Code Name: Aries by Janie Crouch

22

Ian

Five more agonizing days passed with nothing. No word. No leads. Erick Huen had gone to ground, and he’d taken Wavy with him.

We’d checked every building Erick or any member of his family had ever had contact with. The lab hidden in that nursing home hadn’t been tied to him, it had been tied to his ex-wife, to whom he’d only been married for a year more than a decade ago. Her father had lived at the nursing home for a brief time.

I had my team running shifts twenty-four seven, combing intel, putting pressure on or throwing money at contacts who might know anything. But this throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall-to-see-what-stuck method was not going to get us to Wavy in time. I knew it in my gut.

There were no good options anymore. Hell, there were barely any bad options.

There was nothing but the knowledge that every day we didn’t get her back, the chances of getting her back at all went down exponentially. If I were working for someone else right now under the same circumstances, I would have the hard talk with them. Tell them they needed to make peace with the fact that their loved one probably wouldn’t ever come home.

A silent kidnapper was usually a murderer.

Erick still hadn’t demanded anything of me or taunted me. My guess was that he was waiting until he had footage of Wavy’s death to send me. A reminder that it was retribution for killing Grant.

Never mind that Wavy was innocent and that I’d killed Grant in self-defense. Those trivial facts wouldn’t matter in Erick’s mind.

I was back in my penthouse, sitting at the large, oak desk in my office, leaning back in my chair. I should be sleeping, but once again, like every night she’d been gone, that was impossible. Every few days my body gave out, and I’d sleep wherever I was.

But until then, all I could do was stay awake and breathe in the air permeated with a mixture of my own terror, fury, and ineptitude.

That tiny painting we’d found at the lab rested in the evidence bag on the edge of the desk in front of me, the same place where Wavy had sat last time she’d been here.

She’d been wrapped in a towel, fresh from the shower, and I’d been on the phone handling some late-night business. She’d proceeded to sit on my desk and spread her legs until they were on either side of my chair.

I’d hung up very quickly after that and proceeded to make a feast out of her.

I ran my hands through my hair, barely refraining from pulling it out by the roots. There was nothing I wouldn’t give to have her perched on my desk now.

We’d missed them at the lab by only a few hours.

Omega Sector’s coroner had determined that one of the bodies was so recently deceased, she’d probably died when they moved her. Mosaic wouldn’t have left her there if she hadn’t been dead, and she hadn’t been dead more than four hours by the time we got there.

So fucking close.

Cause of death for both victims was still unknown. Trauma and blunt-force weapons had been ruled out on scene. But both had shown signs of recent medical procedures—IVs and surgeries. We all knew what that meant. Mosaic was capitalizing on their new method of indoctrination for human trafficking.

I picked up the evidence bag and looked at the canvas again. All the colors on it weren’t necessarily paint. Some of it was blood.

She’d bled on that piece of canvas.

The blood was smeared across the two top corners, two lines, like she’d been trying to make some artistic pattern with it. Like she’d taken her nails, dipped them in blood, and used them to paint.

Wait. I sat up straighter.

Like she’d dipped her nails in blood and tried to paint with it.

What if that wasn’t her blood?

What if—oh God, I almost couldn’t bear to let myself hope—what if she’d been trying to leave us some sort of clue?

I picked up my phone and speed-dialed Sarge. “Who can we coerce or bribe into getting us a blood sample DNA tested immediately? I think Wavy might have left us a clue.”

* * *

His name was Dr. Sheldon Tippens.

Six hours later, Sarge and I were lying in wait in the dawn shadows outside his front door in an affluent suburb of San Diego.

Wavy had pointed us in the right direction by leaving us the blood on the painting. I had no idea if she’d done it on purpose or not, but it was the first solid lead we’d had since the lab.

Sheldon Tippens hadn’t been on our radar at all. We’d had no idea he was tied to Mosaic or Erick in any way. We would never have found him without Wavy.

His house was pedestrian at the end of a cul-de-sac with a long driveway. A two-story brick house with fucking flower boxes on the railings. It was a house you lived in when you wanted a good place to raise your kids with the right kind of schools. A bicycle was parked near the side of the house.

I didn’t care. I didn’t care if the man had a family. I didn’t care if he skipped out the door with two kids holding his hands.

He was coming with me, and he was going to tell me where Wavy was.

Since Sarge had gotten us an ID from the blood, the nerds had been digging up whatever they could about Tippens and this neighborhood.

