Defending Everly (Mountain Mercenaries, #5)(30)

Elise wanted out.

She wanted to go home.

To see Me-Maw and Pop again.

To talk to her sister over the internet.

All the things she’d thought were so terrible about her life didn’t seem so bad anymore. She’d spent so much time online, trying to feel normal. Online, she wasn’t deaf. She wasn’t the short redhead with a million freckles. She was whoever she wanted to be.

And Elise had loved the freedom all the chat rooms she’d participated in had given her. But she’d been stupid. Everly had warned her about some of the dangers on the internet, but she’d just thought her older sister was being overly protective.

Of course the people she was talking to were teenagers, like her.

Of course they were boys, not men.

Of course they were harmless.

Until they weren’t.

She’d been talking to Rob for months. She’d opened up to him regarding how she felt about her mother. About how lonely she felt most of the time. They’d talked for hours. It had been exciting

. . . and Elise had fallen in love with seventeen-year-old Rob.

But it was all a lie.

Every single word.

And she’d been stupid to agree to meet him.

She’d gotten into the innocuous white van with the man she’d never seen before simply because he’d said he was Rob’s dad and was going to take her to him.

So stupid.

There was no Rob.

Never had been. She was almost sure of it.

Just an old guy with scary black eyes, a guy who hurt her.

She didn’t think she had any more tears left, but they rolled down her face as if she hadn’t already cried herself sick again just hours ago.

She twisted the ring on her finger, the same one her sister had, and hoped like hell that Everly was as good at her job as Elise always thought she was. She knew things in real life didn’t work like they did on television, but she couldn’t help but pray that someone had found her purse. The man had turned off her phone and thrown the purse out the window almost as soon as he’d picked her up.

Hopefully, Everly would be able to hack into it and figure out what was going on.

But just as soon as she had the thought, her shoulders slumped.

She’d thought she’d been talking to a seventeen-year-old boy named Rob. Not this old guy. She wasn’t sure anything they’d talked about would help Everly find her now.

As the tears continued to roll down her face, Elise signed, I’m here. Please, someone find me.

Thirty-six hours later, Ball was beyond frustrated. Rex had been given permission to have Meat access Elise’s phone, but so far he wasn’t having much luck. He’d been able to get into the texts and phone-call log easily, but there wasn’t much there.

Elise did have the apps on her phone that Meat had found on her computer, but as he’d warned, many were geared toward anonymity, and in most cases, any communications were deleted as soon as the apps were closed.

An alarming thing that had been found was a tracking app. It looked like it had installed automatically when Elise opened a picture that had been sent through one of the apps. The picture was just a meme of a dog doing something silly, but as long as the picture was on her phone, she could be tracked.

Everly was nearly at the end of her rope, and Ball wasn’t sure what else he could do to distract her. They’d walked the entire journey from Me-Maw’s house to the gas station and back, several times, finding no new clues. It was looking more and more like Elise had gotten into a car with someone and disappeared into thin air.

Me-Maw had done their combined laundry last night, and when Everly wasn’t even fazed by it, Ball had realized she wasn’t doing well. Then she’d broken down and cried in his arms in bed later that evening—and Ball was done. Too much time had gone by with no leads. If Elise had gotten involved with a trafficking ring, soon she’d be buried so deep, they’d never find her.

“Come on,” he told Everly. She was sitting at the dining room table, staring blankly at her laptop, trying to think of something else to research. Someone else to contact. Some other reporter to beg to put her sister’s case on the six o’clock news. Unfortunately, teenagers disappearing in LA wasn’t exactly newsworthy.

“Where?” she asked.

“We’re going to the station to meet with Detective Ramirez again. We’ll go over his notes and see if we can glean anything new. Maybe by then, Rex will have something new for us. An address. A phone number. Something. ”

The spark of hope in her eyes killed him. Everly had been holding up extremely well, under the circumstances, as had her grandparents. But the strain was starting to get to them all. Ball hated that.

Everly gathered up her things without a word. She grabbed her purse and went into the living room to tell Me-Maw and Pop where they were going. Ball heard her telling them to call if they heard anything, and then she was next to him.

Without a word, they made their way to his rental car and headed for the police station. Every now and then, he looked over at Everly and saw that her head was turned and she was hyperaware of everything and everyone they passed.

After a while, she asked, “Should we go downtown and talk to some of the prostitutes? Bring Elise’s picture and see if they’ve seen her?”

Ball’s stomach clenched at the thought. “As a last resort, maybe. But you know as well as I do if she’s been taken for trafficking, they wouldn’t put her on the streets. Not at first. They’ll keep her under wraps until she’s beaten down psychologically, and they aren’t afraid she’ll run or alert anyone to her situation.”