“To speak to and ask after each other’s health. Like that. Josh was in my class, but we didn’t hang out together. Jordie was a couple grades ahead of us.”

“Any sibling rivalry between them?” Joe asked.

“Nothing cutthroat. Not that I’m aware of, anyway. Both were smart and made good grades. She ran with the popular crowd.”

“Josh didn’t?”

“He was several levels down from popular and didn’t really run with anybody. He was a geek, and I don’t mean that unkindly. Into video games and such.”

“She was social, he was brainy. Fair to say?”

Morrow considered Hick’s question and nodded. “Fair to say. But, as brothers and sisters go, they were close.”

Joe perked up. “Oh?”

“You know what happened to Josh when he was little?”

Both Joe and Hickam nodded.

“Well, I guess because of that, Jordie was always protective of him.” When he paused, Joe motioned for him to continue. “Her senior year, she was with this guy, a superjock. A meathead, but, you know, coveted. One day after classes, Jordie was sitting with this guy in his car out on the school parking lot.

“Rumor had it that they were quarreling. In any case, Josh rode up on his scooter. Not a Harley, nothing with that kind of muscle. He and the meathead exchanged words through the driver’s window, and Josh, whether accidentally or on purpose—accounts varied—bumped the fender of the meathead’s car with his front tire.

“Didn’t even make a dent, but the guy was pissed. He got out of his car and threatened to tear Josh’s head off. He was yelling, trying to shove Josh off his scooter, calling him every name in the book. Josh didn’t—or couldn’t—counterattack.

“But Jordie did. She flew out of the car and got right in this jock’s face. Now he probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more, but she had him backing down in no time flat. Then she climbed onto the back of Josh’s scooter and off they went. That was the end of her romance with the meathead. She dumped him and to my knowledge never spoke to him again.”

Joe mulled over the story, then gave Morrow a long look, gauging his trustworthiness. “You wondered why surveillance on Jordie Bennett was requested earlier this week? Well, here’s why.”

The detective’s intelligent eyes registered the significance of what Joe told him. He whistled softly. “You—the FBI, I mean—have kept a lid on it.”

“We have,” Joe said. “And it does not—and I mean does not—go public until the Bureau is ready for it to.”

“Because of what Billy Panella might do if he gets wind of it.”

Hick nodded. “Exactly. What has us worried is that the news has already reached Panella, wherever in the world he’s holed up. Or else why was Mickey Bolden here tonight? He was Panella’s hired gun.”

“It doesn’t sadden me in the slightest that Mickey is no longer a worry,” Joe said. “But there’s this other guy, who apparently isn’t the least bit gun-shy. He remains unknown and at large.”

“And Jordie Bennett went missing at the same time.” Grasping the gravity of the situation, Morrow removed his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “We didn’t obtain her cell phone number until about ten minutes ago. This is Friday night. Everybody’s out. But we finally reached her office manager. She gave us Ms. Bennett’s number and we’ve been calling it.”

“Let me guess,” Hick said. “Nothing.”

“Not even voice mail.”

“Our unsub would be smart enough to take the battery out so it couldn’t be tracked,” Joe said. “Did you find a phone on Mickey?”

“Negative,” Morrow said.

“No doubt he lifted that, too.” Joe put his hands on his hips and swore softly. “This unidentified companion of Mickey’s is beginning to worry me.”

Chapter 4

The otherwise innocuous sound had the impact of a gunshot. Jordie froze.

When the first click was followed immediately by another, she realized what they signified.

From the driver’s seat, he had flipped a switch that released the child safety lock on the backseat door, then flipped it again to relock it, and, by doing so, mocked her futile attempt to get the door open.

About an hour earlier, she had been roused from unconsciousness by a dull ache on the side of her head. A self-preservation instinct had cautioned her not to let on that she’d come awake. Up till now, she’d thought she’d played possum well enough to fool him into believing that she was still out. Apparently she hadn’t been as convincing as she’d thought.

She was the fool, not he.

After waking up and assessing her situation as best she could without opening her eyes, she’d determined that she was lying on the backseat of a traveling vehicle with her hands and feet bound.

Moving incrementally and as silently as possible, she’d discovered that if she extended her legs just so, she could reach the backseat door with her bare feet. With increasing frustration and muscle strain, she had been covertly trying to lift the lever with her toes, all the while thinking that her abductor was oblivious.

Knowing now that he was on to her, and more than likely had been all along, despair, fear, and anger coalesced into a moan.

After coming to, and as soon as some of the residual muzziness had cleared from her head, she’d realized that this wasn’t her car. Her cheek was resting on cloth upholstery. The familiar texture and smell of her car’s leather seats would have provided her with a small measure of security, but, as it was, this car was as unknown to her as the driver, their whereabouts, and their destination.

No longer needing to pretend to be unconscious, she opened her eyes and blinked them into focus. She had only the dashboard’s glow for illumination. No city lights shone through the backseat window. There were no lighted signposts or overpasses indicating that they were on a major highway, no headlight beams coming from the opposite direction. She could see nothing beyond the window glass except black sky and a sprinkling of stars.

Which was as good a view as any to let her try and block the mental images of the overweight man aiming a pistol at her forehead, then of his facial features disintegrating, his hard fall to the ground, his blood spreading toward her feet as rapidly and darkly as spilled ink.

She remembered staring into a pistol at point-blank range and hearing the second man say, My half just doubled.

Upon waking, her first thought had been amazement that she was still alive.

Rather than shoot her, the tall one must have knocked her unconscious, perhaps with the sound suppressor on his pistol, and abducted her from the scene of the brutal murder that she had witnessed him commit. Leaving her now to wonder why he hadn’t also killed her. Wouldn’t that have been more practical and expedient than kidnapping? So why had he kept her alive?

Speculation on his motives brought on a surge of panic and, because stealth was no longer necessary, she began struggling to free her hands. They were restrained at the small of her back by something thin but incredibly strong that bit into her flesh. Her efforts to get loose grew more frantic.

“Cut it out.”