squealing, and blocked both westbound lanes, he managed to stop only an inch from the vehicle’s rear quarter panel.
A. J. Decker jumped out of the car. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve been looking for you for hours.” With the efficiency of the longtime cop he was, he located Joe’s cell in his pocket-turned off-and swore. “These things aren’t worth crap unless you turn ’em on.”
Joe glared at him. “If I turn it on, people call.”
Decker turned it on, waited for it to boot up, then shoved it in Joe’s face. “You think?” he asked sarcastically.
The screen showed thirty-eight missed calls. Jeez, and he’d been gone only three hours. He took the phone and started to check the numbers, but Decker snatched it back, closing it. “They’re probably all from us.”
In that instant, the numbness disappeared. Hands shaking, Joe removed his helmet, fastened the chin strap and dangled it from the handle bars. “Josh,” he murmured. The Boulder police had found him, and, being Josh, he’d done something stupid. Was he hurt? Dead? Oh, man, if his brother was dead because Joe had wanted to know if it was okay for him to have slept with Liz…
“When’s the last time you saw Liz?” Decker asked.
Joe blinked. “A few hours ago. A little after twelve. Why?” Had she gotten the word from her supervisor? Had she asked Decker to break the news because she knew he’d rather not see her again as long as he lived?
“Where?”
“At the mall.” Joe asked again, “Why?”
Decker’s expression was grim. “Apparently she’s been kidnapped.”
Kidnapped. The word didn’t compute. Not Liz. After he left, she would have gotten in her car and gone home. She would have checked in with her supervisor and, if there was a God in heaven, she would have packed up and left town. After all, she’d gotten what she wanted; she’d said as much. There was no reason for her to stick around. Not him. Certainly not their phony little affair.
“She’s not kidnapped. She’s just gone.”
Decker’s expression didn’t lighten. “911 got a call from a woman screaming that she was being kidnapped at the mall. We found Liz’s car parked in the lot. Her cell phone was on the ground behind another vehicle, and there was blood, both on the phone and splattered on the ground around it. What we can’t find is Liz. You have any idea why?”
The people and events of the last few days flashed through Joe’s mind with such intensity that his head hurt: Liz, Tom Smith, Ashe, Wallace, the near hit-and-run, the sex last night, finding out the truth today. There was little chance Smith or Ashe would have taken her; they were feds, too. They knew her; she knew them; she would have gone with them willingly.
Wallace? He’d tried to buy Josh’s location from Joe and failed. Was he capable of kidnapping Liz? Of course he was.
Was he willing to kill her?
He shied away from the question, from even the possibility that Liz was in Wallace’s, and therefore the Mulroneys’, hands. This was just another of her deceptions. Maybe the cops hadn’t been able to catch Josh in Boulder; maybe they thought if they pretended that Liz had been kidnapped, that her life was in danger, Joe would tell them something more. Not that he had anything left to tell, but why would they believe that when he’d lied to them all along?
But if it was real…His gut tightened. If it was real, would he trade Josh for Liz?
No matter how angry she’d made him or how badly she’d hurt him, there was only one answer. Not only yes, but hell, yes. Falling for her might qualify as the stupidest thing he’d ever done, but mistake or not, he’d be damned if he would let anything happen to her. He wanted her gone, out of his memory and out of his life, but not dead. Never dead.
“Joe?” Decker prodded. “Why would someone kidnap Liz Dalton?”
His head throbbed; his stomach churned. He could barely make his mouth move. “Because they think she knows where my brother is. They think she’ll tell them or…or I will.”
“Who are they? Why do they want your brother? Where is he?”
Sickly, Joe met his gaze. “A few hours ago, he was in Colorado. Boulder. Now…” He shrugged. Now it was anyone’s guess. Josh could have gone to ground in Boulder, hidden so well that not even a pack of bloodhounds could find him, or he could be well on his way elsewhere.
Decker stared back for a minute, then opened the trunk of the car. “Put your bike in here.” Together they heaved it in, though the trunk lid wouldn’t close. Joe slid into the passenger seat, remembering to fasten the belt only when the reminder dinged.
As Decker pulled back into traffic, he said, “I’m guessing you’ve got a long story to tell. First, though, check those missed calls. See if any of them aren’t from the cops.”
It was the seventh call, an out-of-area number. He punched the buttons to get to the corresponding voice mail, then switched to speaker phone as the message began. “Mr. Saldana, it’s Daniel Wallace. Since you weren’t receptive to my offer last night, I’ve raised the stakes a bit. I’ve got Ms. Dalton, but I’ll happily return her unharmed-more or less-in exchange for your brother. I’ll be in touch with you soon with the details.”
