No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7)(26)

I shook those thoughts from my head. There was no indication that something bad had happened to Kylie. Not yet anyway.

I went through the desk first, hoping to find a journal or calendar. From the third drawer I pulled out another notebook. Inside was nothing more than a school assignments list, with most of the notebook pages blank. I pulled out a syllabus from a pocket and a small piece of folded paper fluttered to the ground. I opened it and found a visitor’s pass made out to Kylie Hale for RAF Molesworth. The escort name was TSgt Nicholas Seacrest of the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre, with the destination being some pizza joint on the post.

What on earth would she be doing at a British air base? How good could that pizza be?

I put the pass away and turned on the Mac, logging in and going straight to her social media. There were a ton of new posts to her Facebook page, but no comments or posts by her since she’d disappeared. I opened her private messages, feeling a little slimy. I went through them as fast as possible, not wanting to pry, scanning the initial sentences and moving on. I found nothing of interest. The same for her Twitter feed. Just innocuous posts about college life.

I moved on to Instagram and found nothing on her public profile. I went to direct messages and finally got a hit. A picture of a man’s hand pointing to a brochure for some place called the Eagle, with a time and date written in blue ink on the border. The date was the day she disappeared. The caption said, Shhh . . . loose lips sink ships. I clicked on the profile that had sent it, someone called StNick762, but it went to a dead link. I hollered out of the room, “Blair, could you come here?”

Jennifer entered first, saying, “What did you find?”

I showed her the visitor’s pass, then the Instagram picture, saying, “The profile is deleted.”

Blair came in and I showed her the pass, asking, “Is this close by?”

“Well, the town of Molesworth is about twenty minutes away. I don’t know anything about the military bases, though.”

“Why would Kylie go there?”

“I have no idea. She certainly couldn’t have ridden her bike there, and we don’t have a car.”

I looked at Jennifer, frustrated at the lack of answers.

She pointed at the screen and the Instagram picture, saying, “How about this? Do you know where it is?”

Blair took one look and smiled. “Oh yeah, it’s a historical landmark. And it’s right near where she left my bike.”






17




Kylie felt a cold draft sink from the window, breaking through her small bit of warmth and causing her to glare at it in frustration. Their cellar prison was constantly frigid, with only sparse woolen blankets provided to keep them from going into hypothermia. When nighttime came, the cold of their subterranean cell increased, the dampness seeping into her bones and preventing sleep. Her only moment of warmth came when she was allowed out to use the bathroom. Just breaking the door at the top of the stairs provided a welcome blast of heat, and using the toilet allowed her to sit in relative luxury for a scant few minutes, but now the small window was robbing her of her only pleasure.

It was tiny, really a slat more than a viewing pane, maybe ten inches high and two feet wide, and looked as if it was shut tight, but the outside air was leaking through. She stood on the toilet, awkwardly pulling herself up with her tied hands until she was level with the bottom of the pane. She saw that it cranked outward, opened by a small lever—and it was cracked just a smidgen. She rotated the handle, cinching the wood tightly into the frame and sealing out the draft. She stood for a moment and looked through the pane at the freedom beyond. She saw a bed of gravel just below the sill and a concrete wall eight feet away. The window was only six inches above the ground.

Her guard threw a fist against the door, scaring the life out of her. She collapsed back into a sitting position on the toilet, her pants still fastened, saying, “I’m almost done. Please. Another few seconds.”

The man grunted something but didn’t open the door. She sat for a moment longer, then flushed. The noise brought the guard in, the man clamping down on her flex-tied wrists and leading her back into the hallway. She glanced back at the window, an impossible, lunatic thought flitting through her head.

Back in the cellar darkness, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the small glow escaping from the door at the top of the stairs. They no longer had to wear the hoods at all times, but the basement was still as black as pitch, the edges of the door providing no more illumination than a slice of the moon in a forest.

She whispered, “Nick?”

“Yeah, I’m here. You okay?”

“Yes. I’m fine. I see it didn’t warm up while I was gone.”

Nick chuckled and said, “But you got the heat of the toilet, right?”

The comment brought a smidgen of shame, as she was the only one allowed the luxury of a toilet. The men were forced to use a bucket in the corner, which would have been bad enough, but she’d told Nick about the warmth. About the brief respite from the dungeon they were in.

He sensed the pause and said, “Kylie, I was kidding. Don’t feel bad about what you get in relation to us. Use it.”

She said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I think I can get out of the window in the bathroom. It’s so small they don’t bother locking it because no man could get through it, but I think I can fit.”