Obsessed (The Lizzy Gardner Series) (24 page)

CHAPTER 55

Hayley could feel somebody looking at her. Sure enough, Dog was sitting close by, staring her down. The vitamins the vet had told her to give him were actually working. His fur had grown in, covering the bald spots. She went to the kitchen. Dog followed her and then watched her prepare his meal.

“This is it—your last meal. Seriously.” She turned the can over to show the dog that it was empty. “Don’t worry, though; Kitally told me she found the perfect home for you. They have a big family. You’ll like hanging out with a bunch of kids. They’re not like Hudson, who just sits around and pets you. These kids like to run around outside and play tag all day long. You’ll probably fall over dead from happiness within the first fifteen minutes.”

The dog tilted his head.

I’m doing it. I’m talking to a dog.
She placed the dog dish in front of him and then found herself watching him eat. Lizzy was a pain in the ass. She was good, Hayley had to admit. She’d done it again . . . found a way to get her to keep the dog, make the animal matter to her. Fuck that. She would show Lizzy. The dog had to go.

As she rinsed the can out in the sink, she saw a car pull up to the curb.

Unbelievable.

It was the same guy she’d seen driving the Chrysler LeBaron, the man they’d chased after. She watched him look around before he climbed out of his vehicle and shut the door.

He was here in broad daylight and he was coming her way. That could only mean one thing and it wasn’t good.

She opened the cupboard next to the refrigerator, ran her hand over the top shelf until she felt her Glock and her Taser. She shoved the Taser in her back pocket and the gun in her waistband. Moving fast, she bent down and scooped up Dog. “Sorry, pooch. You’ll have to eat later.” She left everything else where it was. There wasn’t time to do much else. She hustled out the door, locked it, then jogged down the stairs and ran to the other side of the building. With the dog clutched to her body, she stopped to listen to the man’s footfalls as he trudged up the stairs. She heard him knock on the door.

The dog whimpered. She clamped a hand over Dog’s nose. After a moment she peeked around the side of the garage and saw the man picking the lock. He then pulled out his gun and walked inside.

Fueled by adrenaline, Hayley looked around the parking lot, saw the Dumpster and ran that way.

It was less than ten minutes before she heard him returning to his car. She couldn’t believe Brian would be stupid enough to send someone she would recognize. After all this time, he really was back? Did he think he could just kill her mother, hide out for a few years, and then come back to Sacramento like nothing had ever happened?

The door came open. Hayley was curled up tight in the backseat, hidden beneath some of the crap left in his car: an old sweatshirt, a pair of boots, a pile of fast-food wrappers. What was he doing? Had he seen her? Why wasn’t he closing the door?

Afraid he might be looking over his seat at her, she tried not to breathe.

A minute later, she felt movement as he climbed the rest of the way inside and shut the door.

It was now or never. In one swift movement, she rose and put the barrel of the gun to the back of his head. “Turn the ignition on and drive into the garage over there.”

He didn’t say a word. He just did as she told him. Once they were inside the garage, she said, “Turn off the ignition and throw the keys out the window.”

He looked in the rearview mirror, his gaze locking on hers. He dared to smile. “You’re not going to shoot me,” he said, his tone smug and all knowing.

“How did you know?” With her left hand, she got him with her Taser. The noise he made sounded like a whistle as his body convulsed. She gave him another jolt just to be sure before leaning over him and grabbing the keys.

Working fast, she climbed out of the car and shut the garage door. As she dragged him out of the car and toward the support beam in the middle of the garage, his head dropped hard against the floor. He was definitely going to feel that when he came to. She duct-taped his legs, arms and mouth so he wouldn’t be able to scream for help.

The ringing of her cell phone stopped her. The sound was coming from his pants pocket. The asshole had taken her cell from the apartment. She emptied all of his pockets: two of her best pocketknives, her cell phone, and two of Kitally’s Pop-Tarts, still wrapped. She grabbed an empty fast-food bag from the backseat of his car and put all of the items inside. She took his cell phone, too, then searched his car for weapons.

After using a combination of twine and rope to tie him to the beam, she locked and bolted the garage from the outside.

By the time Hayley climbed to the top of the Dumpster and looked inside, the dog had eaten half of the neighborhood’s leftovers. He looked up at her, his tail thumping against some cardboard as he quickly swallowed a wrapper from an old Whopper. She jumped in and got him out before he could eat any more crap. “That’s not good for you. You’re going to be sick.”

