Page 60 of Waiting For A Girl Like You (Haven House #4)

H e couldn’t listen to them.

The chatter. The noise. Annabeth’s crying. Ben’s rage. Rowan couldn’t listen to them. He needed to be in his own head, deciphering the information on his screen.

They’d let their guard down. Caught up in the excitement, they had let their guard down, and now they were paying the price. He should have stayed at the house to track Madison. That should’ve been his top priority, but he stupidly believed the feds could handle it for a few hours.

There would be time to hate himself later. Right now, they had to find Jamison.

“We have a visual on the van,” Klausen was telling Ben. “It’s heading west and into Louisiana.”

West.

No.

That’s not what the data said. He’d traced the call. He wasn’t wrong. Arkansas. Sinclair had been in northern Arkansas. A red herring, maybe, but Rowan trusted the information.

Setting his laptop aside, he moved to the corner of the waiting room to call Liam. “They’re saying the van is headed west.”

“Tell them about the airstrip.”

Rowan had given Jamison and the others five minutes to reach the bathroom, use it, and return.

He watched them on the security feed as they crossed through the double doors.

The cameras in that particular hall had been dead and not in use, so by the time he hacked into the system and activated them, it was too late.

And it was his fault.

Once the camera feed powered up to reveal Carter face down on the floor, it took less than a second for the image to register, but when it did, Rowan sounded the alarm, running as fast as he could while shouting for Liam.

After that, it was a blur of insanity. Trusting someone else would help Carter, he and Liam had searched for Jamison on the abandoned hospital floor and, in the process, caught sight of her through a long panel of exterior windows as she was being hauled into a van with three other people.

One of which was a laughing Taylor.

Taylor was one of them. Zanmi. And she was as good as dead now. Ben would see to it. Her family. Her friends. No one connected to her would ever know peace. Once Jamison was found, Rowan wouldn’t be surprised if Ben himself didn’t murder the woman with his bare hands.

Assuming he didn’t take out a federal agent or two first.

“A visual on the van?” Ben snarled. “Then get my daughter the fuck out of it.”

Klausen glanced around at the other agents. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why the hell is it not that simple?”

Guns.

Bombs.

A hostage situation.

Klausen ran through the possibilities. Ben had already been forced both physically by agents and verbally by Simone to stay put at the hospital, but hearing how a rescue could go down had him heading for the door again.

This time, it was Bernie who blocked him from leaving. “Wait for Will. Let him go with you.”

No one would be able to keep Ben from going after his daughter. The fact that Simone had persuaded him to wait was a miracle, but with each passing minute, Ben’s need to find her ripped away at his rational thought. He wasn’t nearly as calm and collected as Liam.

“Rowan,” Liam shouted his name through the phone. “Did you fucking tell them about the airstrip? ”

So maybe Liam wasn’t exactly calm. When he saw Jamison limp in Bruce’s arms, he lost his shit. Finding the first set of stairs, they stormed down to the ground floor and out into the parking lot just as the van carrying Jamison sped away.

Liam had already pulled his gun out to commandeer the first passing car, scaring the shit out of the woman who was now in the hall screaming at anyone she thought might have the authority to get her vehicle back.

“I told Klausen.”

While tracking Liam as he chased after Jamison, an abandoned landing strip on the Florida-Alabama line caught Rowan’s attention.

Liam had been close to it when he’d lost visual on the van, and, for whatever reason, something told Rowan to guide Liam to the landing strip.

The place had been empty, but the fresh tire tracks on the single dirt road leading to it hadn’t sat right with either of them.

“Eureka.”

Rowan frowned. “What?”

“Bruce said Eureka.” Liam paused for a handful of seconds. “In the cabin. Right before he winged me, he said Eureka.”

Turning around, Rowan faced the wall to focus, leaving the room's chaos at his back. “I’m not following.”

There was a sigh and a muttered curse from Liam. “I promised Killian I wouldn’t drag you deeper into this, so I didn’t tell anyone but my dad.”

“Still not following.”

“When Sinclair called, you tracked him to northern Arkansas.”

Rowan had been so close to finding the fucker, probably closer than he’d ever been, and was again cursing himself for not staying behind at the house to finish the job. “Okay?”

Liam let out a distorted laugh. “There’s a haunted hotel in northern Arkansas. Jamison’s wanted to go for years, but I always said that if she wanted to stay somewhere haunted, she should just pitch a tent in Haven’s woods.”

