Already Taken (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

As they left the dilapidated office building, Laura rubbed a hand over her forehead in frustration. It had gotten dark while they were in there. It was getting later in the evening, and they still really had nothing.

Well, they had something. Two thousand names and counting. And she wasn’t sure there was any way to narrow down the list other than to start interviewing people who had attended and seeing if they knew anything or had alibis to rule them out. Even warning them to be safe was going to take days with the kind of manpower they had, and a television appeal at this point would just create mass panic.

“Are we going back to the inn now?” Agent Moore asked. “I spoke to them this morning and they said that they can provide dinner, but only until eleven. And it’s only cooked fresh until nine—after that, they just reheat whatever was left over from everyone else. We should try to get back before then.”

Laura sighed. It was late, yes, but she always hated giving up and going to bed for the night. Especially these days. The longer they stayed here, the more likely it was that she was going to miss her weekend visit with her daughter, Lacey, yet again. And there was so much at home that waited for her. She still needed to speak to Nate. She wanted to go on another date with Chris. She wanted to sleep in her own bed, not the strangely claustrophobia-inducing rooms of the inn.

She wanted to be home as soon as possible, and going to bed early—not that it was really early anymore—wouldn’t help that.

But on the other hand, she didn’t have a lot of options.

She was about to ask Agent Moore to take the wheel when she remembered the rookie’s story about only recently learning to drive and rethought the idea. “Can you make a few calls to the office back home while I drive?” she asked. “We need to get some extra eyes on this data. There’s no way the two of us are going to be able to get through all of those names on our own.”

“Sure,” Agent Moore agreed easily. “What do we need?”

“First thing we’re going to need is a way to transfer that data,” Laura said. “Shoot. I should have asked her to email me a copy of those printouts. Hold on, I’ll go back up—”

“It’s fine,” Agent Moore said. “I saw a fax machine in the inn’s back office.”

Laura thought about asking what Agent Moore had been doing in the back office, but she thought better of it. There was probably some kooky explanation involving her having grown up in a commune, and she didn’t have time for it. “Okay, great. We can get it back to them that way. You need to call up HQ and get the techs on board with some searches.”

“What are they looking for?”

Laura glanced over and saw Agent Moore was writing everything down in her notebook. “Anyone with a criminal record or a known history of mental illness,” she said. “We can at least start there. These attacks are brutal. I would guess that our perpetrator either has psychotic issues, or has done this before—maybe starting small with knife crimes or less violent attacks.”

“How do we want that sent back to us?”

“As emails,” Laura said immediately. “Name, address if known, and anything relevant about their history. Ask them to work on it through the night, if we can. That way we’ll have the data available when we wake up in the morning. First thing, by the way. I want to be able to hit the ground running as soon as possible.”

“What about just local attendees?” Agent Moore asked. “That way we could narrow it down a lot more.”

“Right, but we don’t really have enough data at this point to be sure the killer will stay local,” Laura said. “Or that he hasn’t traveled here from out of state, maybe using the convention as an excuse to scope out the area first time around. We can’t make a mistake by narrowing it down too quickly on faulty assumptions, no matter how tempting that may seem.”

“I’ll give them a call right now,” Agent Moore said, setting down her pen and picking up her cell phone.

Laura drove back to the little inn, a couple of hours away from the town they had ended up searching in, while she listened to Agent Moore making the calls. She chimed in a few times where it was needed, letting the younger woman know what details she had missed or which pieces of terminology she needed. Half her brain was focused on the road, and the other half on the conversation.

Well, most of the time.

Because every now and then she would drift out of paying attention and into thinking about her own life and the things that always came to the surface when she had a moment of breathing space from whatever case she was working on.

“That’s it for the night, then?” Agent Moore asked, as they pulled up outside the inn. “We’ll eat and then go to bed?”

