Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(20)

“Shouldn’t the GPS signal be emitting from the building, then?” Gina countered. Wyatt liked the fact she argued. Tough part for any new officer, but particularly a new female officer, was speaking up. Clearly, Gina could hold her own.

“Range is give or take a hundred feet,” Jeff said. “So it could be from the building.”

Gina nodded, hooking her thumbs in her duty belt as she accepted his answer.

“So here’s the deal,” Wyatt spoke up. “We have three possibilities. We’re going to find a jacket. We’re going to find a jacket and some or all three members of the missing family, possibly alive or dead. Or, we’re going to find a jacket, a missing family and their kidnappers. Possibly up to four definitely living kidnappers. Which, if you include three family members, totals seven people at one site, with five of us to approach, control, contain. Let’s talk strategy.”

He looked at Kevin, the second detective, who had yet to speak. Kevin had taken some courses on workplace violence and hostage negotiations. They called him the Brain, not just because he was thin and bookish looking, but because he really did like to study. New legal rulings, new forensic techniques, new criminology reports, just ask Kevin. He also knew all the hockey stats for any given player on any given team in any given year. And, no, he could not get a date most Friday nights.

“Code one,” he suggested now. “Approach quiet, get the lay of the land. If the kidnappers are around, we don’t want to spook them.”

“So five patrol cars convening in one parking lot isn’t gonna work?” Wyatt asked with a droll smile.

“We can take two vehicles,” Jeff said. “Double up occupants.”

“Only gonna buy us so much,” Gina pointed out. “Even two cars, turning at the same time into a deserted parking lot…”

“One car could pull in, the other should drive past, heading south,” Kevin amended. “Once out of sight, that car can pull over and the officers hike back up. That gives us one car appearing to stop randomly—maybe a driver needing to check a map, stretch his legs, that sort of thing. Better yet, Gina should be in the car that pulls over. So it looks more like a couple pulling over than cops descending on a scene. Just till we know more.”

Made sense to Wyatt. One by one, they agreed.

“Vests?” he double-checked.

They were a good crew. They were prepared. Better yet, they were excited to get out there and do some good.

Wyatt grabbed the handheld GPS tracker. They booted it up, plugged in the coordinates.

And just like that they were ready to go.


WYATT HAD BEEN MARRIED ONCE. Stacey Kupeski. Beautiful girl. Great laugh. That’s what originally caught his attention. Literally, across the room in a crowded bar, he’d heard that laugh and just known he had to hear it more. They’d dated six months, then tied the knot. She owned a high-end boutique that specialized in fancy Western belts and glittery tops and lots of other bling women seemed to think they needed for big nights out. Being retail, Stacey worked holidays and weekends, which seemed a good fit for his job, given that criminal activity inevitably spiked during every major holiday, not to mention most lazy Sunday afternoons.

Except, that became the problem. She was working and he was working, their paths crossing basically on Monday night, when she’d want to go “do something” and he mostly wanted to varnish a piece of wood just so he could watch it dry. They made a go of it for eighteen months. Then she started going out and “doing something” with the husband of one of her best customers. That wife went crazy, trashed Stacey’s store, while the husband got a restraining order, and Wyatt got out of his marriage. Turned out, he only liked drama on the job, not in his personal life.

Besides, he found he wasn’t really that upset with Stacey, which struck him as not a good thing. If your wife was sleeping with some other guy, you should probably care. At least he and Stacey were still friends to this day. Mostly, because Wyatt still didn’t much care.

His only regret: He would’ve liked kids. Not with Stacey. Oh no, that would’ve been a disaster. But in an abstract gain-two-point-two-kids-but-not-an-ex-wife sort of way, he would’ve loved children. Boy, girl, didn’t really matter. Someone to build tree houses and toss a ball and just be with. Maybe a little version of himself he could teach a few things to before it inevitably grew into a teenage version of himself and passionately declared, You just don’t understand me! But even that would be good. A rite of passage. The way the world was meant to go round.

Not going to happen at his age, he figured, so he borrowed his friends’ kids, helping them build clocks and jewelry boxes and once, even a pirate’s chest. Good Saturday afternoon activities. Made the little ones proud to have made something with their own hands, and made him feel like he had something worth sharing other than investigative skills 101.

These days, his mom was trying to get him to adopt a dog. Maybe an older rescue animal. He had a good mojo for that kind of thing, she kept telling him, which seemed to imply that his current lifestyle was one step away from a monk’s.

Sometime soon, he’d go on a date. But first, he wanted to build that wine cabinet. And today, rescue a missing Boston family.

They’d reached the old diner. He and Gina had volunteered to be the turn-in vehicle. Not the biggest undercover operation in the world, given that even an unmarked police car screamed cop and they were both in uniform. Their hats were off for now, making them appear civilian at least from the shoulders up, as Wyatt casually slowed the car, put on the blinker.