Page 95 of The Trap by Catherine
She’s baiting him, the man who took her sister.
Just like Chris said she was.
Nicki’s sister didn’t have the patience to let the guards do their job and now she, evidently, doesn’t either. Like Lucy, she thinks she’ll do better if she takes matters into her own hands. It’s so stupid, so reckless, so dangerous, so pointless.
What on earth does she think she’s going to achieve?
Whatisit with this family?
Denise lets the girl walk off into the dark, waits five minutes, and then drives after her slowly, with her headlights dipped. She wants to catch Nicki in the act before she reprimands her, having walked away from her car and down the road a bit, so she can’t pretend she was parking up to go visit a friend.
But Nicki has disappeared.
“Shit,” Denise mutters.
Even at running speed, there’s no way Nicki would’ve got this far down this road in the time it’s taken Denise to get here. She must have turned off somewhere, or gone back. Denise circles the village a few times, taking various routes in and out of it, but there’s no one around at all. There isn’t a single other pedestrian. There aren’t even any other cars. The night is silent except for the hum of Denise’s vehicle, rumbling slowly through it.
Where the hell did Nicki go?
Denise pulls up a map on her phone and looks for something, anything, nearby—and finds that there’s a service station, a Circle K, not that far away. It’s the only thing that’s even feasibly within walking distance that might be open at this hour, even though the map says it would take a half-hour to get there on foot, and probably double that in the shoes Nicki has on her.
She decides to go there and wait for a little while, see if Nicki shows up. If she doesn’t, she’ll go back and wait by the car, catch her there. They’re going to have words. As Denise drives, she rehearses her speech in her mind.
Your sister disappeared because she couldn’t stay at home and wait for us to find you, and now you’re out here putting yourself in danger because you can’t wait for us to findher. This stops right now or I’m going to charge you with impeding an investigation.
The Circle K is surprisingly busy for this time of the night, especially since there seem to be so few vehicles on the roads around here. There are three in the forecourt, despite the fact that it’s now gone 4:00 a.m. But then, the stationison the one main road that cuts through the spaghetti mess of local ones, boreens, and dirt tracks around these parts. If people are going to be anywhere, Denise supposes, they’ll be here.
She parks on the far side of the forecourt, away from the pumps and the shop, in a spot the station’s lights don’t quite reach, and surveys the scene.
One car is filling up at the pumps.
Another is parked right outside the shop. The woman coming out of its doors at this very moment is waving at the man behind its wheel.
A third is parked directly across from Denise, directly under a bright light, and—
Nicki O’Sullivan is getting out of it.
At first she worries that something has happened while she was in the car, because now Nicki seems genuinely worse for wear, the stumbling no longer an act, looking sweaty and gray in the face as she heads around the side of the shop, apparently following a sign for the toilets. Denise has one hand on the door and one on her gun, checking it’s there even though she knows it is, even though she can feel its weight against her hip, ready to run, to catch the man—she’s assuming—behind the wheel before his tires squeal and he drives off.
But he doesn’t drive off.
And itisa man, getting out of the car while its lights are on and the engine is still running.
He looks to be in his mid-thirties, six foot or just over it, average build, with strawberry-red hair cut close to his scalp. His T-shirt is on inside out and he looks generally disheveled, and that makes Denise push open her door, switching the courtesy light on, illuminating her.
But something tells her to wait, that if the obvious explanation was the right one, he wouldn’t still be here, that he’d have hightailed it out of here as soon as his victim was out of the car.
The man does a quick scan of the forecourt and she manages to pull the door closed again, extinguishing the light, just before his head turns toward her.
She pulls down the visor and starts tracing a finger across her lips, waits a beat, and then lets her gaze travel back to him.
He’s opened one of the rear doors, and she watches as he reaches in and lifts out a baby seat. An empty baby seat. He transfers it to the boot, looks around the forecourt one more time, and gets back in his car.
That’s when Denise gets the feeling.
It’s like a tug, deep in her stomach, sounding a silent alarm. Signaling that there’s something very wrong with what she’s seeing.
Telling her to look harder.
