Page 123 of Blue Moon

“We’re going to need to see that.”

I stepped forward to look at Nola’s phone, and there he was, strapped into the back seat of a car, looking confused.

“Did you recognise the voice?”

“It was muffled. Maybe I heard it before, but I don’t know.”

“How about the vehicle?”

She shook her head. “But I guess…I guess it could be the one he made me put Ms. Maara into. It was silver.”

That would be another job for Echo.

Emmy spoke in my ear. “Send me that picture. Our investigators can find the make and model.”

Okay, there were advantages of working with a bigger team. Usually, our little unit—we’d been nicknamed the Choir—did its own legwork. We had a reasonable degree of autonomy, but with that freedom came a certain amount of isolation. We couldn’t simply call in more manpower to assist because officially, we didn’t exist. Although we did get to use the facilities at various military bases—runways, ranges, that type of thing. It wasn’t practical to park experimental drones at Casa del Gato.

“Did you make a note of the licence plate?”

“No, no. I was just trying to… She was heavy, you know?”

“How did you get Ms. Maara into the vehicle?”

I suspected we already knew the answer, but I wanted to confirm.

“When he took Kobie, he left a bottle on the table. He said I needed to put the powder onto her food and wait until she fell asleep, then bring her to the fire exit in a cart at nine a.m. He was waiting there.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“The dog? It was sleeping too. And I didn’t…I didn’t know what to do, so I put it with Ms. Maara.”

“Do you always work on the twelfth floor?”

“The tenth through the twelfth.”

The motherfucker had been all over the hotel. He knew Luna’s schedule, he understood men were banned from her suite, and he’d disabled the alarm on the fire door. Smart but unnoticeable.

“Who was watching Kobie at the time of the abduction?”

Nola’s hesitation was an answer in itself.

“He was here by himself,” I said. A statement.

Sheesh, we didn’t need tissues; we needed a mop.

“My sitter got taken away by ICE last week, and…and I didn’t know what else to do. Nobody else could look after him, and I had to pay the rent, and the utilities, and the groceries. It was just temporary, I swear. I didn’t think…I d-d-didn’t think…”

Dusk gave her shoulders a comforting squeeze. “We’ll get him back.”

No promises on whether he’d be breathing or not.

“Who did you tell that Kobie was home alone?”

“Nobody!”

“Okay, did you tell anyone that you were having trouble with your sitter?”

“Maybe a couple of people. I was asking to see if they knew anyone else who could watch him.”

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