Mac rubbed his eyes and checked his watch. It was 8:03 AM when he dropped Lich off. Mac agreed to pick him up in a couple of hours, and he powered up the window to keep the blazing heat out. Sometimes when storms blew through town, as they had the night before, a cool front would come in behind and bring some relief from the heat. This was not one of those times. Mac’s dashboard thermometer registered eighty-six degrees. It was going to be a miserable day.
Mac exhaled. There was a complicated plan in motion – a plan that was only partially executed, and they had no idea what was coming next. Furthermore, Mac worried that the kidnappers knew – had to know – that the police and FBI would be applying immense resources in search of the connection. The kidnappers either knew this and didn’t care, which Mac doubted was the case. Or they believed that the connection would be made, if ever, only after they were long gone, somewhere on the other side of the world, living off the ransom with new identities, never to be found. If the connection was that hard to find, the odds of making it were not in their favor.
Burton was worried about the timeline as well, so he was focusing on the money drop, figuring that might be their best chance. Having the money so close that the kidnappers could taste it might cause a mistake that the FBI and police could pounce on. The FBI man had the experience and the success, but Mac wasn’t so confident about catching the kidnappers when it came time to pay the ransom. Burton was good, no doubt, but they were up against someone with all the advantages at this point. And this was not a by-the-numbers case. The kidnappers were keeping them off balance and would be ready for the ransom drop. It wouldn’t be simple.
What bothered him the most was what was motivating the kidnappers. There was no reason to pick both Carrie Flanagan and Shannon Hisle other than to get at their fathers. This was as much about revenge or retribution – whatever you wanted to call it – as it was money.
Mac turned left and made his way to Berkley Avenue and halfway down he pulled up in front of Sally’s house. He snorted and shook his head. He always thought of it as her house, and she kept telling him he needed to think of it as theirs. Well, it might be “their” house, but she got the one-car garage, so he parked in the street.
Out of the Explorer, he stretched his arms, moved his head from side to side and yawned, the last day finally catching up with him. As he walked slowly up the driveway he ran everything through his mind again. He sat down on the back stoop and pinched the bridge of his nose. Another thing was beginning to gnaw at him. He didn’t feel like he or everyone else was really doing anything, pushing the investigation and beating the bushes, throwing out theories, doing what Lich liked to call “that investigative shit.”
Tired as he was, he could feel the time ticking away. He didn’t know what the clock was, but he was certain that they were way behind and that the time remaining was short. It was like being down by two touchdowns with less than two minutes to go, and the other team has the ball. Mac went inside and into the kitchen. He grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge and went back out to the stoop. Making a pull off the water, he closed his eyes and tried to think about what they had done thus far and what they needed to do. He took out his notebook and started jotting down notes about the case. In the center of a fresh sheet, he wrote down his three concerns, boiled down to three words: prepared, complicated, and motivated.
The door opened behind him and Sally, dressed for work, stepped out onto the stoop. She sat down, kissed him on the lips, and put her hand up the back of his shirt to scratch his back while he continued with his notes.
“Prepared, complicated, and motivated?” Sally asked.
“That’s what these guys are?”
He surrounded the three words with notes, thought, and names. He was tired, exhausted really, and needed sleep. But his mind was working a little now, churning, moving, and he wanted to get it down on paper, and then sleep on it for two hours. He would let it all roll around in his subconscious. Fifteen minutes later, his head hit the pillow with “prepared, complicated, and motivated” percolating in his mind.