Something inside Joe died: the faint hope that this was another of Liz’s lies. The feds, he’d discovered-Liz, he reminded himself; she was a fed, too-weren’t above making complete fools of innocent people to achieve their goals, but they wouldn’t use the Mulroneys’ people to do it.
He would return her unharmed, Wallace had said.
“Any other calls from him?” Decker asked as he turned into the police department parking lot.
Startled by the cop’s voice, Joe refocused on the missed-calls screen, then shook his head. Every other call had come from the police department, Decker or Tommy Maricci.
Decker’s next question didn’t come until they were seated in a conference room inside the department with Maricci, Pete Petrovski and KiKi Isaacs, Copper Lake’s lone female detecive. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? Tell us everything you know about Liz, your brother and Daniel Wallace.”
“I will. But one thing you need to know up front…Liz’s name isn’t Dalton. It’s Dillon, and she’s a U.S. marshal.”
Decker and Maricci exchanged looks, muttering the same curse at the same time, and Maricci rose from the table. “I’ll call Atlanta.”
“Ask for a marshal named Ashe. He’s familiar with the case.” Joe took a deep breath, then slowly blew it out. He’d lived in this town a while. He considered these people friends, and they thought the same of him. They were about to find out just how much he’d hidden from them.
“I have a brother, an identical twin. We lived in Chicago, and two years ago…”
They let him talk without interruption, and he told them everything. Except about the night before. Except the personal parts of his conversation with Liz at the mall. Damn it, if he hadn’t been so pissed off, if he’d done the reasonable thing and gone home with her to talk it out…If he’d at least offered the courtesy of walking her to her car…
But he hadn’t had any courtesy inside him after finding out that while he’d fallen in love with her, he was nothing more to her than a pawn in the government’s game to get Josh. All the lies, all the hurt-he’d just wanted to run away.
And while he was embracing Josh’s childish tendency to flee, Wallace was forcing Liz into his vehicle, taking her hostage to use as his own pawn. Threatening her, scaring her, making her bleed.
Joe had never felt such impotent rage, not when he’d awakened in the hospital with red-hot pain consuming him. Not even when he’d found out it was because of Josh.
“So you don’t know if the cops found your brother in Colorado,” Decker said. When Joe shook his head, his expression tightened. “It’s not like we can just call the Boulder PD and ask, not with this being a federal case. Do you still have the number?”
Joe pulled the crumpled paper from his pocket. It was damp with sweat from his long ride, the ink smudged, but the digits were legible. Decker dialed the number from the landline on the table between them, then handed the receiver to Joe. This time the call went straight to voice mail. “It’s me. Joe. Call me as soon as you can. It’s urgent.” He read off the number from the phone, listened until the cell clicked off, then slowly hung up.
“If his calls are going straight to voice mail either he’s on another call or the cell’s shut off,” Maricci remarked. “I doubt he’s got much of a social life, being on the run. But with the cell turned off, the feds can’t use its GPS to track him.”
“We can assume they didn’t catch him in Boulder,” Decker added, “or a cop would have answered that call.”
Maricci leaned back in his chair. “So Wallace and at least one accomplice have Liz, and they want to trade her for your brother’s whereabouts-”
“If we’re lucky,” Decker interjected.
“Or for your brother himself. We can give him a location, but he’s not gonna let Liz go until his people have Josh in custody, and because you don’t know where he is, that’s not gonna happen.”
At the end of the table, KiKi spoke up. “I have a suggestion. Let’s write up a report and go home. This is a federal case. The FBI and the marshals service are going to come swooping in here within the hour and take over. All they’ll want from us is coffee and doughnuts, so let’s not waste our time.”
Petrovski rolled his eyes, and Maricci scowled. Decker directed a cool gaze her way. “Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut and learn,” he said in a level voice. Bright spots of color appeared in KiKi’s cheeks as he went on. “She’s right about one thing. I imagine we’ll have fifteen to twenty feds here soon, and we’ll be pretty much out of the loop in their investigation. But that doesn’t mean we just blow it off.”
“Maybe Wallace will call before they get here,” Joe said.
“And you’ll give him what?”
He smiled thinly. “Josh.”
“You said he was in Colorado.”
“He is. Was. But Wallace doesn’t know that for a fact.”
The room was quiet for a moment, everyone watching him. Did they think he was nuts? He wouldn’t argue. Reckless? Out of his freakin’ mind?
Decker rubbed his hand over the beard stubble on his jaw. “Do you know how dangerous that would be?”
“Did I mention that Josh and I are identical? Give us the same haircut and put us in the same clothes, and even our parents can’t tell us apart. Wallace wouldn’t know the difference.” Except for the scars. He might pick up on those.