Oh, fuck. Liam was freaking out. Even when things were at their worst, Liam Cohen held his shit together.

When Zanmi first tried to kidnap Jamison, and they thought she might be in some way connected to Sinclair, he kept calm.

When those women charged into the house, he never allowed his emotions to get the better of him .

But now he was choking on them. Panic and strain clung to his words, and were the roles reversed, Rowan didn’t think he would be doing much better.

“The hotel is in a town called Eureka Springs. It’s crazy, but it makes fucking sense, doesn’t it?” Liam cleared his throat, trying to keep his voice steady. “Sinclair warned us about Evie, and if it really is CeCe that connects him to this, I think… I think Bruce was giving us a clue.”

It was a stretch. A massive Grand Canyon of a stretch. “Are you sure you’re thinking clearly? That theory is a gamble. If you’re not going after that van and heading north to follow a hunch, you could be putting Jamison at risk.”

“Anderson and Klausen already have a dozen agents on that van, and my dad will handle that.” Liam cursed as horns blared in the background.

“I was distracted, Rowan. Madison distracted me when I entered Emmett’s shack, and Bruce could have easily dropped me, but he didn’t. He said Eureka and grazed my arm.”

“Liam—”

“No, dammit, listen!” Liam shouted. “My woman is not in that van. I feel it in my fucking bones. She’s not there. She’s in Arkansas, or she will be. I’m not wasting time on a lead someone else can chase while I ignore what my gut is screaming.”

Ben came around to see what was happening, glaring at Rowan as Simone crowded his other side.

“Okay,” Rowan spoke evenly so as not to scare Ben or Simone. “Tell me what you need.”

“Private airstrips,” Liam exhaled. “I want a full list of all the private airstrips in northern Arkansas, starting with those closest to Eureka Springs.”

“You’ll have it in ten minutes.”

He hung up, moving around Simone to sit with his laptop while he waited for the barrage of questions to hit.

Simone was first. “What will he have in ten minutes?”

Ben didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Is he going after the van?”

“Sweetheart, I want you to write this information down for me,” Rowan addressed Annabeth first. She needed something to do. A quietness had come over her, and he had to keep her focused. “Do you have something to write with? ”

“Um, yes.” Annabeth snatched a scrap of paper and a pen from her purse with a small tremor in her hands. “What is it?”

Will swept into the room, cutting through cops and agents. “They’ve got the van in sight and are on approach. I’ll call Liam, and he can meet us.”

“Liam isn’t going after the van.” Rowan began pulling everything he could.

Commercial, private, and even the airstrips hidden from the public.

Long patches of grass that were kept maintained for a variety of reasons.

“Annabeth, I’m going to give you the names of possible landing spots, and I need you to write them down for Liam. ”

Will dropped into a chair across from him. “Talk, Rowan.”

“When Liam lost visual on the van, he was north of here.” Rowan cracked his knuckles as the list began to populate. There were so many possibilities. “Past the Florida-Alabama border and in a rural area with a private landing strip. It wasn’t much, but enough to land a small passenger plane.”

Will grumbled, working through his thoughts. “But then the van shows up west of where he’s searching.”

“Silver Wings Field,” Rowan told Annabeth. “Trigger Gap Airstrip. Circle Farms Airstrip.”

Annabeth wrote as fast as she could. “How long does it take to drive to Arkansas?”

Sparing a glance at the GPS in the corner of his screen, he noted Liam’s location. Hauling ass through the state of Alabama, he was already nearing Birmingham. “About nine hours.”

“Let me recall the jets to get him there.” Ben sat next to Will. “The plane can meet him at a halfway point.”

“That would eat up more time.” Rowan shook his head. “Taking a plane should be faster, but if we calculate how long it takes to recall the jets, fuel up, get the pilots in… we’d be wasting hours.”

Holden pushed through the crowd of agents.

“Evie is in a room. She’s good. Albie’s good.

Samuel’s calming down. Josie and the girls are with them.

Izzy’s at the door with agents and Abe. Carter is being seen by a nurse.

He’s coming around and shouting for Liam.

He heard some of what went down before they knocked him out. ”

Having been locked in with the Fairweathers these last few weeks, Holden had learned how important it was to get as much concise information out in one go.

“Evie and Samuel don’t know what’s happening.

I told them that no one is in there seeing Albie because you guys wanted to give them a private moment with the girls and Josie. ”

“Thank you, Holden.” Ben ran a hand through this hair, musing it even more. “So, which way do we go? North or west?”