“Hey, what’s up?”
“Where are you now?”
“Home.” Home for Howard was Virginia, not far from DC.
“What’s your day look like?”
“I’m open for the next seventy-two hours.”
“Good. I need you to get to DC right away.” He gave Howard Peter’s address and filled him in on what he needed him to do. “Call me the second you’re done.”
“You got it.”
“Thanks.”
As he hung up, Orlando entered the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“Was that Peter?” she asked.
He shook his head. “This might be an even bigger situation than we thought.”
Howard called just over an hour later. Using the camera on his phone, he gave Quinn, Orlando, and Daeng- who had joined them fifteen minutes earlier-a tour of Peter’s apartment.
As Misty described earlier, the bedroom definitely showed signs of a struggle. In addition to the items she’d pointed out, Howard discovered spots of blood on the bed frame and in the hallway leading out to the living room.
“It’s not a lot,” he said. “So whatever it’s from, the wound can’t be that big.”
“How long has it been there?”
“Hard to tell. It’s all dry.” The picture moved down toward the carpet, and Howard’s rubber-gloved hand entered the frame. He touched a dark spot about four inches from the wall. The normally loose carpet fibers were stiff. “See? That’s got to be a few days at least. Could be a lot longer, though. A lab might be able to figure it out.”
The picture rose again as Howard stood.
“Something I want to show you in here,” he told them.
He moved down the hall and into the living room. Almost every inch of wall space was covered with overflowing bookshelves. There were even more books stacked on the floor here and there. The furniture consisted of two easy chairs, a love seat, and coffee table. There was no TV.
For a moment, the camera caught Misty standing by the door, looking concerned, then it swung to the right and pointed once more toward the floor.
“See the books?” Howard asked.
While most of the image area was empty, there were four columns of books along one side. The two columns at either end were stacked neatly, but the two in the middle had been shoved back a few inches.
“I think they put him on the floor here,” Howard said. “Look at this.”
The image moved down again until it was just a couple inches above the carpet. Howard’s finger moved back into the frame and rubbed across the surface. As it did, several tiny white spears, no more than an eighth of an inch long, jumped up and down. Howard pressed his finger against one of them, adhering it to the glove, and turned his hand so the spear was visible on the camera.
“Plastic,” he said.
Both Quinn and Orlando had seen similar fragments before. Sometimes when plastic ties where used for handcuffs, the tips of the ridges could shear off, leaving behind spears just like the one Howard was holding.
Howard rose back to his feet, this time turning the camera around so he was looking into the lens. “I figure they surprised him in his bed, hauled him out here, and cuffed him. If it was me, I would have drugged him, too, so he didn’t cause any problems on the way out.”
The fact that they’d even found Peter, let alone broken into his place, was shocking. Peter was secretive even in the least threatening of situations. Quinn knew he had security in place that was at least on par with what Quinn himself employed, probably even better. Of course, even the best systems weren’t perfect, and Quinn’s methods hadn’t always kept people out, either.
“Fingerprints?” Orlando asked.
“Checked the door when I first came in,” Howard said. “It was clean. Spot-checked a few other places, too. Same thing. Could make another pass if you want, but I have a feeling I’m not going to find any.”
Both Quinn and Orlando knew he was right.
“No. Not necessary,” Quinn said. “Is that it?”
“So far. I want to do another look around, then check the building’s common area and out front.”
“Okay. Report back when you’re done. Let me talk to Misty.”
The image whipped around the room as Howard carried the phone over to Peter’s former assistant and handed it to her. Though Quinn had talked to her hundreds of times on the phone, he’d met her in person only twice. The last time had been several years earlier. But it wasn’t those intervening years that made her otherwise youthful face look aged this morning.
“Are you okay?” Quinn said.
“What do you think happened?” she asked as if she hadn’t heard him.
“No way to know yet.”
“You’ll find out, though, right?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
His words seemed to relax her, if only a bit. “If you need me to do anything, you just say the word. I can take some emergency leave. I have plenty of vacation time.”
“Actually, there is something you can help with.”
“What is it?”
“I need you to figure out the last time anyone saw him. Steve can help you. You can ask around there at his building, maybe talk to some of his friends.”
“He doesn’t really have a lot of friends.”
“There’s got to be some people he talks to now and then. Wherever they had him working, maybe.”
She nodded.
“Whatever you do, though, be very careful. We don’t know what this is, and I don’t want you walking into anything that’ll get you in trouble.”
“Don’t worry about me. Just find Peter.”
He gave her a reassuring smile. “Check in with me later.”
“I will.”
Quinn hung up.
“What the hell is going on?” Orlando said. “Nate
“Maybe what’s happening to them isn’t related,” Daeng suggested.
Quinn and Orlando looked at him, their skepticism etched on their faces.
Daeng held up his hands defensively. “Or maybe it is.”
Quinn knew Daeng had a point. They couldn’t just assume the two disappearances were connected. The incidents had occurred sixteen hundred miles apart, in different countries, and Nate’s main association with Peter was through Quinn. He’d seldom ever talked to Peter directly.
Then again, if those who’d done the taking thought Nate
“Maybe we should see if anyone else is missing,” he said.
Their search was handicapped right from the start.
While Quinn and Orlando knew a fairly substantial number of people in the business, there were still plenty of others they’d never met. And pinpointing the current whereabouts of the ones they did know was not the easiest thing to do. It wasn’t like there was some central switchboard operatives reported to, giving updates of their status. Usually if someone was suddenly unreachable, it was assumed they were on a gig.
When they finally took a break at noon, the list of potential missing contained over twenty people.
“We’re not getting anywhere,” Quinn said. “Most of them have got to be out on jobs.” He frowned. “I think
