Chapter Thirty

Evan

Tori:      Kelly invited us for dinner tomorrow at six. That okay with you?

Me:            Sounds perfect. I’m wrapping up here. My place or yours?

Thirty minutes later, I still didn’t have a reply so I decided to call her. The phone rang for the full thirty seconds before her voicemail picked up. I hung up without leaving a message and stared at my phone.

Something felt off.

I pressed her name again, trying not to let my thoughts run crazy. It only rang four times before she answered and I started to smile until I heard the voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

It was a man, not Victoria like I expected, and I was instantly on guard. “Who is this? Where’s Victoria?”

“My name is Officer Duncan Welker with the New Hope Police Department. Can you please identify yourself, sir?”

Everything inside of me went cold. “Detective Evan Coleman, NHPD narcotics, badge 4123. Victoria Jones is my girlfriend. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Detective Coleman…” He hesitated for a moment. “Can you come down to Power Fitness on Creekside? It seems Victoria is missing.”

–––

I watched the footage again. I hated watching the moment she was taken but I needed a clue, any clue, to find her.

I was so pissed. The guy who grabbed Victoria, who violently abducted her, was the same guy I’d had in cuffs just a month before. We let him go and now she was gone.

Jarvis had been waiting for her, that much was obvious. She and Kelly left the gym, both of them smiling, and Kelly wrapped Victoria up in a tight hug before they parted ways to go to their separate vehicles.

Victoria got into her SUV, but only thirty seconds passed by before her door opened. She stepped back out onto the pavement and walked around to the passenger side of her car, reaching for the slip of paper on her windshield.

She stood there reading it for a few seconds before looking around in confusion. I watched as she started to walk back to the driver’s side of the car at the same time the sliding door to the van parked two spots away opened.

If only she’d been able to see like I could from the camera angle. She would have seen Jarvis walk up behind her just as she was about to slide back into her seat. She would have noticed him before he jammed the needle into her neck. She would have been able to fight back for longer than the minute and a half before her body went limp.

Jarvis dragged her unconscious body back to the van and lifted her in, looking around for witnesses before he followed. The van didn’t move for a full five minutes and the only thing I could do was assume he was tying her up. The lab had confirmed that the substance in the syringe was Propofol. It could knock someone out but they didn’t stay out for very long and I was sure he wanted her restrained for whenever that happened.

The van drove away without anyone noticing that the woman I loved was inside.

Kelly Christos returned to the parking lot about three minutes after the van pulled out and headed back inside. Apparently she’d left her phone on the reception desk when she and Victoria had been talking to the employee there.

When she came back outside, she noticed Victoria’s SUV was still there and told us that she almost just assumed she’d gone back in to work out some more. She almost walked away without worrying about it. It wasn’t until she noticed that Victoria’s driver’s side door wasn’t closed all the way that she went to check it out. She found Victoria’s keys on the pavement next to the car, her cell phone and bag on the front seat, and then immediately called the police.

Traffic cameras had been able to track the van out to the interstate but lost it from there. We had no idea where she was and no way to find her.

Resisting the urge to smash the tablet into small pieces, I put it down on my desk and stood. I grabbed my hair and began pacing furiously.

She’d been missing for almost five hours at that point. Vincent and Warren were out, as were Simon, Megan, Kelly, Nick, Tyson, and the rest of Company 21, driving around the city and surrounding areas in hopes of finding the van. We had waves of patrols out doing the same thing. So far we had nothing.

I’d made Vincent leave a couple of hours before. The weird twin ESP he had was making me more anxious. Victoria had been missing for about an hour and a half when Vincent started saying his body felt weird. He kept scratching at his skin, rubbing his chest, and complaining that he was dizzy. The possibilities of what was being done to Victoria were endless and I was ready to kill Vincent when I kicked him out.

I paced for about three minutes before sitting back down at my desk and pulling the footage up again. I watched it at half speed, not wanting to miss anything.

“Where are you, baby?” I whispered, gripping the tablet so hard that I was afraid it was going to crack. “I need you to hold on. I’m going to find you.”

“Evan.” Dominic’s loud voice cut through my pity party and I looked up to see him thrusting his own tablet towards me.

“They found whatever had been on her windshield. It was caught on a wheel well of a vehicle parked three rows over. They just emailed it over. The lab is expediting the prints on it now.”

I immediately took the tablet and focused on the image that was on it. It was just a white piece of paper with the word “Gotcha” written in all caps. I swiped the screen so I could see the other side and froze.

“It’s stationary.”

Dominic was already behind me, looking over my shoulder, but he leaned in to see what I was seeing. Using my fingers, I enlarged the logo.

“Lucky Sevens Motel. Isn’t that the motel down off I-90?”

“There’re five locations.” Dominic held out his phone, showing me where he’d already googled it. “New Hope, Rollins, Henderson, and two in Las Vegas.”

Lt. Messer appeared in the opening to the cubicles. “You two go check out the New Hope location. I’ll alert the other precincts and have them check the other locations for the van. Go.”

I stood from the desk. “On it.”

“Let me drive,” Dom said, pulling the keys to the department sedan out of my grip. I didn’t argue, just went right for the passenger door.

My best friend drove like a bat out of hell, something I appreciated. He kept the lights and sirens off unless we had to get around traffic but we wanted to get to the motel as fast as possible.

“If she dies-” I started to say but Dominic cut me off immediately.

“Shut the fuck up. She’s not going to die. There’s an end game to this, Ev. He didn’t take her just to kill her. He has an agenda and it has to do with you.”

I tugged at the tie on my neck. It felt like it was strangling me. “You saw the way Vincent was acting. They’re doing something to her.”

“Focus on finding her.” He glanced over and gave me a sharp look. “Get out of your head and start looking for that van.”

My best friend was right. I looked out the window and searched the roads for our missing van.

“I’m coming, Victoria,” I whispered to myself. “Hold on.”