,” Baylor said. “Which would make more sense because she felt that the one bothering her was even less important in the scheme of things.”
“Yes, underlings all the way. And we know that there are layers and layers of hierarchy to this international kidnapping stuff.”
“Exactly,” Baylor said. “Let’s see if the cameras picked up a second guy leaving from the dock before we raided that riverboat cruiser.” They both started searching, going through everybody who walked or drove anywhere in the vicinity.
Then Hudson sat up, clearly interested.
Baylor leaned closer to Hudson’s screen. “What ya got?”
“This is a possibility,” Hudson murmured, pointed to the replay on his screen. A suspect Hudson was following online had met up with another guy on a barren street corner. The two spoke briefly, and an envelope was passed off. Then they split and walked in different directions. “A payday, you think?”
“It looks like it,” Baylor said. “We need to track him and see where he’s gone.”
“Just him?”
“No, both of them. The one paying must be a higher-up, and the other one getting paid is probably just the next guy in line, some go-to middleman, who then hires the low-level gunmen who actually did the kidnapping, including the perv after her.”
“Do you think he still is?”
“I don’t know,” Baylor said. “If you think about it, he actually defied orders by giving her those drugs.”
“So, in other words, it may not be quite so easy to change his mind.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Chances are, he might walk away from it for now because we’re involved, but he also might be looking for an angle to continue later. Either way we can’t take a chance and discount him.”
“Got it,” Hudson said. “We need to track both guys’ movements.”
“Let’s put our eyes on our possible Russian guy first.”
So they went to work on the camera footage, backtracking periodically, depending on the cameras.
Hudson said, “We lost him for a good half hour here. Then he showed up again.”
“Where the hell did the Russian guy go?” Baylor asked, as he searched through the cameras in the area. “He was gone at this corner,” he said, and he tapped the screen. The other camera didn’t pick him up, and that block was only about fifty yards long. But two buildings were in there.
“So chances are, he lives there or was visiting,” Hudson said.
“Or he was hiding,” Baylor suggested. “Or making a phone call.”
“Who knows?”
“He could even have just ducked out of the range of the cameras,” Baylor said. “Think about it. We’re sitting here, spending how much time backtracking his movements, and we lost him for that time frame. How many other people would just give up and figure they lost him? When instead, here he is, showing back up again some forty-two minutes later. What did he do for those forty-two minutes?”
“Well, let me get an address and see if we can find out what the hell is in that building,” Hudson said. It didn’t take too long for him to come back with an answer. “It’s apartments, and I have a full list of residents right here.” He pulled it up. “We do have a name for the Russian associate but not for the one who got paid. He might be a local, with no arrests, so under the radar.”
“I don’t know that the names would be anything that we could count on,” Baylor said. “Chances are the names are fake or something adapted just for the purpose of this operation.”
“Well, we would do that too,” Hudson said. “If you end up doing sneaky things, you wouldn’t want to use your real name for it.”
“Exactly.” They continued to watch the cameras, following the Russian rep, and, when he disappeared again a little bit later, Baylor leaned forward. “Where did he go?” Damn, these guys were ghosts.
They waited and waited and waited, and they never saw him again. Baylor swore and said, “I’ve got to go physically check out where he’s gone.”
“It’s not that far away from the place where he disappeared earlier,” he said. “You want to do some reconnaissance?”
“I really, really do.”
“But first, get this.” Hudson pointed to the replay on his laptop. He had caught the money man, arguing with some guy on the street. When Hudson showed this to Baylor, he had Hudson add this additional guy to their facial recognition software program for the IT team to do a search on as well.
“I’ll watch for him as I’m out too.” He turned toward Hudson. “That means you have to stay here and look after her.”
Hudson gave him a droll smile. “Meaning, she’ll wake up screaming when she finds herself alone?”
“I think she’s pretty damn scared, and we can’t take the chance that her perv is hanging around here anyway,” he said.
“Don’t be too long. I’m getting hungry,” Hudson said.
Baylor
