Page 36 of Tangled With You
“You know it.”
Brax turned toward the door, then paused, looking at Trevorover his shoulder. “Ollie already knows it as an agent, but remind him asCourtney’s friend that a slow start like this doesn’t mean we won’t find her.It just means we’re eliminating the bad choices early on.”
“I will,” Trevor said. “But thanks for the reminder.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes it’s hard to remember that Ollie is avictim here, too.” Brax’s shoulders rose and fell, his expression haunted “Iknow a little bit about that.”
“I’m sorry,” Trevor said, remembering reading in Brax’s filethat he’d seen his girlfriend murdered. It seemed as if everyone on the teamhad stared into Hell at one time or another.
He hurried downstairs to dive into work and checked in withLiam first. “We’re chugging along. Interviewing everyone significant in herlife, and a few select insignificants, too. We’ve gota team on that. A team looking at her banking and credit card statements. Shetook a vacation about a month ago—one of those all-inclusive islands. Denny’sworking with the folks in Mexico. You can see it all in the night report.”
“Good work.”
“Still nothing on tracking the car,” he added. “We’rerunning through permutations for the plate, but that’s going to take time evenwith access to Stark’s servers.”
“Have we been searching the street traffic?”
“Sure,” Liam said. “Time-coordinated footage of LaurelCanyon and Ventura. No sign of a car with a plate sporting those initialletters.”
Dammit. It made no sense. “Okay. Keep at it. Maybea shadow. Or blocked by another car. Maybe it turned —”
He cut himself off, tilting his head to one side as he triedto will the idea to manifest. It was right there—and it was brilliant, if hedid say so himself.
“The parking lot,” he said. “What if it was always in theparking lot?”
“I’m not following.”
“We’ve been assuming the captor’s car turned in off ofLaurel. But what if it actually came from the opposite end of the parking lot,way down at the end?”
In a land of parallel street parking, this free parking lotlocated behind the grocery store and the various shared-wall retailers thatlined Ventura Boulevard was an oasis. One section was dedicated to the Von’s,but the rest was for the retailers.
And there were a shit ton of parking spaces back there.
Trevor could picture what had happened, and he laid it out forLiam. The perp had parked in the lot and waited. Then he’d driven through thelot toward Laurel Canyon, made a U-turn in the lot rather than turning onto thestreet, then eased in the opposite direction, heading back in the directionhe’d come from—and also toward Courtney.
From the camera’s perspective, though, it appeared that he’dentered the lot from the Laurel Canyon entrance only moments before Courtneywas abducted.
“Smart son-of-a-bitch,” Trevor said.
“We haven’t proved it yet,” Liam pointed out.
“We will.” He gave his friend’s back a friendly pat. “Pullvideo from the far end of the parking lot. Find me when you have it.”
“You got it,” Liam said, as Trevor moved on to check in withthe rest of his people, all of whom were working their tails off to findCourtney. It was a good team, made up of some of the top-notch operatives inthe country. They were smart, well-trained, and tireless.
And they still had next to nothing.
With a sigh, Trevor rubbed his temples. Soon, hethought. Something would break soon.
In the meantime, he’d go find Ollie and give him an update,especially on the license plate and his parking lot theory. With any luck,they’d have registration information within the hour.
Since Ollie wasn’t downstairs with the team, he assumed hewas on the third floor snagging a latte, but he wasn’t there, either.
Trevor was about to shoot him a text when Damien stepped outof the owner’s suite in a suit that probably cost more than Trevor’s car, hisphone in his hand as he presumably scrolled through the day’s schedule.
He glanced up, saw Trevor, and slipped the phone into hisjacket pocket. “Where are we today?”
“Slow progress, but we may have some news soon. A new angleon the partial plate.”
