Page 89 of High Value Target

They watched the stable footage. There were only exterior cameras. The one that covered the exit they’d taken her from was pulled up first. The white truck appeared and parked.

“He’s put the truck between the camera and the door. He’s purposely blocking the view,” Chris surmised. They watched the man climb out. “Can you figure out his height?”

“Judging by how tall he is in comparison to the roof of the truck, I’d say about 5’10” – 5’11”,” Al replied.

They watched him lift an arm, and a split-second later, the exterior light went out.

“He shot it,” Stan said. “I never heard a shot.”

“Probably a silencer. It doesn’t completely drown out the sound, but if you’re inside with the doors closed…” Chris explained.

“Pharaoh would have heard it. He’d have started acting up,” Grady said.

“Maybe that’s what drew Tinsley out there. She heard the horse making a commotion,” Chris suggested.

The figure dressed in black shoved the door open and disappeared inside. A good five minutes passed before he reappeared. He was in shadow now, and they couldn’t see much. The truck shifted with weight as he loaded what Grady had to assume was Tinsley into the backseat of the crew cab. He closed his eyes for a split second and said a prayer.God, please, let her still be alive.

“What about the guy you said worked at the stable?” Al asked. “Has he been accounted for?”

“He’s here now. He claims he spent the night in jail, picked up for a DUI. It checks out,” Stan said.

“Then I keep coming back to the oil rig explosion. It’s got to be tied together,” Al said. “Frank Fucking Bonner.”

“Let’s go pick that motherfucker up. I’ll make him talk.” Grady flexed his fists. He wanted to tear the man apart. If he had Tinsley…

Chris held his hand up. “We need to do this smart. I’ve got an idea. I heard about this scheme a detective friend of mine once used. It’ll require us to cross a bunch of lines legally, but I think it’ll get us the results we’re after.”

“What’s the plan?” Stan asked.

“We pretend we're the FBI. You’ve already got the fake badges, I hear. We bring the husband in for questioning. Drive him to Tri Star in the back of a black SUV. Cover all the Tri Star signage. We photocopy some FBI logos and place them on binders, just enough to make him think it’s some temporary field office.

“We walk him in and let him see his wife already sitting in a room with an open door, and we slap a sign on the door that says, interrogation room. They make eye contact.”

Grady snaps his fingers. “Make him realize she’s there, and he can’t control her or what information she’s telling us.”

“Exactly, but we don’t stop there. We do this up big. We make him think we’ve got a ton of evidence against him, like we’ve connected him to something much bigger. It’s a gamble to get him to confess, but I think it’ll work.”

“How do we make him think we’ve got evidence? He’s not going to believe us.”

“We label a bunch of notebooks and files and set them up to look like we’ve been working a bigger case, and he’s just a small part. But we put his name on everything. We stack some boxes marked Frank Bonner Taskforce, so his perception is this is big.”

“Okay.”

“We pull his driver’s license photo—”

“You can do that?”

“I’ve got ways, believe me. We use it to make a composite drawing that looks just like him and we show it to him and tell him a witness saw him. This is you, man. Then we show him the drive thru footage, and the DNA report.”

“He’s gonna piss his pants.”

“He’s gonna tell us everything.”

They exited the room. JD was waiting in the foyer.

“What did you find? I’ve called the police.”

Chris nodded. “A white pickup truck. It’s got our name on the door, but it’s not our logo. I can assure you, JD, it wasn’t our vehicle. Tri Star doesn’t own any white trucks, and we sure as hell don’t mark the vehicles we do have. Whoever this is, he used our name to gain access past the security guard. The guy let him through, then it appears he backed up, went in the guardhouse, and killed him.”

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