The Buried (4 page)

A million different emotions churned through Quinn, but he kept them all in check and headed out of the cell.

“Do…do I get the plastic?” Nate asked.

“No,” Quinn grunted.

He opened cell one next. The woman inside jumped back, confused and frightened, as the door swung wide.

Quinn touched Ananke on the arm and motioned with his eyes for her to take the lead.

“This isn’t my kind of thing,” she whispered.

“It’s not like it’s ours, either,” Quinn said.

“I wouldn’t even know what to say.”

He frowned. “If you’re not going to help, then go into the other room and make sure no one comes down.”

“Just what I was thinking.” Ananke left the hallway.

Quinn turned his attention back to the cell. He made a quick examination of the woman for any weapons, but her hands were empty and she was wearing no clothes to hide anything in. “You can come out.”

The woman pressed herself against the back wall. “You’re the ones who’ve come to take us away, aren’t you? The ones Mr. Black told us about.”

“Tell me, is Mr. Black a short, skinny guy, losing his hair?” Quinn asked.

The look in her eyes confirmed that Mr. Black was Edmondson.

“I don’t work for
or
with Mr. Black,” he told her. “But I can tell you he’s not going to be bothering you anymore. The only place you’ll be going from here is home.”

She didn’t move.

“How about this?” he said. “We’ll leave the door open. Come out when you’re ready. No one’s going to force you to do anything.”

He nodded for Nate to follow him to cell three.

As he opened that door, the woman inside rushed out. He braced himself, thinking she would try to tackle him, but instead she dropped to her knees and threw her arms around his waist.

“Please! I’ll do anything. Please just—”

He peeled her arms off and pulled her to her feet. “No one’s going to do anything to you. Whatever was going on here is over. You won’t be seeing Mr. Black again.”

In her eyes, he could see she was having a hard time processing this.

“Get her some clothes,” he said to Nate.

“From where?”

Quinn nodded back toward the large room. “Ask Ananke. She’ll show you where to find them.”

As Nate escorted the woman into the other room, the captive in cell one yelled, “Don’t listen to them! They’re going to take you away like the others.”

Quinn headed over to cell four and looked through the window. The prisoner was still sitting on the mattress. Instead of glaring at him, though, she was now staring at the opposite wall. He unlocked the door and opened it.

Without looking at him, she said, “What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. I’m just letting you out.”

“I heard what you told the others. I know you’re lying. You’re not here to rescue us.”

Technically, she was right. They were here to deal with Edmondson’s termination, not to act as liberators of the man’s…whatever this was.

“We have zero interest in harming you,” he said. “We didn’t even know you were here until a few minutes ago.”

She looked at him and sneered. “So I just follow you out?”

“That’s up to you.”

“Like I really have a choice.” She pushed to her feet and started to cover her chest, but then dropped her arm as if she wasn’t going to let her nakedness embarrass her.

She wasn’t like the other two. She still had fight in her. Either she was a new arrival and hadn’t been beaten down yet or was stronger than her prison mates.

When she reached the door, she held her wrists out, hands clasped together. Quinn didn’t move.

“No cuffs?” she asked.

“I told you, we’re here to free you.”

Another grunt. “All right, then. What now?”

“Now we get you something to wear.”

He purposefully went first so that his back was to her, putting her in a position of control and hoping it would gain him a little trust. When they reached the larger room, he saw that the other woman was already wearing a shirt and was pulling on a pair of pants.

“What size are you?” Quinn asked the woman from cell four.

She looked over at the open cabinets full of clothes. “I don’t want any of those. I want mine.”

“I have no idea where yours are.”

She nodded toward the other end of the room. “In the lockers. Mine’s number seventeen.”

Quinn pulled out the keys and opened the indicated locker. Inside were a pair of jeans, a long-sleeve dark brown T-shirt, a maroon hoodie, panties, bra, ankle socks, and a pair of sneakers. Sitting at the bottom was an empty messenger bag, the few items that had apparently been inside sealed in a clear plastic bag lying next to it.

“Yours?” he asked the woman.

She nodded.

“Are the other lockers the same?”

“How should I know?” she said. A pause. “Can I get dressed now? Or are you still enjoying the view?”

“Sorry.” He’d been lost in thought, wondering about the other lockers.

He moved to the one next to hers and opened it. A single set of clothes and some personal items. He tried another. Same.

Like trophy cases, he thought, sickened.

Twenty-three of the thirty lockers were secured. If four belonged to the women he and Ananke found, that left nineteen unclaimed. He tried not to think what that meant, but failed.

This was way beyond his contractual obligation.

Wanting to have as much information as he could before contacting Helen, he took cell four’s wallet from her personal items while she had her back to him, and then hunted through the next few lockers for more intel.

As he opened another one, the girl from cell three said, “That’s my shirt!”

Quinn pulled her clothes out and tossed them to her, and then added her ID to the others he’d taken. He had five now and decided that was enough.

“Please help these ladies with anything they might need,” he said to Nate and Ananke. “I’ll be right back.”

“What
I
need is to go home,” the woman from cell three said.

“That’s what I’m working on,” Quinn told her.

He went up to the garage and pulled out his phone, but hesitated before dialing. He needed guidance from Helen, but he also needed to let Orlando know what was going on. In fact, it would be best to have her on the line when he talked to their client.

The phone rang five times before Orlando answered. “What?” she asked in a whisper. He could hear other noises—music and amplified voices.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Hold on,” she said.

For the next several seconds, he could hear the muffled sound of movement.

When she spoke again, the music and other voices were gone and she was no longer whispering. “Okay, I can talk now.”

“Where are you?” he asked again.

“I’m at the movies.”

