Page 24

24

JACOB

It’s only eleven in the morning and I feel like I have been up for hours.

It feels like she’s been missing for days.

A year.

A whole fucking lifetime.

My blood pressure has reached peak levels. My pulse hasn’t stopped racing and I’ve gone into fight or flight. In fact, I am in pure fight mode.

And I won’t stop until we get her home.

After making phone call after phone call to get everything we need for the search party, I’ve arrived ahead of schedule to meet Walter, the infamous PI.

Being back in the coffee shop feels awful. Just being in the last place she was safe strangles the air from my lungs. The police informed us at the house there was no point sweeping for fingerprints, since all the tables had been sanitized before they closed last night.

While I’m waiting, I make the phone call I’ve been dreading.

It rings for ages and goes to voicemail. I try again. He still doesn’t pick up, so I leave a message.

Elbow on the table, I push my fingers into my eye sockets, wondering what the hell I’m supposed to say.

The beeps finish and I begin my message.

“Owen, it’s me. Jacob. I need you to call me as soon as possible. It’s about Skye. Your dad said he tried contacting you, too. Can you please call me?” I suppress my inner frustration. “It’s urgent.” With a heavy heart, I hang up.

“Jacob Baxter?”

A deep raspy voice startles the mental breakdown I’m currently having. Or maybe it’s a heart attack. I feel horrific.

Where is she?

I take Walter’s welcoming hand and shake it.

He sits down on the wooden chair opposite me, making it creak under the pressure of his weight.

I’m big.

He’s a giant.

A hairy motherfucker too.

Shoulder-length hair, a full bushy beard, and dark-as-coal eyes.

Walter places a laptop on the table and starts tapping away on his keyboard. “We are only staying here for a couple of minutes, then we will go to my car. Just be patient with me, Jacob.”

I don’t know what the hell he’s doing. But his enormous size and bear-like hands tell me not to question or mess with him.

My phone is blowing up. Never-ending swooshes and dings alert me to dozens of notifications, but I don’t bother looking. Skye’s mom said she would call as soon as she heard anything. That’s the only call I’m interested in, and this meeting with Walter is more important.

He pulls a bottle of water out of his backpack, hands it to me. “Drink.”

I look at him, confused.

“You’ve probably not eaten or drunk anything since you made your discovery this morning, am I right?”

Christ, he’s good. I down the bottle of water. I’m so thirsty.

I wonder if Skye has drunk anything since she was here yesterday, and a wave of sadness hits me like a tsunami. My body and mind are being pushed in so many different directions, I don’t know how I should be feeling.

I have never felt this level of devastation before.

It’s fucking awful.

Where is my beautiful Skye?

Is she safe?

Is she alive?

Walter coughs, pulling me from my thoughts. “Okay. We can go.” He pushes the chair back, making it screech across the tiled floor.

I follow him back to his blacked-out Range Rover Sport, and I hop in when he tells me to.

Once seated, he opens his laptop again and points at the screen. “Is this Skye?”

Fucking hell. It is.

Did he just hack into the security system at the coffee shop?

My beautiful girl looks so innocently unaware of what’s about to happen. How could any of us have known?

I stare at the screen, watching her smile every now and again. The smile I want to be part of every day. The smile I have yet to see today.

I let out a sound I’ve never heard myself make before as I clutch my chest.

Is this what heart failure feels like?

A sinking feeling turns my stomach as I watch her interaction with Jules, or whoever the fuck he is, knowing what comes next; she goes missing.

When she heads to the bathroom, two minutes later, I follow her into the women’s restrooms.

We both watch intently as Jules follows in the same direction. He hovers in the hallway outside, pretending to read the noticeboard, but every few seconds he eyes the bathroom door.

Walter changes the camera angle so we can get a better look.

A girl appears in the corridor, head back, laughing at whatever her friend, who slips off into the gents’ bathroom, says to her. She pushes the women’s restroom door open. Standing inside is Skye with her hand wrapped around my tie and we’re so close we look like we’re kissing.

The security camera shows Jules’ whole stance change as his body becomes rigid. He turns on his heels faster than a bolt of lightning.

Storming back to his seat, he snarls, his lips moving as he chants inaudible words through a tight jaw. “Go back to the other camera,” I say, pointing at the tiles of footage on the screen.

We watch as Jules throws himself back into his chair; fist clenched, he clicks his neck.

Walter zooms in on Jules and we watch as he pulls something out from his jacket pocket, leans over, and with what looks like a small white pill placed between his chubby fingers, he drops it into Skye’s coffee cup.

“He drugged her?” My heart splits open.

Walter stays quiet, watching everything while the footage keeps playing.

Jules picks up his phone, furiously scrolling, waiting for Skye to come back.

“Can you zoom in on just his phone screen?” I ask.

