Page 66 of Billion-Dollar Ransom

NICKY TOOK IN every detail displayed on the camera feeds.

The military cot with the pancake-thin mattress and spare bedding.

The handcuffs. The gallon jugs of water.

The generator. The microwave oven hooked up to the generator.

The lantern. The box of industrial paper towels.

The open box of MREs. These either belonged to a squatter who happened to be a trained survivalist, or a kidnapper prepared to keep his hostage alive with the bare necessities for the next few days.

“Penney!” Nicky shouted into her mic. “Get some men into the garage to see if there’s still a vehicle inside.”

“After my men finish clearing the room,” Jeff said, sounding more than a little annoyed, mostly because Nicky’s wild-card tip had been correct. “They might still be down there.”

“Trust me, they’re not,” Nicky said. “Which is why you also need to get someone next door to talk to the neighbor, see what she heard or saw. I’m sure she’s been watching this whole thing play out.”

Jeff Penney grumbled but followed her orders and gave the commands.

Nicky watched as the garage door was lifted.

Flashlights revealed a black Audi very similar to one they’d caught on traffic cams in the area not long after Boo Schraeder’s abduction.

Beams of light focused on the car’s interior; there was no one inside.

Before Nicky even said anything, Hope ran the plate. A few seconds later, she told Nicky that it came up clean. Still, the Audi would be hauled to their garage to see if forensics could find any traces of Boo Schraeder inside.

The conversation with the next-door neighbor was fruitless.

No, she hadn’t seen anyone leave the house—just the holy hell of the SWAT team interrupting an otherwise quiet night on the block.

The noise distracted her from her favorite reality show, in fact, and no amount of reward money would cause her to rest easy now, not with all of this “ruckus.” (Never mind that this was the same busybody who’d called in the tip to begin with.)

“Oh, they were definitely here,” Jeff said to Nicky. She looked at his personal video feed and saw that Jeff was searching the room for anything Dowd might have left behind by mistake. “And they left not too long ago.”

“How do you know?”

“There’s food in the microwave. I stuck my finger in it. It’s still warm.”

“So they left in a hurry.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “Clearly somebody told that asshole Dowd we were on our way. Any idea who that somebody might be?”

Nicky said nothing, because she had a very good idea who that might be.

Michael Hardy wasn’t in the Sandbox right now, but he had access to everything the task force did, including the anonymous tip-line call.

And if Mike had let his ex-partner know about the SWAT team even a few minutes after the command to strike the house was given, Dowd would still have had plenty of time to slip away with his hostage.

“Gordon? You still with me?”

Nicky wasn’t about to share her suspicion with Jeff. “Yeah.”

“Perimeter is up,” Jeff continued, “but there’s a chance they’ve already slipped though. Very likely they made it to the freeway. And this time of night, they can move quick in any direction. Any bright ideas about where Dowd might be headed next?”

Nicky knew this was Jeff needling her, trying to save face.

But it wasn’t necessary. This would be considered her failure—that she hadn’t acted on the suggestion from the tip line fast enough.

Never mind that it took Jeff Penney longer to gather his team than she thought it should have.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, as Nicky’s boss John Scoleri liked to say.

“They had to have been on foot, at least at first,” Nicky said. “I want all your men scouring the neighborhood, and I’m going to call in reinforcements. We haven’t lost them yet.”

“You got it, Gordon,” Jeff said and hung up.

Nicky called up a map of that section of Culver City.

Right behind the row of houses on Briar was the campus of Culver City Middle School.

Nicky didn’t think Dowd would be foolish enough to hole up in a school, but he might have used the campus as a shortcut over to Sepulveda, in which case there might be footprints on the softball field or even signs of a stolen car on the campus—

“Agent Gordon,” said Hope, “I have Virgil Tighe on line one. He insists you’re going to want to take his call.”