“Shit! The bastard!” Quinn typed frantically, then the computer froze. Blue screen.
Quinn spoke quietly yet frantically on the phone. Dillon read Quinn’s file as he paced, feeling more helpless than at any other time in his life.
Thirty minutes later Patrick said quietly, “I have it.”
“How’d you do that?” Quinn and Dillon stood over Patrick’s shoulder.
43:31:45.
Again on screen, Lucy was restrained on the floor, tears running down her cheeks. She was looking straight up at the ceiling. Her breasts were bare, blood on her stomach, a bruise already forming on her cheek.
Dillon didn’t know if he was more relieved he had missed witnessing his sister’s humiliation or furious that it had happened in the first place.
“I hacked the feed, falsified the DNS so he doesn’t see it coming from a government server, and sent in Nick’s credit card information. I didn’t want him running names to numbers and seeing a ‘Kincaid’ on the list,” Patrick added.
Peterson was trying to text message Kate to warn her. “Dammit! Kate shut down her system. She’s in danger.”
“Lucy is in danger!” Connor exclaimed.
“Kate will contact us,” Dillon said.
“How can you be sure?” Connor threw his arms up in the air. “I can’t stand around and do nothing.”
“So don’t,” said Dillon.
“Stop playing shrink and tell me straight.”
Tensions were high, and Nick stepped between the two brothers. “I think what Dillon is suggesting is that we try to track him through other means.”
Connor sighed, rubbed a hand over his rough face. “The money.”
“Exactly,” Dillon said. “The payments need to be going somewhere. And, frankly, I don’t care about the law right now.” He glanced at Peterson. “Find the financial institution, get the DA, Andrew Stanton, to write any warrant we need, and see what trail we can find.”
Peterson went through the file he’d given Dillon and handed Connor a stack of paper. “These are the known bank accounts on this guy. Most have been shut down, many are inactive. We haven’t found a pattern to them, only that he opens them right before a live feed, and closes them immediately after, transferring the funds to another account. Last time we seized most of his money, and now we don’t know what he’ll do. Our profiler thinks he’ll withdraw the money every couple of hours to prevent losing it all.”
Patrick said, “Have Nick’s credit card company track the payment. Get every confirmation number you can, contact information. It’ll be a dummy company, but eventually it’ll lead somewhere. It has to.”
Connor wasn’t happy, but it gave him something to do. Nick clapped him on the back. “Where can we work?” he asked Peterson.
“I’ll get you set up.” They left with Carina.
Dillon and Patrick were alone. Dillon watched Lucy on the camera and admitted to his brother, “I’m scared for her.”
“So am I.” Patrick was reading code that seemed to fly by on the computer, his eyes darting back and forth. Focused, determined.
Dillon paced. What good was it to understand why someone kills when he couldn’t prevent him from doing it?
Kate was the key. She had confronted Trask, faced him. If Dillon could bounce theories off her, it would help him put together a better profile, one that could lead Dillon to Trask. And to Lucy.
If he could find his first kill, Dillon was certain that it would lead to his identity. A killer’s first victim almost always led to him. The FBI had to have run like crimes.
Dillon needed to put together a visual time line. He flipped open Peterson’s file and had just started creating a time line on the white board when Peterson’s computer beeped. Dillon looked at the screen.
“It’s her,” Patrick said.
Does Lucy know sign language?
Dillon typed.
Yes.
I’m sending you a feed of the last thirty seconds before it was cut off. Watch her hands. I think she’s signing in Spanish, but my Spanish is rusty.
Kate, you need to be careful. He knows where you are.
A long pause before a link came through and the words:
I know.
Dillon clicked on the link. He tried to focus on Lucy’s hands, but both he and Patrick tensed as they watched their sister brutalized as she was wrestled to the floor by two men. They replayed it, watching only her hands.
Kate was right. She was signing in Spanish.
“She’s telling us the time. That the sun hasn’t come up yet.”
“It’s four thirty in the morning right now,” Patrick said. “She could be close by.”
“In the same time zone.” Which meant she could be thirty minutes away or hours.
“On an island. There are dozens of islands off the coast.”
“In this time zone, hundreds,” Dillon corrected. “I don’t think he’s close,” Dillon added.
“Why? You’re basing it on a hunch, not on fact.” Patrick was getting agitated. “She could be on Anacapa or San Miguel. An hour or less from where we are by helicopter! We need to check the Channel Islands right now.”
“We have less than two days to find her. We can’t possibly storm every island off the coast. And your hunch that it’s the Channel Islands? Filled with tourists this time of year.”
“There’s a lot of small islands in the chain. They could be on one of those.”
“But what if we’re wrong? We have no evidence, and it would take days to search every island even with the manpower of the FBI behind us.”
“Dammit, we have to try!”
Dillon tamped down his own temper, knowing his brother was teetering on the edge. First Connor, now Patrick. Well, so was Dillon. He was just better at holding back. Assessing. Being the reasonable, responsible, mature Kincaid. Sometimes he wished he could explode with the injustice he saw in humanity. But he couldn’t. People depended on his stability, particularly his family.
He tried to calmly explain his reasoning. “He had Lucy for more than twelve hours before putting the webcam on her. I think the bulk of that time was getting her to his destination. They went by boat, at least for part of the trip. Twelve hours on a ship could get them all the way to the Canadian border, or to the tip of Baja California.”
“Or he was waiting for midnight,” Patrick said. “Which is when the feed started. Are you willing to put Lucy’s life on the line for a theory?”
“Are you?” Dillon responded.
Peterson walked back in, immediately on alert when he felt the tension between the brothers. “What happened?”
Dillon told him about Lucy’s clues.
“I’ll get the Coast Guard on alert up the entire West Coast. I think he went to Mexico or Canada,” Peterson added.