Walter taps a few buttons making the camera angle change again, where we witness him deleting his social media account.

“You’ve got yourself an obsessive stalker. Did you see his whole mood change when he saw you two together? You triggered him.”

The horror of Walter’s words whips through me in a flash. If he hadn’t seen us in the bathroom, would Skye be here, safe with me?

“I think I might be sick.”

“Not in my truck, please,” Walter says calmly. I swallow down the fear and guilt currently trying to break free from my body as I watch the camera zoom in on Jules’ face. At the click of a button, Walter runs it through a piece of software that automatically begins zooming through data at lightning speed. He then hits play on a different video. This time, it’s from the street outside. The one we’re currently parked on.

Barely keeping one foot in front of the other, Skye is being held up by Jules. Further down the street, he ushers her up the alleyway. The one we are sitting at the end of.

I look up out of the front car window. The CCTV is right above us.

Walter is smart as fuck and shit-hot with tech. I didn’t think hacking into the town’s security footage would be so easy.

I can barely look at the screen when Jules lifts her lifeless body into the back of his car.

“He’s a stupid motherfucker,” Walter mumbles.

“Why? I would say the opposite. He’s organized and seems to know what he’s doing.”

Without lifting his head, Walter points at the CCTV pole in front of us and then back at the screen, as if I’ve missed something obvious. “His number plate is right there. He’s an amateur and I can tell you now, this was unplanned. He’s considered it, planning it in the background for some time in the future, but he had no intention of taking her last night. He saw you with her, got jealous, panicked, and he didn’t want you to have her. He wanted her all to himself. He saw an opportunity and took it. All signs point to him never having done this before. That’s a good sign.”

“But he had drugs with him.”

“Practice run. Bringing a few things with him would make him feel prepared. He wanted to feel powerful, but he had no intention of using them. Knowing he could was enough. Seeing her with you made him escalate. But he wasn’t ready, and that’s making him sloppy.”

He looks me dead in the eye. “We’re going to get your girl back.”

“What, now?” I ask, not feeling as confident as Walter appears to be.

“Now I rally my team together. I’ll meet them at the office as soon as I leave here. We trace every step he made. There are CCTV cameras everywhere from here, right into the city, and all along the highways. My team is extremely experienced. We’ve got you covered, Jacob. I will make sure I do everything to get her back.”

“Quicker than the police?”

“You should have called me first. The whole context and circumstance of Skye’s disappearance tell us that she is the victim of a crime. Fucking twenty-four hours, my ass. I’ll find her. You have my word.”

All the hope that left my body earlier floods my skin. A huge wave of emotion hits me, making my eyes go blurry.

I shake my head to dry up my damp eyes, wiping my nose with the back of my shirt sleeve.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“Don’t be.” He squeezes my shoulder. Hard. Then he pulls his hands away and slams his laptop shut. “Now, we get to work. I’m running his photo through advanced facial recognition software as we speak. I’ll pick that up when I get to the office. My right- hand man, Tim, is coordinating with the team. When , not if , but when, we locate this guy, we’ll move in at night. It’s the only way. Don’t tell her parents I’m looking. Let them keep searching for her. When he sees them on the television, he will think he’s winning. He’ll probably get off on the attention. All his focus will be on the press and social media. He won’t expect what’s coming.” His grin takes an evil twist. “Me.”

I like this guy.

“How long?”

“You need to give me forty-eight hours. If I don’t have her back to you by then, I’ll give your father back his money.” He pushes his hands through his unruly hair.

Fuck me. That’s some serious confidence right there.

“We’re already further along than the police. I would hope to have her back to you sooner.”

Momentarily basking in his confidence, I believe him.

“We’re done. Keep your phone on, Jacob.”

My head bowed, I utter the words I never thought I would. “Will she be alive?”

“The first seventy-two hours are critical. He’s left a lot of breadcrumbs for us to follow, and you’ve given me lots of information, plus we have the CCTV footage. We know what he looks like and his car registration number. We’ll be able to pinpoint his exact location by tracing his website IP address. It doesn’t matter if he deleted it or his account he posted on her channel from; we’ll find it. I hire the best cyber hackers and engineers from all over the world. We’ve got this.”

That didn’t answer my question.

“Wait for my call. Eat something. It’s going to be a long night, maybe two.” He nods to the car door, giving me my cue to leave.

Not knowing when I’ll speak to him or if I will get my girl back safely, my fingers clamp around the door handle and I push the door open, stepping back out into the street.

Walking to my car, I take a moment to gather myself. I’m desperate to go to the town hall where the search parties are meeting up, but when I slide into the driver’s seat, I tip my head back and let out a long exhale. I need to contain the combined rage and sadness bubbling away in my gut.

I pull out my phone and try calling Owen again.

No reply.

Where the hell are you , Owen?