Page 19 of Dark Memories
“I’ve been thinking about that. His father wouldn’t do something like kidnap a child, and he was pretty fed up with his son when all was said and done. Was threatening to disown him. I think it would be safe to be up-front with Mario. If Arturo is involved, his father is not going to be at all happy, and I’m sure he’ll help if necessary.”
She glanced at him. “I trust your judgment.” Today he was back in his CEO armor, a pin-striped charcoal-gray suit, light blue shirt, and dark blue and gray striped tie. She’d heard but never understood the expressionsuit porn, but now she got it. She imagined stripping those power clothes off him, one piece at a time. Very slowly. And then she imagined dunking her head in a barrel of ice water to get any and all pictures of a naked Zach out of her mind.
He’d put his phone faceup on the console when they’d stopped, and he stared at it. “What about tracing the text? Can you do that?”
“Hmm?”
He smirked, and she was very much afraid he was reading her again. “Where’s your mind, Delaney?”
Like she’d share that bit of information. She’d heard one word, so she repeated it. “Tracing?”
“Their phone. Can we trace the phone the text came from?”
Right. This was the kind of talk she understood. “They’re probably using a burner phone or phones. If they’re smart—and since they knew to block their number, I’m saying they are—they’ll destroy the phone after each use. It also depends on a lot of other things such as if they happen to be using the same carrier as you, and some stuff I don’t understand. But it’s not easy.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“We’d also need to give your phone to our lab guys.”
“Not happening. My phone is my only link to my daughter.”
“I know.” She sighed in frustration. Sitting around, waiting for something to happen was always hard for a cop, especially when a child’s life was at stake.
The garage door opened, catching her attention. “Someone’s coming out.” An older model car backed down the driveway.
“That’s him,” Zach said. A woman walked out, pushing a garbage can to the curb. She waved as the car pulled away. “Guess he has a girlfriend. Should we follow him or talk to her?”
“Follow him. We can always come back.”
“What if Kali’s in that house?”
“We can’t go busting in without a warrant, and he’s given us no cause to get one. Let’s see where he goes.”
Where he went was to a strip mall, and after parking, he entered a building with a sign offering fast cash. They waited twenty minutes for him to come out, and when he didn’t, Harry said, “I’m going in.”
She pulled the band from her ponytail and fluffed out her hair, then unbuttoned her two top buttons, which got a raised brow from Zach. “A little cleavage and some blonde hair popping up in front of a man and he’s putty in my hands.”
His gaze dropped from her hair to her cleavage. “Those two things always puttied me.”
Damn him again, he’d made her laugh. “Yeah, you were too easy.”
“And never regretted it.”
She did, and that was the problem. He’d broken her to the point that there had only been one man after him, a stupid I-feel-so-sorry-for-me hookup a year later. After she’d managed to stop missing him with an ache that had made her bones feel like they’d been crushed into dust.
She’d hated him for that. So she’d gone shopping for sexy clothes, something she’d never done in her life. Then she’d gone trolling to get Zach’s taste, his smell, his whispered dirty-soft words out of her head once and for all.
She’d chosen Leo’s, a cop bar, something she still regretted. It had happened with another cop who’d been showing an interest in her for a few months, and she’d thought,what the hell, why not.
It had been disastrous. She’d closed her eyes, trying to put Zach’s face on the poor guy’s. She’d tried to hear Zach’s sometimes loving and sometimes dirty words whispered in her ear in the man’s grunts. She’d tried to replace the feel of Zach’s lips on hers with another man’s, but the sloppy, wet kisses weren’t Zach’s. She’d wanted to vomit.
There would never be another Zach, so she’d crossed men out of her life after her disastrous night with a nice man who hadn’t come close to doing it for her.
“Do not follow me in,” she said as she got out of the car, not waiting for him to answer.
She needed to find his daughter, watch her heart break all over again as she observed them running into each other’s arms, and then return to life as she’d known it the past eight years while figuring out how to never open the Zach Box again.
John Meyer stood up from behind a scarred, laminate desk when she entered. So he worked here now. How the mighty had fallen. His gaze immediately fell to her cleavage.
