1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,59

you up, an Agent Lisa Konrad Palumbo,” Keats said. “She’ll take you where you’re going.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Where am I going?”

“Somewhere safe,” was all he said. “You need to disappear for a little while. Are you okay waiting here?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked. It was a ridiculous answer, considering what I’d just been through, but I didn’t want Billy worrying about me. He’d already spent enough time on that. I wanted him out there looking for Eve.

Keats knelt by the open door and put both arms on the frame of the car, closing us in a little huddle. When he spoke, it was a low murmur, just for me, and I could tell I was about to hear something confidential.

“She’s still alive, Angela,” he said. “I can tell you that much.”

“How can you know that?” I asked. “How can you possibly—

”But then I realized. Whoever was behind this must have notified the Bureau that it was about to happen. It was exactly the kind of move these attention-seeking scumbags had been pulling all along. The more they accomplished, the more they flaunted their position.

“They told you ahead of time, didn’t they?” I asked.

“Just not enough to do anything about it,” Keats confirmed.

“Jesus.”

“For all we know, Reese Sapporo’s abduction in Portland was some kind of dry run for whatever this is supposed to be,” Billy said. “My guess is they drugged her before they took her out that upstairs window. But Angela? Look at me.”

I took a shaky breath and looked him in the eye.

“If they wanted to kill her, she’d already be dead. Okay? Trust me. We’ve got the whole city lit up with surveillance. We’ve already spun up a task force at the field office, and we’re covering every known route out of the city. Believe me, we’re going to find her. Do not give up hope.”

I gave him a nod, which was as much as I could manage.

“Go,” I said. “Do what you have to do.”

And then he was gone.

That left me alone with the cop in the front. I didn’t even know the officer’s name. He’d kept his eyes forward the whole time, like he didn’t want to intrude. Which was just as well. I didn’t feel much like chatting.

I hated to think about the hell Eve was in. Not to mention how out of her mind she’d have to be, worrying about Marlena. But Keats was right. Eve had to be alive. Otherwise, why take her? Reese Sapporo had been returned unharmed. Maybe this was just another version of the same maneuver. With any luck, we’d have Eve back by morning.

But where was she now? What did these people want? And why? It was like a shifting constellation of questions, one moving target after another, with no clear answers.

“Hey, excuse me? Are you hearing that?”

I glanced up. The cop had twisted around to look at me from the front seat. He chinned down at the messenger bag on my lap.

“Sounds like your phone’s going off,” he said. “You seemed a million miles away, but I wasn’t sure if that might be important.”

“You must have heard something else,” I told him. “I don’t have a phone on me.” I’d dropped my burner inside the house, and it had already been tagged for evidence.

But even as I finished saying it, an unmistakable ping sounded from somewhere inside my bag. I looked down and back up at the cop, totally confused. He just shrugged and left me alone.

I had to rummage through my usual collection of junk to find where that sound had come from. And there, at the very bottom of the bag, I found a silver Android phone I’d never seen before. It had a charger rubber-banded to it and a white bar on the screen that read 5 NEW MESSAGES.

What in the blue hell?

When the cop caught my eye in the rearview mirror, I wasn’t sure what to say. So I punted. “It’s my friend’s phone,” I told him. “I forgot I had it with me.”

But whoever had planted that Android there was no friend of mine. That much was clear. They must have dropped it in my bag while I was outside losing it at the sight of George’s murder.

I tapped the message bar with a shaking finger. It opened the phone right up without any unlock code and took me straight into the app.

The app. The one I’d been seeing everywhere I looked, ever since this case began.

And there, in