No surprise, Tippens was a genetics specialist. He had his own medical and genetics counseling practice. And, evidently, a side job brainwashing human trafficking victims for Mosaic.

Sarge was the only other person who knew we were here. I hadn’t contacted Callum to get law enforcement in on this. Even Landon didn’t know. The gesture wasn’t lost on Sarge.

“What’s your plan, Ian?” He didn’t call me Ian very often.

“My plan is that Tippens is coming with us, and I’m taking him to an undisclosed location, and he’s not leaving until he tells us where Wavy and Bronwyn are. I’m not fucking around anymore.”

We both knew what I meant. Torture, dirty and brutal, to get the info we needed.

“I want Bronwyn safe pretty much more than I want my next breath,” Sarge said. “But there are some things you don’t come back from. If you do this—if we do this, then it’s going to leave a mark on our souls.”

My eyes were still pinned to Tippens’s front door. I didn’t care. “I will give up my whole fucking soul to get Wavy back. She’s in this because of me. Erick figured out, even before I did, how much she means to me. I should have had security on her. I should have never left her alone. I should have known she’d be a target just because she was spending time with me. But I’d been keeping it casual, thought it would never become a factor.”

Nothing I felt about Wavy Bollinger was casual.

Sarge didn’t try to talk me down from this ledge. That’s why he was here with me. He was also willing to cross the line. “When Mosaic realizes Tippens has been taken, they might move her again, you know that.”

“Then we make him talk quickly. We go straight to the hard stuff from the beginning.”

My words were tough but my stomach rolled at the thought. I didn’t want to torture anybody. Even someone like Tippens. Someone who was, at the very least, an accomplice in what had happened to Wavy.

But I would do it. I would do it without flinching to get her back.

“Okay,” Sarge said.

We both relaxed a few minutes later when a vehicle pulled out containing a woman and child. No Tippens. It was better that they were leaving so they wouldn’t be around when we grabbed him. Sarge and I had worked out multiple scenarios so that no innocents were hurt if it came to that, but if they were nowhere around, that would be ideal.

So we waited in our vehicle, calling the wife’s license plate into the nerds so they could follow it.

When Tippens pulled out in his BMW, we made our move. He wasn’t all the way out of his driveaway when we rammed our vehicle straight into his. It wasn’t subtle, but the neighbors were far enough away from each other that by the time someone called the cops, we would already be gone with him.

We both had masks on and our vehicle was not registered to anyone. Dr. Tippens got out of his car, at first indignant that someone had hit him.

But as soon as he saw us with the masks, he tried to dive back in. I grabbed him and pulled him toward our vehicle.

“If you tell me where Wavy Bollinger is right now, you might live to finish this day with all your fingers and toes attached to your body.” I wasn’t going to waste any time. The more afraid he was, the better this would go for all of us.

“Wavy Bollinger?” His eyes got big. “No. I swear, I didn’t want to—”

I headbutted him. It was the easiest way to let him know I meant business without taking a chance on letting him go. “Where is she?”

Blood poured out of his nose and he started blubbering. “I swear I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t me.”

I dragged him toward our car. We needed to get him off the street.

“Look,” he said, “I—”

The impossible happened. A shot rang out from down the street. Tippens collapsed into my arms, a red hole forming on his chest as blood spread across his shirt.

“Shit, he’s down.” I lowered Tippens to the ground.

Sarge was already returning fire. It didn’t matter. Tippens was not going to make it.

“Look, you asshole,” I told him, “tell me where your lab is. You’re going to die. If you don’t want your wife and kid to find your body lying here, you will damn well tell me where Wavy is.”

He knew his own death was imminent. This was all in his hands now. Nothing I could do was going to change things.

“Lab,” he breathed out, a gurgling sound in his throat. He was choking on his own blood. “But too late. She’s not . . .”

Too late.I tamped down panic. “Where, Tippens?”

He almost seemed to relax a little. “Wavy. Told him not viable. But still was able . . .” he trailed off.

“Tell me, please. Even if she’s dead, tell me.”

“Corner warehouse. City Heights. Industrial district. Chollas—”

That was all he got out before he died.

I was vaguely familiar with the warehouse district near Chollas Creek off the bay in downtown San Diego. I was about to become much more familiar with it.

I could only hope that he’d been telling the truth, because Sheldon Tippens wouldn’t be telling anyone anything else ever again.