Page 35 of Bodied

One of the thumbnails started to play, and he could see it was live.

“What’s that?” Lauren asked him.

“Just the news,” he said.

But Lauren leaned in and pointed. “That’s my mom! That’s a picture of my mom!”

She was right. Wesley opened the window so they could see what was going on. It was a live report of a recent development in their own city. Senator Anne Bartlett had been taken, right outside her office. There had been a gap in security between her office and vehicle, and in that seconds-long moment of vulnerability, she’d been snatched off the street.

Wesley was in shock. How had this happened? It was the middle of the afternoon, and Anne Bartlett was well guarded. But no one had thought any of the extremists would be so bold as to drive up and take her right outside her office in broad daylight.

As he sat with his mouth hanging open, Lauren shook him and shouted, “Do something! We have to do something!”

CHAPTER17

LAUREN

Nothing felt real for Lauren. This was a bad dream or something — it had to be. The idea that anyone would kidnap her mom was not one she had ever seriously considered. It just wasn’t possible. Her mind was on overdrive, speeding through all its denial in one trip. Perhaps this was an elaborate political stunt or some kind of joke? Maybe the news media was outright lying. But she knew that was all just a psychological mirage.

“We have to do something,” she repeated. “This can’t have been…” She got choked up before she could go on. “This can’t have been the last conversation I had with her.”

“What do you mean?” Wesley asked, turning to her for the first time since the screen had taken his attention.

“We were fighting.” She sobbed. “I said something terrible to her, something I never would have said normally. But she’d taken so much, and I was so angry, and I just wanted to see her hurt as much as I was hurting… So I hurt her.” Her tears were running constantly now, and Wesley had left her side to get her a box of tissue, which he then handed to her with a sympathetic look on his face. “I can’t believe those might be the last words I ever say to her.”

She was a mess. Wesley clenched his jaw, knit his brow, and then gave in to the urge he appeared to have been fighting to resist. He hugged her. And she melted in his arms. He was so strong — she could feel it in every muscle surrounding her now. In his arms, she felt safe, and that was something she hadn’t felt in a long time, not really. “We have to do something,” she whispered. “Please, I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

Wesley’s hand came to rest on the back of her head. “Okay. We’ll do something. Let’s work through this backwards.” He pulled away and sat on his couch. Lauren sat beside him, her heart bouncing like a ping-pong ball in her chest. “She was still there when we left. So, it must have happened after we left, sometime in the last hour or two. They said she was headed toward her car, so we have the path she might have taken.” Lauren could see his mind working over the problem, and she suddenly felt like they had the chance to make a difference, no matter how unrealistic that belief might have been. “We could find out if there is any security footage.”

She perked up at the idea. “Do you think that would help us identify the people who took her?”

Wesley nodded. “When I was alerted to the potential danger of this group, I was told they had been careful to keep their identities and locations secret online. If I could get a vehicle identification, that might change things. It’s possible the group is just chronically online and got careless when they were out in the real world. It happens more often than you’d think. I could visit the stores around the area and see if any one of them has a view of the kidnapping. It’s a long shot, but it’s something I could do.” He took her by the shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “But you have to promise me you will stay here, tell no one where you are, and keep a low profile.”

Lauren shook her head. “I can’t. I’m coming with you.”

“Absolutely not, Lauren. No.” He was dead serious, and Lauren couldn’t stand it. “You’re not going back to the scene of the crime just to make yourself into another target.”

But Lauren was determined to help her mom. She needed to do something. She needed to fight. She needed to make sure, with everything she had, that her last conversation with her mom wasn’t the argument they’d had back in her office. “I’m coming with you. Please. I can’t just sit here and wait. Anyway, you can keep a closer eye on me if I’m with you.”

Her attempt to reason with him didn’t seem to be having any kind of effect, but her more emotional plea appeared to have gotten to him. Wesley closed his eyes and sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”

* * *

The street where her mom was kidnapped was quieter than Lauren expected it to be. Was everyone just trying to pretend it hadn’t happened? Sure, Anne’s office was taped off, but nothing else was. And everyone around Lauren was just going about their business. For some reason, it upset her just as much as the kidnapping itself. To Lauren, her mom had always been a giant in her life, the most important person by a long shot. The fact that the woman meant so little to everyone else was something that she may have known intellectually, but she’d never come to grips with it on a core, emotional level.

The shock of that idea slapped Lauren in the face with her mom’s vulnerability. The world wasn’t going to protect Anne Bartlett. Why would they? They had their own lives to worry about.

She and Wesley parked and walked the street, stopping into store after store. Wesley would show them his credentials, which probably shouldn’t have counted for anything, but people were compliant as soon as he pulled out his identification.

The number of security cameras that weren’t even in working order was something Lauren hadn’t predicted. But every once in a while, they’d come across one that had recorded the area at about the right time. One restaurant had a camera pointed at the street where her mom would have walked just before she was taken.

“Can we see the tape?” Wesley asked. His aura of authority was impressive and helpful.

“Sure.” The owner led them to a back room and woke up his computer. He queued up the clip, and they watched it sped up to catch the exact moment.

About fifteen minutes into their viewing, Lauren pointed at the screen. “There she is!” The footage was grainy, but she knew her mom’s coat. She’d seen her mom that day and knew exactly what she was wearing, how her hair was done, which purse she was carrying.

“Are you sure?” Wesley asked.

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