Page 153 of Protecting Peyton

“What’s going on?” O’Connor asked when we returned.

Lucas ignored him. “Jordy, she got free and just called the main number here. Tell me where the call originated?”

“Leighton?” O’Connor asked.

“On it.” Jordy checked his watch, then his fingers flew across the keyboard.

“It’ll take forever to get a warrant,” O’Connor said.

Jordy raised his hand. “Got the call. It came from…”

The room filled with tension as we waited for an address.

“Be a landline, be a landline,” Jordy chanted. Then, he banged his fiston the table. “Shit, it was a cell phone and it’s not giving me GPS coordinates, probably inside a building. I won’t be able to get an exact address, but I can triangulate a rough location from the cell towers.”

“Do it,” Lucas commanded.

“How’d he do that?” the detective asked.

I ignored him, clenching and unclenching my fist. We were so close, but not close enough.

“What can we do without an address?” It was O’Connor again.

Jordy didn’t even look up from his laptop. “We can search cameras in the area to find her.”

“Forget that. We have to interview witnesses in the area,” O’Connor insisted.

Constance shook her head.

Jordy raised a fist. “Got it. Registered to Jian Chen.”

I looked straight at the Boston cop, anger boiling up. “No wonder you never caught this guy.” I shouldn’t have said it, but it was the fucking truth. Interviewing witnesses would take forever—time we didn’t have. That would virtually guarantee that the trail went cold.

“Fuck you,” O’Connor spat.

I worried that Lucas would come down on me for being so confrontational, but that thought disappeared when I caught the smirk Constance only partially hid. She agreed with me that the detective’s methods were shit. If she was on my side, things wouldn’t be that bad.

O’Connor slammed his fist down on the table. “You have no fucking idea how smart this guy is. I’ve been on this case for years. You have no idea how to go about catching a criminal.”

“Home address on Chen?” Lucas asked.

O’Connor was pissing me off. “Yeah, on the case for years, and you blew off Leighton, a real eyewitness who came forward,” I said. “That’s stupid police work.” Stupid was a kinder word than what I meant.

Jordy interrupted us. “He lives in Palos Verdes. I’m narrowing the search area. It’s north of here.”

O’Connor leveled a glare at me as his face turned beet red. “Fuck off. I’ve been on the force for nineteen years. How many years of police experience you got? I’m going to catch this guy.”

Constance was a law enforcement professional and it was clear what she thought of O’Connor when she silently shook her head again.

The ends of Lucas’s lips quirked up, then he turned to Jordy. “They couldn’t have made it to Palos Verdes this soon. Any other properties?”

“Fuck,” I roared back at O’Connor. “Catching the guy isn’t today’sgoal. We’re trying to save the victim here, your witness, and my woman. We have to use the quickest tool.”

O’Connor stood. “I don’t have to listen to this shit.”

“Sit your ass down.” Lucas’s words were cold and commanding.

The detective froze. “Feet on the ground close cases, not electronic crap.”