Page 103 of Deathmarch
Chase stepped away. “I’ll put an APB out on the bread truck.”
“The rest of us could start looking,” Mike offered. “Check parking lots, driveways, especially those that are difficult to see from the road. If the kidnapper means to trade Allie for the gold, then he has to hang around.” He must have realized how on edge Harper was, because he hadn’t cracked a single joke since he’d gotten there.
“Hey.” Joe clapped Harper on the shoulder. “It’s more than nothing.”
“Not much more.” Harper wanted to tear the town apart with his bare hands.
“After I put out the APB, I’ll scroll through traffic-cam footage,” Chase told him as he dragged on his coat. “We might have something there. At least the cameras weren’t snowed in today.”
Harper was grateful, but didn’t hold out too much hope. Broslin didn’t have nearly enough traffic cams for full coverage. They didn’t have all that many traffic lights, period. Someone familiar with the town could easily keep to the back streets and evade being recorded.
“How about the fingerprints?” Shannon sniffed, pointing at the plastic-encased piece of paper on the table, covered in fingerprinting dust.
“The results will take days,” Harper told her. “And the prints might not be the kidnapper’s. He could have worn gloves. These could be prints from whoever packaged or sold the paper.”
“No phone number.” She picked up the evidence bag and held it up to Harper. “How are you supposed to call the kidnapper to tell him you’re ready to hand over the gold?”
“They usually do the calling.” Harper looked around. “So let’s start with setting up for that. He’ll call here. This is where he grabbed her. This is where he left the note. He’ll call the landline from a blocked number. Mike? I want you to stay here and wait for the call. Gabi?”
“Whatever you need.”
“Could you bring our call-tracing equipment over from the station?”
“On my way.”
As Gabi ran off, Shannon asked, “Is that like in the movies? It’ll tell us where the kidnapper is calling from?”
“It’ll tell us his number,” Mike responded. “Then we call that into the cell phone company, and they’ll triangulate his current location for us.”
“He won’t hurt Allie, will he?” Shannon put a hand on his arm, while her other hand held a couple of tissues in a death grip.
“No,” Harper said, as much for his own benefit as for hers. “He’s planning on trading her.”
Shannon pressed her trembling lips together. “I should have watched her better.”
The same sentence had been pounding through Harper’s brain since he’d found Allie gone.
“We had no way of knowing this would happen. This isn’t your fault,” he told Shannon, then he turned to the rest of the room. “All right. Let’s go and see if we can find that truck.”
Mike stayed with Shannon. Harper drove to Lamm’s place, hoping he’d find a new clue, something he’d overlooked before. In the kitchen, he stopped next to the bloodstain on the floor. His instincts said if he could figure out who killed Lamm, he would have the kidnapper. The chances that the two were separate people were slim. Most people were decent. Even those who might skirt the law here and there balked at top-level crime like murder and kidnapping.
Harper drummed down the stairs to the basement and walked the perimeter as he racked his brain. The supplies on the shelves were untouched as far as he could tell. The killer stole only the contents of the safe and nothing else.
All the people who knew the location of the safe were accounted for. They all had alibis. He’d cleared them all.
What had he missed?
Looking at the open, empty metal box in the cement floor made him think of the floor safe at Finnegan’s. They had the same brand, but not the same model.
Other than family, nobody knew they even had it under the carpet in the back office. And only the family had the code for the keypad.
Harper had been there the day the floor safe had been installed, the old wall safe replaced since they were enlarging the main dining room and the wall had to come down, the office made smaller—
The solution hit him as if he’d stepped on the tracks in front of a coming train: headlights blinding, whistle blaring. The answer was so obvious, he was an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. This whole damn time, it’d been staring him in the face.
He called his mother’s cell phone. When she didn’t pick up, he clicked off and dialed the bar phone at Finnegan’s next. It rang and rang before it went to voice mail.
Harper took off running.
