Delores Fossen - Nate

Dade looked at Nate when he answered. “This was probably the van initially used in the kidnapping, but the children and Marlene were transferred to another vehicle. Maybe they were even split up since at least two other vans were seen around town.”

Nate had already come to that conclusion, and it made him sick to his stomach. He couldn’t choke back the groan. Nor could he fight back the overwhelming sense of fear.

“If they split up, then there are probably more than two of them,” Nate mumbled.

That meant things had gone from bad to worse. The kidnappers could have an entire team of people helping them, and heaven knows what kind of vehicle they had used to transfer the children.

Nate was betting it wasn’t a black van.

It could have been any kind of vehicle. Darcy and he could have driven right past the damn thing and wouldn’t have even noticed it.

“We have people out on the roads,” Dade reminded them. “More are coming in. And there’s an Amber Alert and an APB out on the van. SAPD and all other law-enforcement officers in the area will stop any van matching the description. We’ll find them, Nate. I swear, we’ll find them.”

Nate checked his watch. About twenty minutes had passed. That was a lifetime in a situation like this. The kidnappers could already have reached the interstate.

“I’ll take you back to the sheriff’s office,” Dade insisted. He glanced down at Darcy. In addition to the nicks on her face, her jacket was torn, and there were signs of a bruise on her knee. “You need to see a medic.”

“No!” she practically shouted. “I need to find my baby.”

But the emotional outburst apparently drained her because the tears came, and Nate hooked his arm around her waist. He didn’t feel much like comforting her, or anyone else, for that matter, but the sad truth was there was only one person who knew exactly how he felt.

And that was Darcy.

She sagged against him and dropped her head on his shoulder. “We have to keep looking,” she begged.

“We will.” Nate looked at his brother. “We need another vehicle. And I need to call the San Antonio crime lab so they can come out and collect this van.” Silver Creek didn’t have the CSI capabilities that SAPD did, and Nate wanted as many people on this as possible.

Nate adjusted Darcy’s position so he could get her moving to Dade’s truck, but he stopped when he took another look at the scrawled letters written in yellow crayon. He eased away from Darcy and walked closer.

“You think Marlene wrote that?” Dade asked.

Nate nodded. “She might have tried to leave us a message.” He studied those three letters. “L-A-R,” he read aloud.

“Lar?” Dade shook his head, obviously trying to figure it out, too.

“Maybe it’s someone’s initials,” Darcy suggested. She moved between Dade and Nate, and leaned in. “Maybe she’s trying to tell us the identity of the person who took her.”

It was possible. Of course, that would mean it wasn’t Wesley Dent, and it would also mean Marlene had known her kidnapper. That possibility tightened the knot in Nate’s stomach. But there was something more here.

Something familiar.

Dade rattled off names of people who might fit those initials. He only managed two—an elderly couple with the last name of Reeves. Nate figured neither was capable of this. But his own surname began with an R.

Did that mean anything?

“A street name, then,” Darcy pressed.

Dade lifted his phone and snapped a picture. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll try to work it out on the drive back to the sheriff’s office.”

It was a good plan, but Nate couldn’t take his attention off those three letters. They were familiar, something right on the tip of his tongue.

“Let’s go,” Darcy urged. She tugged on Nate’s arm to get him moving.

They only made it a few steps before Nate heard a phone ring. Not Dade’s. The sound was coming from his wrecked car, and it was his phone. He hurried toward it, but it stopped ringing just as he got there. He located his cell in the rubble and saw the missed call.

The number and caller’s identity had been blocked.

Hell. It had probably been the kidnappers. “It could have been the ransom call.”

“Try to call them back,” Darcy insisted. But the words had hardly left her mouth when another phone rang. “That’s my cell.” She frantically tore through the debris to locate her purse. She jerked out the phone and jabbed the button to answer it.

She pressed the phone to her ear, obviously listening, but she didn’t say a word. When the color drained from her face, Nate moved closer.

“But—” That was all she managed to say.

Nate wanted the call on speaker so he could hear, but he couldn’t risk trying to press any buttons on her phone. He darn sure didn’t want to disconnect the call. All he could do was wait.

“I want my son. Give me back my son!” she shouted. The tears welled up in her eyes and quickly began to spill down her cheeks. Several seconds later, Darcy’s hand went limp, the phone dropping away from her ear.

Nate snatched the phone from her, but the call had already ended.

“Who was it and what did they say?” Nate demanded. He caught her by the shoulders and positioned her so that it forced eye contact.

She groaned and shook her head. “The person had a mechanical voice, like he was speaking through some kind of machine, but I think it was a man. He said he had the children and Marlene and that if we wanted them back, he would soon be in touch. Then he hung up.”

“That’s it? That’s all he said?” Nate tried to calm down but couldn’t. “He didn’t say if the kids were safe?”

“No,” she insisted.

Nate took her phone. He tried the return-call function on his cell first. It didn’t go through. Instead he got a recording about the number no longer being in service. The same thing happened when he tried to retrieve the call from Darcy’s phone.

A dead end.

But maybe it was just a temporary one.

Dade gathered both cells. “I’ll see if we can get anything about the caller from these. Darcy, you need to write down everything you can remember from that conversation because each word could be important.”

She nodded and smeared the tears from her cheeks. “Let’s get that other vehicle so we can look for them.”

Nate agreed, but he stopped and stared at the three letters written on the door of the van.

LAR.

“I already have a picture of it,” Dade reminded him. “You can study it later.”

Nate cursed. “I don’t need to study it.” He started to run toward Nate’s truck. “I know what Marlene is trying to tell us. I know where we can find the children.”

“LAR,” Darcy said under her breath.

Lost Appaloosa Ranch.

Well, maybe that’s what the initials meant. Of course, Nate could be wrong, and it could turn out to be a wild-goose chase. A chase that could cost them critical time because it tied up manpower that could be directed somewhere other than the remote abandoned ranch. According to Nate, the owner had died nearly a year ago, and his mortgage lender was still trying to contact his next of kin.

“Hurry,” Darcy told the medic again. And yes, she glared at him. She’d spent nearly fifteen minutes in the Silver Creek sheriff’s office, and that was fifteen minutes too long.

Darcy didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be out looking for Noah, but instead here she was, sitting at the sheriff’s desk while a medic stitched her up. God knows how she’d gotten the cut right on her hairline, and she didn’t care.

She didn’t care about anything but her son.