Mercy's Angels Box Set (92 page)

“Hi, I’m Annie, Eli’s mom.” I thought I saw a flash of guilt, but if I did, it was quickly smothered by righteous indignation.

“Wonderful to meet you,” she practically sneered before disappearing into the elevator at the end of the hallway. I stepped further into the room and handed Dillon his coffee.

“Nice girl,” I couldn’t help but say. Sam was such a gentle, kind man. I couldn’t understand why he would want to be with such a thoughtless and selfish woman.

“Sorry, Boss, Annie,” Sam said a little sheepishly.

“I don’t want her down here anymore, Sam. If you can’t rein her in, we are going to have problems.” There was no sympathy in Dillon’s voice; he was in complete boss-mode right now.

Sam nodded. “I give you my word she won’t step foot in this office again. I’m going to remove her access to the elevator. She can use the stairwell to get down to the street, and if she needs me, she can call. I might answer her,” he said with a small smile. “Anyway, she won’t be here much longer, I promise you. Her folks get back from an overseas vacation next week. The minute they do, I’m sending her home to them with instructions to never return.”

“She still lives with her parents?” I wondered out loud.

“Technically, right now she lives with me, but she doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and I’m not going to kick her out onto the street, no matter how much of a bitch she is.” Dillon gave a noise which I gathered was a reluctant agreement. He took his coffee from me with a grateful smile, then like the gentleman he was, he pulled out a chair for me to take a seat.

“I’m okay,” I murmured. I’d done enough sitting over the past two days. I needed to stand. I needed to pace, move. I needed to at least feel like I was doing something to help. Dillon nodded, and I noted he didn’t sit either, instead opting to lean against the wall beside Sam’s desk.

“Where’s Bomber?” Dillon asked.

“Went home to shower and change, thank god. He smelled rank,” Sam chuckled.

“Probably smelled like I did when I woke up.” Dillon ran a hand through his messy hair. A quiet knock at the door had us all turning to face Alice. Behind her stood Sergeant Maitland, dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a navy blue button down shirt. His hair was wet as though he had showered and come straight in.

“Alice?” Dillon startled, also surprised to see her here on her day off. “It’s the weekend, what are you doing here?” He wasn’t angry or disappointed to see her; if anything, he seemed guilty that she had come in on her weekend.

“Hush, Dillon, it’s Saturday, and if I wasn’t here, I’d be at home cleaning, so a little bit of quiet office overtime is saving me from back breaking work. Anyway, I’m heading off now, but Sergeant Maitland is here for you.” Alice stepped away from the door and offered us all a solemn smile and a wave.

“Dillon,” the sergeant said, holding out his hand to shake Dillon’s.

“Sergeant, I wasn’t expecting you here today. You have something?”

“I’m off duty today, so call me James. Morning, Ms. Lonergan, how you holding up?”

I shook my head in dismay. “Please, call me Annie, and I’m not. I’m just holding on. It’s all I know how to do.”

James nodded and turned his somber gaze back to Dillon. “No news, but I’ve got every available resource out there working on this. Your cousin, Braiden, called me and filled me in on the situation with Grayson Shivell.”

“Braiden called you?” Dillon said rather alarmed.

James smiled. “He’s quite the charmer, not real big on conversation.”

Sam and Dillon both snorted at the same time. “Hence why you met with me the other day and not my cousin. He’s good at what he does, though, the best.”

“We are following up on this Shivell. He has a partner, his right hand so to speak. On the street, he is known as Ricky the Enforcer, to us he’s known as Richard Fenner. We were able to establish that Ricky took a flight out of Holton Springs five days ago and landed in Claymont. I’ve got men out searching for him as we speak. My thoughts are he is the one who attacked you, Annie.”

“You think he has Eli?” I asked, unable to hide my hope.

“Of that I’m not sure.” At that moment, Dillon’s phone rang and he glanced at the screen.

“Braiden,” he said as way of answering it. He was quiet for the longest time before nodding, a small smile touching his lips.