“What are you doing in there?”

Hayley looked over the edge. “Here, take the dog.”

Kitally took the animal, but quickly put him on the ground. “He stinks. That’s disgusting. Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t have enough money for food? I would have brought you something.”

“I don’t need food. It’s a long story.” Hayley climbed to the top of the bin, jumped to the ground. Dog followed her back to the apartment. So did Kitally. “Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

CHAPTER 56

Madeline was upstairs changing when she heard the doorbell. She prayed it was the police coming to tell her that they’d found Cindy or Megan—anyone. Cindy had already been missing for over twenty-four hours. Madeline’s nerves were shot. But when she peeked out the window, it was Debra Westlake’s car parked in front of her house. She grabbed a sweater and pulled it over her head before making her way downstairs.

The doorbell wouldn’t stop buzzing.

She prayed Debra had news about David. Although it didn’t make sense that she would come all this way to give her the news.

She looked through the peephole before opening the door.

Debra barged right in.

Madeline looked around outside before shutting the door and locking it.

Red in the face, Debra held a crumpled piece of paper in her trembling hands. She slammed the paper on the dining room table. “I want you to read this and then I want the truth.”

Madeline read the letter aloud. “ ‘Dear Debra, we have never met but I think you should know the truth about Dr. Blair. She had an affair with your husband’ ”—she was committed to reading the thing aloud now, but her throat was constricting nearly shut—“ ‘two days before you were married. In light of your husband’s disappearance, I thought it was important that you know the whole truth. Sincerely, Concerned.’ ”

Debra was pacing the room with her hands jammed into the pockets of her thick parka—back and forth, head down. When she realized Madeline had finished reading, she stopped and looked at her. “Is it true? Did you sleep with David two days before our wedding?”

“Debra, it wasn’t like that. We spent one night together long before you two ever met.”

“It’s written all over your face. You’re lying.”

“It’s the truth.”

“David would have told me if you two had slept together years before we met, but he never would have told me if it happened two days before we took our wedding vows.”

Madeline couldn’t believe this was happening. All this time had passed and nobody knew about their one night together. Nobody. “We had been drinking. We both regretted it the moment it was over. It never should have happened. We didn’t want it to ruin our friendship, so we put it behind us, pretended it never happened.”

Debra pulled out a gun and aimed it at Madeline’s chest. “You are a terrible person. You know that, don’t you?”

“What are you doing?”

Madeline’s phone began to ring in the other room.

“Stay right where you are,” Debra told her.

“Debra, whoever gave you that letter is the same person who’s been trying to discredit me.”

Debra groaned. “Oh, give me a break.”

“You don’t want to use that gun. What about your children?”

“Shut up and tell me what you did with David.”

Madeline tried to stay calm as she tried to think. “I swear to you, Debra, I don’t know where David is. I want to find him as badly as you do.”

“Are you still in love with him?”

How had it come to this? “I was never in love with David. We’re friends. That’s all we’ve ever been.”

“I truly don’t think you understand what you’ve done, Madeline. All of these years, it’s always been about you.
Madeline, Madeline, Madeline.
I’m so sick of hearing your name. You would do and say anything if it was to your benefit.”

“That’s not true. I’ve always thought of you and the girls as family.”

Debra let out a short, caustic laugh. “I don’t want to hear it. You’ve ruined my life and my children’s lives. You deserve to die.”

CHAPTER 57

Tommy, Hayley, and Kitally had been racking their brains for hours. According to his ID, the guy tied up in the garage below them went by the name of Frank Briggs.

Tommy was in the process of going through the contacts on Frank’s cell phone, writing down names and numbers, anything that might lead them to Brian.

“I’ve searched his car,” Hayley said. “There isn’t one damn thing in there that will help us find Brian, but the strange thing is that I think I’ve met this guy before.”

Tommy frowned. “Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No, that’s the weird part. But he was one of Mom’s drug connections, I’m sure of it.”

“I can’t find anything on Frank Briggs,” Kitally said. “It’s as if the guy doesn’t exist.”

“Shit,” Hayley blurted. “His name isn’t Frank.” She paced the room. “I remember him now. His real name is Pete.” She snapped her fingers. “Pete Lasko. Brian went to a lot of trouble to cover his tracks.”

“I would too if I were wanted for murder,” Tommy said.