“It’s almost midnight. You should be in bed,” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep, all right? We need to get a new mattress. Our bed is horrible. I can’t get comfortable.”

“The mattress is fine.”

“Well, then, you get fat and sleep on it.”

“You’re not fat.”

“You obviously haven’t looked at me in a while. But who could blame you?”

Pregnancy was getting in the way of Orlando’s usually active life. Thankfully, it would be over soon.

“Why are you calling?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“You might say that.”

“Dammit. It was Ananke, wasn’t it? She screwed something up.”

“The termination went fine. The body’s wrapped and ready to go.”

“Then what is it?”

“We, uh, found, I don’t know, a dungeon, I guess.”

“Excuse me?”

He described Edmondson’s secret basement and the women they had found down there.

“Holy crap.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“I grabbed a few IDs.” He started to read off the names but Orlando stopped him.

“Let’s get Helen on the line first. She’s going to love this. Hold on.”

Thirty seconds later, the night officer at Helen’s office transferred their call to his boss’s home.

“I’ve got Quinn on with me,” Orlando said when Helen came on.

“Problems?” their client asked.

“Yes, but not what you think,” Quinn said.

He explained how the mission had gone, what they had found, and then read off the names on the IDs: Laurie Wright, Vanessa Holland, Kelly Blackwood, Marsha Venton, and Danielle Chad. The last two were the women from cells three and four, respectively. “I need to know how you want us to handle this,” he said when he finished.

Helen was silent for a moment before saying, “Give me ten minutes. I’d like to know a little about who you’ve found before making any decision. Can you shoot me photos from the IDs so I can check them against official records?”

“No problem.”

“Thanks. I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can,” Helen said and hung up.

“Copy me on the photos and I’ll see what I can find out on my end,” Orlando said to Quinn. “If Helen calls you back directly, make sure you get me on the line.”

CHAPTER
5

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

T
HE MOMENT THE
photos arrived, Helen logged into her agency’s system and navigated to the information interface. The module would not only search her group’s database, but also cull information from other US intelligence and law enforcement organizations.

She typed in the five names Quinn had given her, set the parameters for a basic search so that it would be quicker, and clicked the
ENTER
button.

She received the results for the first four women within minutes. Wright, Holland, Blackwood, and Venton all matched the IDs Quinn had obtained. Each had been reported missing within the last month from different locations, all within a three-hundred-mile radius of Seattle.

None of the cases were getting much attention, however. The four women were recovering addicts of one type or another, and law enforcement officials in charge of each case seemed to think the person they were looking for had probably fallen back into her addiction and would turn up eventually, either stoned or dead. Because of this and the distances between the cases, no connections had been made to reveal a pattern.

Helen had started to assume Danielle Chad was a similar case that just hadn’t been reported yet when her computer spit out a response:

DANIELLE CHAD: A&D/Alpha One

A&D—apprehend and detain, in this case with the highest priority. It had been routed through the NSA, but could have originated from any of a dozen or more other agencies. Usually some basic information about the individual would come with such an order, even an alpha one, but the only other item was a link to a contact. When she clicked on it, she was presented with a screen telling her that remote access to the requested information was restricted.

She spent several minutes searching other databases for anything she could find about Danielle Chad but came up with nothing.

It looked like she wouldn’t learn anything until she went into the office.

But that could wait for now. She was already late getting back to Quinn.

__________

T
HE MOMENT ORLANDO
hung up with Quinn, she arranged through an app service for a car to pick her up right away. By the time she reached the street and removed her laptop from her backpack, her ride pulled to the curb. She gave the driver her address and settled into the backseat.

Using the information from the IDs, she conducted a similar search to the one Helen was doing on the other side of town. Her results for the first four women were basically the same. When it came to Danielle Chad, all her normal sources returned nothing.

Orlando then did a general search on the woman’s name. She received several hits but none matched the age and description of the woman Quinn had found.

There was only one other thing she could do. After cropping the woman’s photo out of the ID, she uploaded it into her web-based facial recognition interface and hit
START
. There was no telling when, or if, it would kick back any results, so she closed her computer and put it away.

She squirmed in her seat, trying to alleviate some of the aches she was feeling. When that didn’t work, she twisted to the side so she could rub the base of her spine. She couldn’t remember having this much back pain when she’d been pregnant with her son Garrett twelve years before.

Barely five feet tall, Orlando’s pre-baby weight had always hovered around ninety-four pounds. Her little passenger had added over twenty percent to that, rocketing her to—at last check—what she considered a hefty one hundred and fourteen.

Being pregnant again wasn’t all annoying, though. She was having a baby with Quinn. Thinking about that always brought a smile to her face. Okay, perhaps they hadn’t planned it this way, but damn if it wasn’t cool. She could already tell Quinn was going to be one of those overly involved, pain-in-the-ass dads, and she loved him even more for that.

As the baby nudged against her belly, Orlando sucked in a breath, the movement catching her off guard. She rubbed the spot and said, “Sweetheart, come on out anytime you’re ready.”

“Excuse me?” the driver said.

She looked up. “Sorry. I was—hey! There!” She leaned forward and pointed down the street to where a small crowd had gathered next to several food trucks. “Pull over.”

“But this isn’t where—”

“Just pull over.”

“Okay, okay. No problem.”

She opened the door as soon as he stopped. “Wait for me. I won’t be long.” She started to get out but then asked, “You want anything?”

“No, I’m good.”

“You sure? My treat.”

“A Coke, I guess,” he said. “And a taco. I mean, if that’s okay.”

Orlando climbed awkwardly out of the car and waddled over to the end of the line in front of the Mexican food truck.

Barely half a minute later, her phone rang, the caller ID reading
HELEN CHO
.