Nick tapped the steering wheel, his eyes on the brick building across the street. He didn’t usually mind stakeouts — Declan was the one who couldn’t sit still — but he’d never been on a stakeout with the father of the woman he loved either.
He glanced over at Russell Nash, quiet in the passenger seat of Nick’s car. “You okay?”
Russell’s features tightened. “I can’t stand the thought that she might be in there, that she might be in there and we’re just sitting here watching.”
“I understand.” Nick did, he just tried not to think about it. “We have to be smart. If Alexa is in there, there will probably be men guarding her. If we go in unprepared, we could do more damage, put her in more danger.”
“But if she’s not there, we’re wasting our time,” Russell said. “Time we could spend somewhere else.”
“I’m pretty sure the other place was clean.” Left unsaid: they didn’t have any place else to look after this one. They’d cased the first apartment building for six hours early that morning. No one had come or gone from the building in that time, and they’d gone home to shower and sleep for a couple of hours before heading to the second building on the list once it got dark. As far as Nick knew, Declan and Ronan hadn’t had luck with their sites either. “I know it’s hard, but you have to trust me on this.”
There were questions in Russell’s eyes, questions Nick didn’t want to answer until they found Alexa, but Russell didn’t ask them. They hadn’t spoken about the true nature of MIS’ business, and the family had been careful about what they said with Russell in the house. They were all used to the risks involved with the business, risks that had only been exacerbated in the months since the AG’s office started poking around.
Russell knew about Nick’s time with BPD, and he knew Ronan had been a SEAL with the Navy. Nick hoped that was enough to explain their knowledge of stakeout procedure, the weaponry they’dprepared for the stakeouts, the shorthand Nick fell into with his brothers when they were preparing for a mission.
The questions would come eventually, but once Alexa was back in Nick’s arms he would tell Russell and Jean Nash everything they wanted to know, for better or worse.
“Did you do this a lot when you were a police officer?” Russell asked.
Nick settled into the driver’s seat, relieved to be in safer territory. “Not so much when I first started, but once I was promoted to detective it was pretty routine.”
“Were you bored?”
“Not too much actually. It’s good practice, being able to sit, to be quiet, to just… observe. You notice a lot of things you don’t notice the rest of the time. Everyone’s so busy now,” Nick said.
Russell nodded. “Did you ever work something like this? A kidnapping?” he asked.
“We had a couple domestic kidnappings, parents in the middle of nasty divorces, that kind of thing,” Nick said. “Nothing like this. Nothing so…”
“Personal?” Russell finished.
Nick nodded.
“Is that better or worse for Alexa?” Russell asked.
“Hard to say.”
It wasn’t hard to say: it was bad. Really fucking bad, especially since they hadn’t had any contact from the Walkers. No demand for ransom or anything else, just a maddening silence that made Nick want to do something reckless, something stupid.
Kyle had called him that afternoon to tell him that as far as he could tell, no one was paying much attention to Alexa’s case. That was good news for now. It meant Alexa’s kidnapping was a rogue move by Frederick Walker, one not supported by a resource at BPD.
It wasn’t entirely surprising. Richard Delaney had been Walker’s guy for over a decade. Nick had no doubt Frederick would eventually find someone else to do his bidding inside the department, but dirty cops were harder to find than most people thought.
Unfortunately, Kyle had delivered bad news as well: there were only two CCTV cameras in the vicinity of the residential neighborhood where Alexa had been taken. Both had been down at the time of her kidnapping — just like the ones in the hotel during Juska’s attack there.
Nick wanted to be hopeful but it was impossibleto divorce himself from his training, from his experience. Statistically the first seventy-two hours provided the best hope for recovering a missing person alive. After that, clues started to disappear, the memories of witnesses started to fade, and whoever had the victim started to get antsy about getting rid of the evidence.
Nick didn’t want to mark the time. He wanted to stay in denial, to pretend it didn’t matter, but the cop in him couldn’t help it. The cop in him knew Alexa had been missing for almost exactly eighty-three hours.
He thought about her, tried to send out a signal wherever she was:Hang on, Lex. I’m coming.
He reached for the binoculars in the console and used them to scan the building across the street. It was two stories tall, with a brick facade and soot marks around one of the upper windows that spoke to a fire, probably why the building had been condemned.
As locations went, it wasn’t a bad choice to keep a kidnapping victim. There was a house two lots over, but the building sat on a corner in a neighborhood not exactly known for foot traffic. It was about as private as you could get in a city as densely packed as Boston.
He thought about the warehouses on the list. They were good possibilities too, semi-isolated by virtue of their large footprints. Nick had thought about taking them himself — he wanted to be where they were most likely to find Alexa — but he’d gone with his gut and chosen the apartment buildings. There would be a lot of security cameras in an industrial district. It might be too risky for Walker to have them all shut off at once. Someone was bound to notice, especially over a period of days.
Ronan had taken the warehouses with a promise to call Nick if he saw anything remotely suspicious.