hadn’t expected Camps to promise he would drop everything and set all his cops after Kira. But she hadn’t expected this open skepticism. She very rarely played the gender card. But she wondered if Camps would have treated her differently if she were a man.
“Here’s what we know,” she said. “We don’t have this guy’s name, phone, email, any contact info. He met her barely thirty-six hours ago. Now she’s gone. Maybe you don’t have enough kidnappings, murders, to know what those look like, superintendent, but in the good ol’ USA we do, so I’ll tell you. They look like this.”
“Come back tomorrow,” Camps said. “Tomorrow morning.” He nodded at the door, dismissed.
“That’s your answer?”
Rob Wilkerson clapped his hands on the legs of his suit. “CC. No one’s asking you to shut the Quarter. Just give her picture to your guys, call the hospitals for anyone who matches her description. Check the arrest logs. If the girl’s really gone you know the blowback’s gonna be huge. Americans think this city is safe. Let’s keep it that way.”
“Did you forget last month, Roberto—”
“Your beef with the Guardia has nothing to do with this.”
“You remember next time, you talk to me first.”
Wilkerson nodded.
“Fine,” Camps finally said. “As a courtesy. The hospitals, the other stations, the morgue.” He looked at Rebecca as he said the last word. “But if you hear from her, when you hear from her—”
“You’ll be our first call.”
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Wilkerson said to her afterward, outside the station. Tony and Brian were on their way to a print shop to make fliers. Rebecca was headed to the clubs she hadn’t hit the night before. “Last month I briefed the Spanish cops on some guys. One was hooked up with the independence movement, which I didn’t know. That made him a friend of the Mossos. They thought they deserved the first call. Camps and I talked about it, I thought it was done but obviously he didn’t agree.”
Rebecca didn’t know what to say. She hated this jurisdictional nonsense. She hated it even more now that it might be messing up a search for her own daughter.
“This gonna be a problem, Rob?”
“I don’t think so. Now that he’s taught me my lesson he’ll do what he said. He’s good. He’ll have answers from the hospitals and everywhere else by this afternoon.”
Rebecca wasn’t as confident.
“We’ll find her,” Wilkerson said. “She’s out there, Rebecca. Someone saw her. Someone remembers her. We’ll trace her phone.”
Yeah, right. Neither the Spanish cops nor the NSA would do anything to find her phone for at least another day. Then Rebecca realized what she should have hours before. Maybe they couldn’t trace the phone yet, but they could at least track Kira’s calls and texts. They didn’t need any technological tricks, either. All they had to do was log into their AT&T account.
For the first time in her life she was glad she was stuck paying her daughter’s phone bill.
17
Somewhere in Spain
Good news. Kira still had one bottle of water.
Bad news. They’d forgotten to feed her.
Good news. She wasn’t hungry. Fear was a great appetite suppressant.
So maybe good news all around, har-har. The Kidnap Diet. Get locked in a closet, watch those pounds vanish.
She figured it had to be afternoon. A line of sunlight leaked white through the narrow crease where the plywood was nailed to the window frame. Plus, the room had gotten hot. Uncomfortably hot. Sweat dripped down her back. Now, faintly, she heard the garage door wind open, chk-chk-chk. A minute later, maybe, the van rolled off. Had they left her alone? She waited. Counted up to two hundred, slowly, by twos. Then down to one hundred. Had to be at least five minutes.
The house was silent.
Her chance. If not to escape, at least to feel her way around her new home. Maybe she’d find a trapdoor back to Barcelona.
First the door. Just in case they were setting her up. She went to it. Slowly. On the balls of her feet. Listening. Hearing nothing but the occasional faint rush of traffic. Unless it was the wind. How could she know? Nobody had ever told her she’d need to learn to track noises. She was a city girl. Okay, suburban but—
Focus.
She found the doorknob. Turned it. It moved freely under her hand. But when she pulled and pushed the deadbolt gripped it firmly in place.
Okay, no surprise. An unlocked door would have been a Powerball long shot. She paced her fingers around the edge of