“Whatever his name is,” Kitally said, “I don’t like having him beneath us. I feel like we’re sitting ducks.”

“I’m not letting him go until he tells me where Brian is,” Hayley said. “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

“We could put a GPS tracker on his car and let him go,” Tommy offered.

Hayley shook her head. “Too risky. There’s no way I’m letting him go at this point.”

“Let’s think about this,” Kitally said. “We need to know Brian’s whereabouts, plain and simple. So I suggest we take turns interrogating the man. I’ll go first since the asshole stole my Pop-Tarts.”

“I’ll go with you,” Hayley said. “I’ll stand outside the garage door and make sure nobody comes around. Don’t remove the tape from his mouth unless you turn up the music. There’s an old boom box inside the garage.”

For the next few hours, the three of them took turns trying to wear the man down, but he wouldn’t talk, even after listening to Kitally badger and threaten him with her machete for at least an hour straight.

Hayley went last. She would have shot the guy or given him the waterboard treatment if she thought it would mean getting a chance to see Brian face-to-face, but a gunshot would alert the neighbors and the last thing she needed was for the police to get involved.

Tommy looked up from his laptop when she walked through the door. “You think Frank/Pete came here to take you out?” he asked.

Hayley nodded. “I’m sure of it. As soon as I saw him pull up and climb out of his car, I knew he wasn’t here to beat me up. For some reason, Brian decided sending a message wasn’t enough . . . the ten-thousand-dollar reward must have scared him.”

“If that’s true, then I think we can assume Brian is going to be calling his boy sooner rather than later to see what happened.”

“That makes sense,” Hayley said. “So what do you have in mind?”

“When Brian calls, I can use information from a mobile infrastructure to track him down. We’ll also be able to listen in on his voice-mail messages and calls.”

“I don’t care who he’s talking to,” Hayley said. “I just need his location.”

“This is perfect,” Kitally chimed in. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it hours ago. There are a couple of ways we can handle this, but I suggest cell-tower triangulation.”

“How long would that take?” Hayley asked.

“Not long if we had a connection with Verizon or AT&T,” Tommy said.

Kitally smiled. “Ask and you shall receive. I’ve had access to both for years,” she said. “We’ll need to use the computer room at my parents’ home in El Dorado Hills.”

“It won’t work,” Tommy said, “unless we have access to MMC, MNC, and LAC codes, not to mention unique cell-tower ID.”

“Not a problem.”

“How close will you be able to track Brian?” Hayley asked, desperate to keep them on the
real
subject and away from technobabble.

“If Tommy is able to find the coordinates of the three closest towers, we can pin Brian’s location down to what side of the room he’s standing in.”

“Unless he has a decent cell phone jammer,” Tommy added.

It couldn’t be that easy. “What if his phone is turned off?”

Kitally shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We can still track him.”

“Won’t he know he’s being tracked?”

“Nope, his phone won’t even ring. Even if he’s on a call, there’s less than a ten percent chance he would hear something odd.”

“We could call his phone with a spoofed caller ID,” Kitally added. “If he doesn’t answer, we just enter his voice mail without a PIN—”

“How would you enter it without a PIN?”

“Just getting in to the point where it
asks
for the PIN is far enough.”

“Right,” Tommy chimed in. “It’s all about fundamental vulnerabilities in the way mobile providers interoperate over the GSM infrastructure. There’s a weakness in the cell phone network . . . it all has to do with how these companies connect. They literally reveal entire interfaces to one another, which leaves them exposed and open for attack.”

“It’s like attacking the Internet at router level,” Kitally said.

Tommy agreed.

Hayley was beginning to get a headache, but as long as they could get Brian’s exact location, she didn’t care if they talked like this all night. “What do we need to make this happen?”

“We need to get to the computers in my father’s data center.”

“Won’t your parents wonder what we’re up to?” Tommy asked.

“Nah,” Kitally said. “They’ll be thrilled I have new friends. Wait until you see this room. We have HD data projectors, servers, scanners—the equipment is sweet.”

Tommy looked at Hayley. “What do you think?”

“I think we need to make this happen before Brian discovers what we’re up to.”

“Once we find Brian’s location,” Kitally asked, “are we ready to go?”

“We have explosives, guns, and knives,” Tommy said. “But what we don’t have is manpower. Three of us, and who knows how many of them.”

“Hopefully we’ll be enough,” Hayley said. “Let’s do this.”