Page 66 of Catching Fire

Though his fury was directed at the two FBI agents, Sebastian and Maggie stood by, watching. Unlike Luke, they didn't try to comfort him. They knew better than anyone what this was like, what was at stake.

“I'm sorry Kalan,” Maggie stepped forward, her hand reaching out but stopping just shy of touching his arm. Maybe she was afraid he’d direct his anger at her. She sounded like the words were ripped from her throat. “But I have to leave.”

Lord,he thought, finally taking a good look at her. He'd missed every sign.

She was gripping Sebastian's hand in a way that looked like it might break bones. This whole situation was triggering the PTSD that she surely had from her own ordeal.

“Go,” he told her, giving her permission to not be the supportive friend right now. He nodded at Sebastian to follow her. There wasn’t much they could do anyway. The FBI had every piece of tech at their disposal …now. After they'd failed to do everything they could when they should have.

Turning, Kalan looked again at the whiteboard that they'd wheeled in. Maybe he would see something he’d missed the first time, or the fifth. It was old school next to all the tech laid out on folding tables around Seline’s living room. It all felt so wrong … but he forced his focus to the black marker line.

Verner had laid out the order of events that they knew. And Kalan could see that Seline had arrived at Dr. Morales’ office on time. At some point after that, Kalan’s email had arrived, baiting him out of town.

Rossi had told him the professor who’s email it had come from had been out of his office at the time. On the keyboard, they’d found partial fingerprints that likely matched Sanders.

So the man had been at the university, near Seline, just before she went missing.

None of it was coincidence. Kalan knew that now.

Dr. Morales had already been interviewed and had given the FBI a time when Seline left the office. The administrative assistant had confirmed it.

Luckily, the school had cameras and they’d already confirmed that Seline’s car left the school less than fifteen minutes after she left the chemistry department.

Somewhere between there and Redemption, she’d disappeared. And so had her car.

Every muscle clenched with the need to act. There was nowhere to go, no race to win to save her, not until they had at least an idea where she was. It was debilitating feeling so helpless. If her house had caught fire, he’d know what to do. If she was trapped in a grain silo, he could help save her. Hell, if she was stuck in an elevator, he could at least be useful. The thought brought a small, sad smile to his lips. But this?

He ran his hands across his head. He wanted to call his mother—bold and smart, she would either know the right thing to do, or the right thing to say. But there wasn't time. Besides, how did he tell her that he found the woman he wanted to be with? The one his mother had constantly asked him if he would ever find. Because in the same breath he’d have to tell her that he'd fucked up and lost her. That the mess he’d created just a few hours earlier had been a planned attempt to get him out of the picture.

Seline was gone.

“You can triangulate her cell phone, right?” He looked to Rossi, grateful that the FBI agents managed to stay busy, while still placating his needy requests. Maybe they’d been trained in how to handle angry and frightened family and friends.

“We can't triangulate phones like they do on TV, especially not out here where the towers are so far apart.” She held up her tablet and showed him a map of Lincoln that he didn’t quite understand. “Her phone's been off, anyway. Since thirteen minutes after she left the garage.”

“She wouldn’t have turned her phone off.” He said it in a wooden tone, unable to conjure more emotion as they layered on evidence that she’d actually been taken by Sanders and wasn’t just on the side of the road with a flat tire and a dead phone.

It was interesting,he thought, that they knew the times down to a minute, but had no idea where Sanders might have taken Seline.

Kalan remembered when Sanders had taken Balero, and how they'd counted down the fourteen hours he usually kept his victims alive. Balero had gotten longer than that. Maybe Seline would, too. But he didn't kid himself that she would come back from any of this.

Though Maggie seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from her ordeal, she hadn't gone up against the likes of Sanders. And, as evidenced by her low key but clearly shaken exit, she was not exactlyunscathedby it.

His brain was racing, and his mouth was spewing stupid idea after stupid idea. “So she stopped somewhere and ran into him? But where?”

“Somewhere within the fifteen minutes from when she left the garage to when the phone went dead,” Verner answered, showing that she’d been paying attention to him, even if she didn’t look like it.

“It wasn't between Lincoln and Redemption, though,” Rossi told him, holding up the tablet. This time, instead of showing a tracking line on the map, it had now populated a series of dots, each labeled with a time.

He followed each one, trying to place a path. “It looks like she drove an odd path out of Lincoln.”

“That's what it would appear.”

“That's not like Seline.”

“Dr. Morales said she’d basically offered Seline her job back. You don’t think that would give her a few errands to run?”

“No.” Kalan said it with a conviction that he wasn’t confident was correct. But he was relatively certain that she’d said she was coming home afterward. That didn’t mean she hadn’t changed her mind and stopped to pick something up. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”

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