“Go to my place,” he insisted. “You’ll find what you need in the barn. Use your date of birth to get in. I’ll set the code up now. I need this, JJ. There’s no time to waste.”
“Absolutely. I’ll hit you back when I know something.”
Brantley disconnected the call, tucked his phone in his pocket, and turned to see Reese staring at him.
“Well, that’s handy.”
He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “JJ’s got skills.”
“Sounds like it.”
He took another quick look around. “Let’s do this, shall we?”
Two hours later, they’d made a trip through every office, every storage room, every nook and cranny in the building, and as Brantley expected, there were no signs of Kate. His anxiety level had ratcheted up a few notches during the search, as had his anger. It wasn’t that he thought he was some sort of superhero who could find a lost kid because he willed it to happen, but Brantley wanted some sort of lead to go on.
Anything.
Based on the last time the teachers had seen Kate, she’d been missing for roughly six hours and no one had heard from the kidnapper. He did not want to think about what that could possibly mean. At some point since he’d heard the news, he had started banking on this being a kidnap and ransom scenario. The asshole who took Kate would call Travis, make his demands. At that point, Travis would give the assholes what they wanted, and Kate would be returned safe and sound.
If this wasn’t a ploy to extort money from Travis Walker, then that meant the little girl was in serious danger. He refused to consider what that bastard might’ve done to Kate during the time she’d been—
His cell phone rang as they were getting into his truck. Brantley could feel Reese’s eyes on him, which was why he chose to take the call through the Bluetooth in the truck.
“Yeah, JJ. Whaddya got?”
“First, let me say, you’ve got some magnificent toys here, Brantley. I’m a little pissed I didn’t know about ’em before now.”
Attempting to rein in his patience, he exhaled heavily.
“Okay, sorry,” she said quickly. “I was able to hack into the cameras. They’ve got plenty of them, I might add. And all seemed to be working fine with the exception of several leading out the back of the building and a couple in the parking lot. They lost the feeds for sixteen minutes.”
“That’s what we were told,” he said, pulling his truck out of the parking lot so he could wind his way back to the highway.
“There’s no way that wasn’t planned. Whoever took Kate had an extraction plan and they took the cameras down for their getaway. However…”
Brantley could hear her typing, waited.
“I compared a shot of the parking lot before the cameras went down to one when they came back online. There are three vehicles missing in the later picture. A grey Ford Expedition, a blue Altima, and a silver Audi. The Altima and Audi are registered to state employees.”
“And the Expedition?” Reese inquired.
“Oh, hey,” JJ said, clearly surprised by the voice.
“I’ve got Reese with me,” Brantley explained. “What do you have on the Expedition?”
“No plates, of course. Kidnapper knew what she was doing. And the image I’ve got is grainy at best, but I can make out a blond woman in the driver’s seat.”
Brantley glanced at Reese, then back to the road. “A woman?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary software for facial rec, and even if I did, I don’t think it’d be enough to go on.”
“Can you send me a picture of the woman? I’ll take it back to Travis, see if he recognizes her.”
“Yep.” There was a slight pause. “Done. Oh, and I reached out to Dante, explained what was going on.”
“What can he do?” Reese asked.
“Dante’s the governor’s son,” Brantley explained. “And the guy JJ’s dating.”
“Ah.”
“We’re headin’ back now,” Brantley told JJ. “Gonna stop at Travis’s, show him the picture.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just stay here,” JJ replied. “Keep diggin’. Not sure it’ll help, but I feel like I’ve got to do somethin’.”
“I appreciate it,” he told her. “See you in a bit.”
He disconnected the call and passed his phone to Reese. “Check out the image.”
“You think I’ll recognize her?” he asked, taking the phone.
“You never know.”
Brantley drove in silence for a few minutes, attempting to keep from violating too many traffic laws as he headed back to Coyote Ridge. Thankfully, the toll road would take them most of the way, the eighty-mile-per-hour posted speed limit his friend.
“I got nothin’,” Reese noted, referring to the image he was looking at. “Mind if I shoot this to Z? I know Sniper 1’s got some nifty software. I’ll see if they can get a hit.”
“Go ahead.”
At this point, Brantley would do whatever it took to take something back to Travis.
