dead?
“She’s still alive.” Kate wasn’t looking at him. “I told you he’s not going to jump the countdown.”
“What happened?” he repeated.
“If you want to look at the recording, go ahead.” Kate faced him, sadness etched in her vivid blue eyes. “It was more of the same.”
Dillon looked up at the ceiling, his throat tight. What good would it do to watch his sister be hurt…be raped? The most important thing was finding her alive. Taking care of her, nursing her. He shook his head.
“I want to talk to Quinn.”
“He hasn’t gotten back to me since I sent the coordinates. That was over an hour ago.”
“May I?” Dillon motioned to the keyboard attached to the lone computer that had instant messaging.
She nodded, looking at a host of other monitors that flashed code and programs Dillon didn’t understand.
Peterson, it’s Dillon Kincaid. I’m with your friend. What’s happening?
Wait, I’ll get Peterson.
Dillon didn’t know to whom he was talking, so he didn’t type anything further. “You knew that woman?”
She nodded curtly.
“Who was she?”
“Denise Arno.”
“And?”
Kate said nothing.
“Kate,” Dillon said, his voice sterner than he intended. She faced him. “I need to know everything. I believe you want to help, but my goal is not Trask. It’s saving my sister. If you can’t get behind that, then maybe you don’t have your priorities straight.”
“Don’t talk to me about my priorities. Who are you to judge me?”
“I’m not judging you. But I need to know
He continued, starting slow and speeding up as he went. “He’s forty, plus or minus. He’s from a wealthy family, used to privilege and getting whatever he wants. His parents were strict, probably excessively strict, and he resents authority because of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if his father was a high-ranking public official, attorney, or in some position of authority that he enjoyed abusing. Trask wasn’t born in a vacuum.”
“So he was an abused child,” Kate said sarcastically, rolling her eyes.
Dillon took a deep breath. He was used to that kind of comment from law enforcement. “He may or may not have been abused in the traditional sense. I feel no physical abuse, or if he was physically abused it was when he was very young. He likely had a volatile temper even as a young child, unable to own up to his mistakes. He feels no remorse for his actions, and I sense from reading the files Peterson gave me that he never has felt remorse.”
“Oh please,” Kate said, hand on her hip. “So he’s insane? He’s incapable of feeling remorse so he doesn’t know that what he’s doing is wrong? Lock him in a padded cell, give him some drugs, and declare him cured?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Dillon said, his rare temper rising. “I never said he was insane.”
“But-”
He put his hand up. “I’m giving you a rough profile of the man I think Trask is. Understanding his past, getting a sense of his character and personality, will help us find him and, more important, stop him. But I need more. I need to know about Roger Morton, and I need to know about Denise.”
“Why?” she asked, honestly curious.
“The more we know about the people he surrounds himself with, the more we know about Trask himself.” He took a step toward her. “Between the two of us, we can stop him…after we save Lucy.”
He glanced at the countdown. 33:02:40.
“We don’t have time to play games.” Dillon sat at the desk chair, watched as Kate paced like a tigress, lean and rippling with suppressed energy.
“Denise Arno came to my partner, Paige Henshaw, a week before the ambush. Said she was running from Trask, that she knew about April-”
“April Klinger?” Dillon asked, remembering his conversation with Peterson.
“She’s the reason we started our investigation into Trask Enterprises in the first place. Her family contacted us when a private investigator they hired to find April discovered that she was starring in online pornography movies. She’d been seventeen when she ran away, but was twenty at that point. The PI turned over a DVD he’d made of what appeared to be a snuff film, with April as the dead woman. It was so real-”
Her voice trailed off and she stared at the screen, where a woman was silently being beaten. Across the bottom of the screen flashed a disclaimer.
Role-playing fantasy rape. No one was hurt in the creation of this film.
She snapped back, her voice harsher. “Paige and I became certain April had been killed. We started investigating the company that housed the digital file that the PI had downloaded, Trask Enterprises. At first we had the support of the Violent Crimes unit-we couldn’t locate April anywhere, dead or alive. For all I know, she could have been at the bottom of the Atlantic or chopped to pieces and fed to pigs in up-state New York. With no body, no evidence, no witnesses, we were stuck. Internal support waned. We were getting pressure to back off from upstairs. Other cases were more pressing. The Bureau even used my boyfriend, also an agent, to get me to drop it.
“But I couldn’t get April’s eyes out of my mind. She was dead. I knew it.”
“What happened?”
“Denise contacted Paige, set up a meeting. Told us she knew that April had been killed, but she was too scared to talk about it. Gave us some information that alleged that Trask was bringing in girls from Russia to star in future productions.”
Kate sat on the edge of her cot, squeezed her eyes shut, and rubbed her temples. Dillon resisted the urge to rub the tension from her shoulders. Kate wouldn’t appreciate it, and right now he didn’t want to do anything to upset her. She was already on edge. “Denise didn’t make it to our next meeting. I used my computer skills and the Bureau’s extensive network to hack into a secure server at Trask.” She looked at him, put up her hand. “I know- don’t say it. I could have jeopardized a conviction. But I was scared to death that Denise had been killed because she’d come to us. I couldn’t do
“That’s when I found her strapped to a chair. Naked. Live on the Internet, and damn, I was determined to connect this to Trask Enterprises and raid their company. But it wasn’t them. Not on the surface. Someone was using their site, but it was obvious they were piggybacking on it.
“Paige and I had to find Denise. We told our boss what we learned and he said we didn’t have enough to go on. But Paige talked to him, told him we had the warehouse under surveillance where Trask was supposedly going to be bringing in these Russian girls. We were supposed to have backup. But it never came. It…” Her voice trailed off. Dillon suspected that there was more to the story, but Kate jumped ahead. “We were essentially ambushed. Trask killed Evan and kidnapped Paige. Suddenly Paige was in the chair instead of Denise. I watched as my partner, my best friend, was raped, online where every pervert could see.”
Kate stood and paced again, agitated, her hands moving constantly.
“And Evan was your boyfriend,” Dillon said quietly.
She nodded.
“Why did you think Denise was dead?”
“NYPD found a body in the Hudson River. She matched Denise’s description, but her face had been so brutalized, it wasn’t recognizable. I was certain it was her. I had seen her beaten on the Internet. Why would Trask let Denise go? She could identify him.”
Kate slammed both hands against the metal door. “But the bitch was working with him all along! I felt so damn