“You did good, Braiden, thank you.” He hung up and turned to face us. My heart was pounding hard and fast in my chest. Dillon’s soft grey eyes found mine, and he shook his head, sadly. “Nothing on Eli, well, not really. Braiden found Grayson.” Dillon then turned his attention to James for a moment. “He wasn’t willing to talk, but Braiden can be very persuasive.” The sergeant said nothing, merely raised a brow and nodded. “Grayson knows nothing about Eli’s disappearance. He said he wouldn’t have taken him, having a kid around wasn’t on his agenda. If the money didn’t come through, he would have come for Annie, and it was his man, Ricky, that was told to rough her up a little and let her know they weren’t fucking around.” At this point, my legs failed me, and thankfully, I fell down into a chair sitting right behind me. “Once Braiden got Shivell talking, he became real helpful, told him Ricky is staying at The Sleep Inn. And also told him he’s wiping Phillip’s debt clear.”

“How thoughtful of him,” Sam murmured, reminding me he was in the room.

“Okay, but we still have a missing boy.” James Maitland stood rigid and wide and tall, like an unmoving wall in Sam’s office. His arms were crossed over his chest as he listened to everything Dillon had said.

“Braiden is concentrating on Phillip now, but we don’t think he has Eli. Annie received some flowers from Phillip this morning that were nothing short of an apology and a goodbye. He said he knew Eli would be safe with her. My gut says he doesn’t have Eli.”

James nodded and ran a hand through his short, greying hair. “I don’t think he has him either. Everything points towards Alison and Stephan Walters . . . but why?”

“Sam, did you get anything else from the Walters’s computer?” Dillon asked, spinning around to face Sam who currently sat before three large computer screens, tapping away at the keyboard.

“Stephan and Alison were careful about what they did with their computer. There really isn’t much on there, just your usual eBay shopping, music downloads, news, banking, everything is pretty much standard and clean. Their bank account is clean, just your usual stuff like groceries, bills, gas. There’s nothing that seems suspicious or criminal.”

“This is pissing me off,” growled Dillon. “There has to be something.” Sam pulled off his dark rimmed glasses and ran a hand over his tired eyes.

“Something, maybe,” he sighed, and James, Dillon, and I suddenly had his undivided attention. “I don’t know. This is just a hunch, an idea I only started toying with just before Jessica came down and threw a tantrum.” He took a deep breath as if gathering the courage to tell us his idea. “Alison and Stephan spent a hell of a lot of time on a couple of prepper sites, and it got me thinking.”

“Prepper?” I wondered out loud.

“It’s a term used for people who spend all their time preparing for the end of days, the apocalypse,” Dillon calmly explained.

Sam cast me a small smile, no doubt seeing the disbelief on my face.

“There are entire sites and communities dedicated to surviving the end of days, whether it be a nuclear explosion, a virus, or an alien fucking invasion, pardon my language, Annie.”

“Wow, I can’t even plan my meals a week in advance,” I murmured.

“So, they’re preppers?” James asked, cutting in.

“Not sure. From their apartment next door to Annie’s, I’d say no, but they spent a considerable amount of time in a couple of doomsday forums. They were researching solar energy, water filtration, horticulture, and farming. I’ve been reading transcripts from hours of forum interaction, and they don’t really seem to be honing in on the whole doomsday aspect, but more of the self-sufficient lifestyle. And since they couldn’t have their own child, it just got me thinking that maybe they saw Eli as a potential replacement for that which was missing in their life. They’d been watching him for a long time. Maybe they’d been preparing to take him.”

“You think they had a place off the grid somewhere? A place they readied for their new family? Something rural? No water or electricity . . .” Dillon said, his eyes becoming glazed and unfocused. I’d seen the look enough to know it meant he was deep in thought.

“It’s plausible,” James said, also deep in thought.

“I haven’t been able to get a hit on any other properties listed in Alison’s or Stephan’s names, though. I’ve been through all their immediate family and nobody has property that is anything like what we are talking about here.”

Dillon waved off Sam’s words. “It could anything, a property belonging to a friend, distant family member, anything.” Dillon rubbed a hand over his shadowed jaw. “It’s just crazy enough to make sense.”

