Victoria grabbed the hand holding the picture and reached for it. She pulled it from his fingers and worked her fingernail into the edge. A picture had been stuck to the back of the one he had been waving and when she saw it, she smiled. She showed it to him.
“Come on!” he yelled and they bolted toward the stairs.
Chapter 53
Luke’s cell phone went off. The music signaling he had a text message jarred him from his sleep and he sat up quickly, unsure of his surroundings. He had been dreaming and in it he and Ellie had been swimming in the pool with Jimmy and John. Nothing ominous or threatening in that simple act, yet the dream left him feeling disjointed and uncertain. It had been too happy considering all that was happening at the moment. His head still throbbed and he had a brief wave of dizziness as he reached for the phone on the nightstand.
The sender’s number was all zeroes and his heart skipped a few beats.
“Gotcha’ you bastard,” he whispered as he opened the text. It read simply, ‘Bring it, kid!’
Luke called John and Jimmy immediately and told them to get their butts over to his house. Worthington had just sent him a message. They were over in less than two minutes.
Luke was plugging his phone into the computer with a USB cable and loading the program up Bodey had e-mailed him when they both bounded in out of breath.
“What did he say?” Jimmy asked.
“He told me to ‘Bring it,’” Luke said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s all it takes,” Luke said grinning. “I don’t care if he texted me one letter. As long as I receive anything from him, we’ll know his new number. Watch.”
Luke hit a few keys like Bodey had instructed and the program went to work. A few seconds later a whole list of numbers filled the screen and John said, “Whoa! How do we know which is his?”
“Hold on,” Luke said, and clicked a button on the screen. The page changed and more numbers popped up, but an offset area displayed what he needed. He pointed to it and smiled.
“There he is.”
Jimmy and John moved in closer and just stared at the ten digits in awe. Luke wrote the number down and closed the program out opening the software they had used to track Worthington before. He input the cell phone number into the program and clicked ‘next.’ The screen that popped up was not what Luke expected and he felt deflated.
SEARCHING……..QUERY A13244997 EXECUTED……..UNABLE
TO LOCATE GEOSYNCHRONUS POSITION AT THIS TIME………
RESCAN AUTOMATICALLY EVERY 30 SECONDS?
“Shit!” Luke said.
“What does that mean?” Jimmy asked.
“I think it means the program can’t find the cell number. He must have the phone off. Dammit!”
John pointed to the screen. “It looks like it can keep scanning for it. See?”
Luke looked at the screen closer and saw it. He typed the letter ‘Y’ into the box and pressed enter and the screen changed.
AUTO SCAN ENABLED……….AUDIBLE NOTIFICATION WHEN FOUND?
Luke typed the letter ‘Y’ again and hit enter. The system would give some sound when it found the signal. Luke sat back and sighed.
“We wait?” Jimmy asked.
“All we can do,” Luke said, and stood up. “I need a drink. Anybody want a soda?”
They stood with him and went downstairs to the kitchen.
Chapter 54
As Jaxon ran through the house, Victoria shouted to him, “Jaxon! Wait!”
He stopped and turned. She was just outside the door to the basement and when she saw him look her way, she pointed to something he could not see. He walked back into the room and followed her finger. He hadn’t noticed it before. High up on the wall, mounted near the ceiling, a little grey box aimed its black lens down on them, its blinking red light mocking them. Jaxon walked up to it slowly and then reached up his hand and gave it the finger. He turned to her and said, “Let’s go!”
Slamming the front door open and running into the yard toward the car, Jaxon saw a group of teenagers huddled around his car. They were trying to pop the lock through the driver’s window. He didn’t even slow down. They saw him coming and two of them stepped away, but the one working the slim jim never faltered. Jaxon slowed as he got closer, but strode up to the one at the window and, without hesitating, drew the weapon Victoria had given him and pressed the muzzle against the kid’s temple.
“I appreciate you wanting to open the door for me, but I got it.” The kid raised his hands and backed away. Jaxon thought he was going to piss his pants. The other two looked about to help their buddy, but Victoria had her FBI credentials out and her weapon pointed directly at them.
“Don’t fucking move!” she said. They froze.
Jaxon shoved the kid out of the way, grabbed the slim jim from his window and threw it over the house as hard as he could. He beeped the locks with the remote and slipped into his seat at the same time as Victoria. He started the car and rolled down the window.
“Have a nice day,” and floored the accelerator, laying down rubber for a hundred yards. “Fuckers,” he said under his breath and Victoria chuckled.
“Their lucky day,” she said.
He nodded. The house they were speeding off to surprised them both, yet now that he knew Worthington’s next move, maybe it wasn’t such a surprise. The picture had been a shot of Jaxon and Victoria’s second house. The one they were in when their marriage ended, the bank taking it in foreclosure. The one Michael was killed in. It was the only picture that didn’t fit.
“He knows we’re onto him,” Victoria said, holding on tight as he took a sharp turn at high speed, the tires squealing in protest.
“He’s going to move her again, I know. We have to find a way to predict his next move.”
“He’s guiding us to exactly where he wants us. Are we going to let him lead us right into a trap?”
“At this point, we don’t have any other choice.”
“He’s always one step ahead. We have to find a way to cut him off.”
“I’m racking my brain, Vick! I’m not coming up with anything. Are you?”
She looked away angrily, “No. But he’s giving us easy stuff to use. Think about it. That picture was obvious.”
“We wouldn’t have seen it if you hadn’t peeled it from the other one.”
“But I don’t think he meant that to happen. I think it was random. I’m sure he planted that picture in there for us to find easily, but we almost missed it because it was stuck to the back of another picture.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’ve bitten on the easy bait. We’ve missed something that might give us an edge.”
He thought about this but could not put anything together in his head that made any sense. The pictures in the box were the only things associated with Worthington and Ellie in the whole house.
“What were the other pictures of?” he asked, grabbing onto the only thing he felt was important.
“Worthington and the Mrs. Family shots. Kids and first houses, and toys and cars.”
It made no sense. Who cares about Worthington’s old family memories. His hate for his wife made the sentimental value of the shots unimportant, so why were they in the basement?
“Were the pictures for Ellie?” Jaxon asked. “To make her see he’s not as bad a guy as she believes?”
“That doesn’t make sense. There were pictures with her mother crossed out of them. A big red ‘X’ right across her face.”
“We know he hates her. Does he want Ellie to hate her too?”
“They weren’t meant for Ellie,” she said. “They were meant for us.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Ellie would never hate her mother. He knows that. And the picture of our house was in there too. Those pictures are ours.”