“Yes,” Laura replied, though she wished she could skip the dinner part altogether. She had too many things on her mind, and her stomach was roiling when she thought about food. Mostly, she thought about the glass of wine that might easily accompany a nice meal. The glass of wine they would probably be offered.

She hoped she had the strength to turn it down.

Agent Moore went to get out of the car, and Laura made a quick motion that arrested her momentum. “Just keep your mind alert and ready for whatever might happen,” she said. “If we get a call that there’s been another body in the middle of the night, we’ll be getting up and rushing out to it. Don’t let yourself settle in too much—and definitely no alcohol with dinner. Right?”

“Right,” Agent Moore said, and Laura breathed a sigh of relief to herself. It was a bit deceitful, to pretend it was the rookie who needed to watch what she drank, but at least this would help Laura to stay on the straight and narrow as well.

“I’m going to my room to make a couple of personal calls,” Laura said. “I’ll see you down there in half an hour.”

Agent Moore nodded again, getting out of the car for real this time. She pushed the door shut behind her and soon disappeared inside the inn—a picture of countryside sweetness with rambling plants climbing trellises across red brickwork, and a porch set up with various tables and loungers for breakfast in the summers.

Laura looked away, got out of the car, and forced herself to head upstairs and do as she’d said she would. She wanted to talk to someone. To anyone, really, but to someone in particular.

Well, if she was honest with herself, she wanted to talk to Nate.

That wasn’t an option, though, was it? After the way they had left things, she didn’t know if he would even pick up. And if he did, he probably wouldn’t welcome her hounding him like that. He’d made it clear that he needed time and space. He needed to be away from her.

Even after she’d saved his life, and he knew it.

Laura shook her head in the solitude of her room. The stuffy furniture and fussy floral bedspread almost seemed to mock her. So domestic and rural and sweet; exactly the opposite of what she was.

She couldn’t stand it.

She picked up her phone and dialed Chris’s number without letting herself think about it too much, waiting impatiently for it to connect.

“Laura!” he exclaimed, sounding as if he had been waiting for her call all along. “How’s it going on your case?”

Laura closed her eyes and threw herself backwards onto the chintzy covers on the bed. “Honestly? Not great.”

“Oh, no,” Chris said, with what sounded like real feeling. “Is there anything I can help with?”

“Not really,” Laura sighed. Why had she even called him? Just to hear his voice, she supposed. “I’m not supposed to give any details on open cases to civilians, you understand.”

“Oh, I totally get it,” Chris said. “It’s like doctor-patient confidentiality. You can’t tell anyone the details until after it’s done, and maybe not even then. Don’t worry. I’ll never ask you for things you’re not allowed to tell.”

“Right, I guess it is pretty similar,” Laura said. That, in many ways, was a relief. Marcus, her ex-husband, had hated that she couldn’t talk to him about her cases. She took her job seriously, and she knew that any kind of information leak could result in a mistrial and see someone she’d worked hard on taking down go free. He’d swung between trying to get her to tell him all the juicy gossip about cases that ended up in the news and not caring about her job at all.

Chris, she already knew, was different.

“So, is there anything on your mind that you can say? You need to vent some frustration?” Chris asked.

Laura passed a hand over her eyes. It felt so good to be listened to. The same way the bed was supporting her tired and aching back from a long day of work, the way Chris listened to her eased the aches and pains in her mind. “Yeah, I’m just kind of stuck,” she said. “I’m not used to this. I always know what to do next, even if we haven’t gotten any results yet. There’s always another door to knock on. But right now, with this one, I’m stuck. I have way too much data and not enough people to go through it with me, and if we miss something, we could be stuck at square one for a really long time.”

Chris made a sympathetic noise. “All you can do is your best, Laura,” he said. “Can you ask for more resources from your boss?”

“I wish,” Laura said, stifling a huffed laugh. “The only reason I’m out here with a rookie in the first place is that there’s no one else. I should still be on leave, really. Or at least doing desk work. My boss just doesn’t have the bodies to send down here.”