“There were subtle signs in their finances that they could be building something. There were building materials, supplies, small things spaced out far enough apart that they wouldn’t set off any alarm bells.”

“They were always away on the weekends,” I added.

“Claymont is surrounded by thousands of miles of forest. If they were out there, off the grid somewhere, setting up their very own hillbilly oasis, we could possibly narrow down a location,” James said as both he and Dillon quickly turned to a map on the wall.

Grabbing a white board marker off Sam’s desk, Dillon turned to a white board mounted on the wall beside the map. I sat and watched with no clue what it was that had them suddenly full of energy. “Time frame?” Dillon asked.

“Eli went missing from Claymont Hospital at approximately ten o’clock Thursday morning,” said Sam.

The painful memory made me feel nauseated. Dillon wrote the time and location at the top of the board.

“Road blocks were set up on both the north and south side of Claymont at one p.m. Thursday,” added James.

Dillon drew an arrow facing down and added road blocks, one p.m. underneath it.

“Bomber found Stephan and Alison’s last known location to be a car rental place on the north side of Claymont. Desk clerk confirmed they were there at two thirty in the afternoon.” Dillon added that information to the time frame. Sam shook his head. “But that would mean they are still in Claymont, and there sure aren’t any homes off the grid within the city limits. Everything has accessible power and water, and everyone knows fucking everyone in this town. There is no way they can hide a boy for long, especially so close to his home where people know him. With Eli’s photo being constantly flashed on the TV and Internet, it’s only a matter of time before someone recognizes him.”

James grabbed a marker as well and approached the map. He put a large X in two spots, one on the highway that led into Claymont from the north, and the other on the same highway that continued to the south. “The northern road block was fifteen miles on the north side of the Black Ridge Mountain Range turn off.” I followed James’ finger as it wound up into what I assumed was the mountainous territory that surrounded Claymont. “They were last seen on this side of town and they wouldn’t have gotten through the road block. If we go with your hunch and assume they’ve gone rural, then my bet would be that they’re up here somewhere.”

“That’s a lot of mountain,” Sam murmured from behind his desk.

“It is, but all this area,” James drew a circle around the first part of the mountain hinterland, “is full of wealthy vacation homes; electricity, water, not really the hillbilly off the grid lifestyle we’re talking about.” He drew another larger circle beside the one he had just drawn. “This, this is all off the grid. Does anyone know if Claymont has its own prepper fanatics group?”

“No idea, but I’m on it.” Sam was once again tapping away at the keyboard. My eyes took in the circle James had made, the area Eli could be in. So much land, so rugged, but it was something. It was a ray of hope, and that was all I needed to give my spirits a gentle nudge upwards. It finally felt like we were moving forward, a step toward finding Eli, which made my heart pound with anticipation. Dillon’s phone rang, which caused my already racing heart to almost trip over itself.

“It’s Jaxon,” he murmured, quenching my need to know. “How’s it going, Daddy?” he asked with a small smile, which soon fell as his gaze found mine. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” After a small pause, he nodded. “Okay, let me see what I can do.” With that, he hung up, his grey eyes still watching me with something akin to concern.

“What is it?” I asked, both wanting to know and not wanting to know. I wasn’t sure my heart could take any more bad news.

“Ella wants to see you. She knows what’s going on. She feels guilty, and she’s having a mild panic attack.” My hand automatically closed over my mouth to smother the whimper that fell from my lips. Ella was a brand spanking new mom; she couldn’t afford to be stressed out. She needed to concentrate on her newborn baby. Even though my first thought was for Ella’s wellbeing, that thought was quickly followed by the sheer terror of going back to the place I lost Eli.

“If you don’t want to go back there, we won’t.” Dillon’s words drew me away from the terror. “Jaxon can handle Ella, and Mercy is there, too.”

I wanted to see my friend, though. Ella and I had been through a lot together; she had been one of my first true friends in Claymont, and I needed her right now as much as she needed me. Even though Ella was several years younger than me, we were bonded by a mutual understanding of pain and despair. We also understood what it took to overcome those obstacles.