Page 112 of Winter Vows

He took Jeb with him and together they scoured the airport, looking for anyone who might have caught a glimpse of Paul. Even though it was turf Justin’s men had covered, Dylan wanted no stone left unturned.

He finally left Jeb sweet-talking ticket agents into checking their computers for reservations for a father and son, under any name at all. It was peak travel time and the airport was a madhouse, but if anyone could wheedle the information out of an employee, it was Jeb. He had the charm and the patience for it. Dylan was running out of both.

He went back to his car, which was stifling in the summer heat, turned the air-conditioning on full blast, then used his cell phone and called one of his contacts to do another check of Paul’s credit-card records. Surely by now he was running low on cash. Maybe he’d finally slipped up and used plastic for something,anything,that would give them a lead. His using it to book a hotel room or a flight would, no doubt, be asking too much, but maybe he would have seen no harm in using it to pay for a meal or buy some T-shirts for Bobby.

While he waited for a call back, he studied the locator map he’d picked up in the airport. Hotels for the surrounding area were highlighted. He’d checked most of them just days ago, but with Paul’s car turning up in the airport parking garage, maybe he’d taken a room in one of them since then.

“Dammit, where is he?” he muttered. He hated failing under any circumstances, but this was Kelsey’s son they were talking about. Dylan would never forgive himself if the boy slipped through their fingers due to some oversight of his. He was as driven to succeed as he would have been if it had been Shane’s fate at stake.

When his cell phone finally rang, he grabbed it. “We’ve got a break,” Frank Lane told him. “He used the credit card this morning.”

“Where?”

“Don’t get too excited. I’m not sure it’ll help.”

“Anything will help at this point.”

“He used it at an airport gift shop.”

“What for?”

“Coloring books and children’s Tylenol.”

Which meant that Bobby still had his fever, Dylan concluded. That wasn’t good news. The toys were probably meant to distract a cranky child.

“Is there any way to tell which shop?”

“It took some doing,” Frank said, “but the woman at the credit-card company was able to track it to the one closest to the Trans-National ticket counter.”

“Thanks, pal. I owe you.” He hung up, then called Jeb inside the terminal and relayed the information.

“Got it,” Jeb said. “I’m on my way.”

If Paul was buying tickets, toys and medicine inside the airport, he had to be staying close by. Dylan set off to recheck each of the hotels he’d visited a few days earlier.

He hit pay dirt at the fifth hotel. The desk clerk recognized Paul and Bobby from the pictures Dylan showed him.

“But you’re out of luck,” he said. “They checked out about an hour ago.”

Dylan bit back a groan. “How’d the boy look? I heard he’s been sick.”

“A little pale and quiet, maybe, but he looked okay to me.”

“The man didn’t say where they were going?”

“No, just that he had a business meeting scheduled not far from here.”

In Los Pinõs, no doubt, Dylan thought wearily.

Would he head straight there? Probably not. But he might pick a new hotel between here and there.

Working on the assumption that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, Dylan went back to his car and headed southwest without waiting to hear from Jeb. He doubted his brother would learn anything critical from the gift shop and, if he did, he could reach him on his cell phone. It was more important that he start hitting every single hotel or motel along the highway. He figured he had twenty-four hours, maybe less, before this whole case was going to blow wide-open.

It was midmorning when Kelsey’s cell phone rang. She was so startled by the sound coming from her purse that it took her a minute to make sense of it.

Suddenly the knot in her stomach tightened. Her gut told her it was Paul and that this time he intended to make all of his demands. He was using the cell phone for the first time because he’d assumed that by now her regular line would be tapped. She hadn’t even thought to tell the police about this phone. Paul knew she kept it primarily for emergency use on the road or when the hospital needed to reach her. How could he be thinking so rationally, so diabolically, when she was all but incoherent from the stress?

Maybe it was for the best that she was alone for the first time in days, except for the sheriff’s deputy outside. Maybe she could walk a verbal tightrope and reach an agreement with Paul knowing that there were no eavesdroppers to challenge her decision. She took a deep breath and answered the phone.

---