Cindy Dees - Navy Seal Cop

“May I come in?”

“No. I don’t want you to disturb the crime scene.”

“Crime scene—” She rounded the corner to stand in the doorway and stared inside in dismay. “What happened? It looks like a tornado hit.”

“I’d say someone searched the place. Could Mr. Hubbard have done this, or was it likely an intruder?”

“He’s a slob, but he’s not this bad.”

“From where you’re standing, can you identify any of your employer’s possessions that are missing?”

She looked around helplessly. “I don’t know.”

“Okay. I’m coming out and I’ll seal the door until the crime scene guys can get over here and have a look at the place. I’m going to ask them to lift fingerprints and do an inventory of possessions. Maybe they can identify who did this. It’s likely whoever searched this place was involved in Mr. Hubbard’s disappearance.”

He jogged down to his car and brought back supplies. He pasted a red paper seal to the door and frame, so if anyone opened the door they would break the seal. Then he put a big yellow X of Crime Scene Do Not Cross tape over the entire entrance.

“I’m the only other person who lives in this building,” she commented after he was done. “You could have just told me not to go inside.”

Yes, but she was a suspect. He shrugged. “Gotta follow procedure.”

She walked him down to the street-level exit. He turned to face her and her eyes were big and dark with worry, and maybe fear.

His gut twisted at the sight of her looking so lost and vulnerable, and he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Try to get at least a little sleep. You will need stamina over the next few days if Mr. Hubbard has, indeed, been kidnapped.”

If possible, her eyes got even bigger and more worried looking.

“Call me if you hear anything at all tonight or if you remember something that might help me find your boss. Hell, call me if you’re scared and can’t sleep.”

She nodded doubtfully.

“Promise?”

“I guess.”

“Promise me,” he repeated. He was making a mistake, to press her like this. He was skirting dangerously close to forming a personal connection with her.

“All right. I promise.”

Why in the hell he’d felt compelled to extract that promise from her, he hadn’t the slightest idea. And frankly, he had no desire to examine the impulse any more closely. There was something about her that made him want to protect her.

Weird. He’d never lived to protect women before. In fact, the women he worked with—attached as support staff to his SEAL unit—were badass in the extreme and fully capable of protecting themselves. They would laugh their heads off at him going all protect-the-little-lady on a crime suspect. Even if she was both little and a lady.

He desperately hoped she was actually a damsel-in-distress. But he feared Carrie Price was simply a talented con artist. God knew, he had plenty of experience with those.

Chapter 3

Carrie tried to sleep, but every time she dozed off she dreamed of men in black whisking her away and carrying her down into darkness cold enough to freeze her lungs. She woke up gasping for air, so terrified she pulled the covers all the way over her head and cowered under the blankets, clutching her stuffed turtle close like she had when she was a frightened child.

As dawn crept around the flimsy curtains and the city outside her window began to wake, she gave up on sleeping. She called Gary’s phone, and when there was no answer, she went downstairs to check the seals on his door. Please be home. Please be home.

The red seal was still in place, the yellow crime scene tape undisturbed.

Damn.

Real dread for Gary’s safety roared through her, and her legs barely supported her weight as she fought the urge to cry. This was her fault. If she’d realized the abduction was real she could have run forward, fought the attackers. Two on two, Gary might have stood a chance of escaping.

Who was she kidding? She barely weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet and didn’t know the first thing about self-defense. And Gary was no spring chicken. Still. There had to have been something she could have done.

Heart heavy, she went upstairs and called the television show’s executive producer. It was barely 7:00 a.m. in New York and the guy didn’t pick up, so she left an urgent message that Gary was missing and appeared to have been kidnapped.

She played the videotape again, unable to watch it now without spotting that distinctive twist and lift move put on Gary’s hand behind his back. She couldn’t stop watching the tape. Over and over, she watched the black shapes appear, move in behind Gary, grab him, and rush away into the night. But no matter how many times she watched it, the outcome was the same. Gary was gone.

There had to be something useful she could do to find him or at least prove he was indeed missing.

Had he received threats he hadn’t told her about? He had seemed distracted ever since they’d arrived in New Orleans. But she had put it down to his obsession with finding his lost treasure and proving that the last governor of Louisiana had been no friend of Napoleon’s.

When critics lambasted him online for perpetrating a giant historical hoax, he’d muttered a few cryptic comments about having tangible proof this time. A few nights ago, when he’d come home late, more drunk than not, he’d even mumbled about being close to finding an incredible treasure while she’d taken off his shoes and tucked him into his bed.

What did you get yourself mixed up in, Gary?

She was choking down some dry toast when it belatedly dawned on her that Gary had put a duffel bag in their van yesterday as they’d left for the Pirate’s Alley shoot. She raced downstairs to the garage and threw open the back of the van.

Opening the drab olive canvas duffel, she spied Gary’s laptop sitting on top of a pile of his filming clothes—flowing artist’s smock shirts with open collars that he thought were appropriate for a master ghost hunter. Personally, she thought they made him look like an old hippie.

She grabbed the laptop and headed back upstairs to try to break into it. Detective LeBlanc might have told her to leave it alone, but she had to do something to find her boss. She couldn’t just sit back and wait for two days until the police got around to declaring him missing.

A computer hacker she was not. However, she knew Gary pretty well, and she doubted he was the kind of guy to get too creative with his passwords. How hard could it be to figure it out? She tried a dozen combinations of his birthday, address, and the name of his childhood pet, a mangy mutt he still talked about, forty years later.

Not that she could fault him for over-loving his dog. Her best friend, Shelly Baker, had often declared that the only reason she didn’t kill herself was because her cat would miss her too much. If a pet was a kid’s reason to live and sole source of love, Carrie supposed that was better than no love at all.

Her own parents and her older brother had been okay. They’d been average people with average expectations of her. As long as she passed her classes and didn’t get into trouble, they didn’t pay much attention to her comings and goings.

She’d tried to talk to them about Shelly when things had started getting bad at her friend’s house, but they’d told her to keep her nose out of it and that how Shelly’s mom and stepdad raised her wasn’t anyone else’s business.

She added Gary’s agent’s name to the mix of possible password combinations, and on about the sixth try, his computer popped open.

Yaaasss! She fist pumped the air.

The past several days’ worth of emails didn’t yield anything that screamed of threats from a potential kidnapper. Gary got several hundred emails a day, though, and it was going to take a while to read through his entire backlog of emails and deleted messages.