~Rhys~
I felt it in my gut. Something wasn’t right.
I had blown a tire and so I was thirty minutes late as of now, and I couldn’t exactly tell Emma that because my phone had also died. I could only hope she would still be there. I couldn’t blame her if she wasn’t, but I could hope.
After pulling up in front of Vittorio’s, my stomach dropped when I didn’t see her. Okay. So she was home and probably pissed. Excellent. That meant damage control was due.
I was heading back to my car when the glint caught my eye. Curious, I strolled around the side to the lot in the back, and the bad feeling in my stomach worsened tenfold.
Emma’s car was still there.
And she wasn’t inside of it.
I figured I had a right to jump to the conclusions I did. Given what happened to her, and the bastard out looking for her, I had a God-given right.
And also because Rico had called me and told me his buddy told him Mike Packer had been in the area. That he was in North Carolina.
“Shit,” I hissed, running to my car and revving the engine.
Please don’t let me be right.
~*~
“Rhys?”
I pushed passed Emma’s mother into the house. “Is Emma here?” I asked, whirling on her. I was sure I looked half-crazy.
“No, she said she left to go see you . . . What are you doing here?”
“What’s going on?”
I frowned at the man that stepped out. “Who is this?”
“Emma’s father,” her mother explained. “My husband. Where is my daughter?”
“I was on my way to meet her,” I said in a rush. “I got there and she wasn’t—her car was there, but she wasn’t.”
Their eyes widened, clearly sharing in my suspicions.
“Jacob,” her mother gasped fearfully. The man nodded and pulled out his cellphone.
“What? What is he doing?” I demanded. My fists were clenching and unclenching.
“Jacob is a police officer.” She grabbed my shoulders and forced me to look into her eyes. “Rhys, I know what you’re thinking but you can’t okay? She might have just travelled over to the library or the coffee shop.”
I shook my head. “No,” I countered. “He has her.”
She froze. “Rhys, please don’t—”
“I just know he does, okay?” I quipped. “Your daughter is in trouble, Mrs. Hall. Emma is in trouble.”
At that time her father came back with his badge in his hand and a gun shoved into the waist of his jeans. “I called some back-up,” he told his. “Cops are always headed down to Vittorio’s.”
“I’m coming,” Emma’s mother started, but her husband shot her a cold look.
“I don’t think you will,” he replied. “You know I don’t want you around that kind of stuff. And besides, you have to hold down the fort. Her car might have broken down and she might be on her way back here.”
“Jacob . . .”
“Please,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “For me. I don’t want to have to worry about you.”
Eventually she nodded. It was remarkable how much she bore a resemblance to Emma. “Okay. Bring our daughter back, Jacob.”
“I will.” He turned to me. “You coming?”
I nodded. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
~*~
There were squad cars and law officials crawling all around the area when we finally arrived. Her dad jumped out and I followed quickly after.
“What you got, Archie?” he asked a man stooping over the curb, where I had stood not twenty-five minutes ago.
Archie sighed. “You’re not gonna like it, boss.”
“I have no doubt. Tell me anyway.”
He scratched at his unruly dark hair. “There are tire marks on the road, burned in there. Whoever was here wanted to get out fast.”
I swallowed hard. That sounded like our guy.
“What else?” Mr. Hall demanded.
“We found a hair.”
“Did you give it to CSI?”
“Yes, it’s being analyzed as we speak.”
“Good.”
“Sir?”
“What?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
I watched Emma’s dad rub his head roughly “I suppose so, Archie.”
“Is this your daughter’s cell phone?”
Both our heads whipped around. I recognized it as well. “It is,” he replied. “Where did you get it?”
He pointed to where a group of people were huddled. “Found it right on the curb, a bit out of sight. Clearly she didn’t want whoever she was with to know she had a phone.”
Good one, Emma, I thought to myself.
Archie turned the phone in the evidence bag around so we could see the screen. “Left us a message,” he said. The words ‘help me’, ‘Mike’, and ‘black Volvo’ were written in an empty text message box. It didn’t escape my attention that my name was in the recipient line.
“Your daughter is one smart girl,” Archie praised.
“I know,” her father replied, eyes deep and thoughtful. “But I’m smart, too. Now, we have a twenty-four-hour window to find her. I won’t accept anything longer that, and anything longer might be too late. So everybody, get to work. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
~*~
“Coffee?”
I shook my head at Officer Hall’s question, unable to stop staring down at the phone on the evidence table.
The message was to me.
Who knew what she had originally been going to say? Had he come upon her by surprise? Did he hurt her?
The thought made me want to kill something.
He settled down in the seat across from me.
“We’re going to find her, son. I swear.”
I clenched my jaw tighter. “I have no doubt about that, sir,” I murmured. “But will we get there in time is the question.”
“Do not forget this is my daughter. I have dealt with this nutjob before; he won’t go far. And we will find them in time.”
I nodded.
He took the evidence bag out of my hands and set it aside. “You’re blaming yourself, aren’t you?”
“I told her to meet be there,” I blurted out. The guilt was eating me alive. “My freakin’ tire blew and my phone died and I couldn’t contact her. If I had just been able to . . . This might never have happened. I could have been there. I could have kept her safe.”
“You can’t blame freak accidents on yourself, Mr. Richardson,” he stated. “And focusing on guilt won’t help the situation. Helping us find her, however, will.”
“I know.” I sucked in a sharp breath. “What can I do?”
“For now, just be on the call if something turns up.”
“Okay.”
He stood and patted my shoulder, taking his coffee mug and exiting the police station. It was a school night but I didn’t give a rat’s ass. Emma was out there somewhere with that sicko and that was all that mattered.
I took out my phone and dialed up the one guy I knew could help.
“Hey, man.”
“He took her, Rico.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “What?”
“I was supposed to meet her somewhere and I was late. She’s gone. Completely and utterly disappeared. He took her.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m at the police station. I’m pretty sure.”
He breathed out a long breath. “Damn, Rhys.”
“You gotta help, Rico. I know you can.”
“What do you want me to do, bro? Summon my magical powers and call upon her whereabouts?”
“Now’s not the time,” I growled. “The cops here are fucking slow. They have to do it by the system and that will take too long.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“You have a hand-gun, don’t you? And a rough clue of where this bastard might go?”
“Ah, vigilante justice.” There was shuffling and crackling on the opposite end. “Do you know what you’re asking, Rhys? This could get you into more trouble than you usually get in.”
“I don’t care.”
“Why? The Rhys I knew would save his ass before anybody else’s.”
“I’m not him anymore,” I admitted. “You know that thing you were telling me? About needing a future?”
“Yeah.”
I stared at her phone, at my name glaring me right in the face. “Well, I found it Rico. Emma’s my future. And I can’t lose her.”