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“You didn’t imagine we could, really, did you?” Laura was incredulous. “Nate, think about it. What’s the first thing he would ask?”
Nate paused. When he answered, it was with reluctance. “Where the lead came from.”
“Right! So, you see the problem.”
Nate nodded. “I do. It’s just… this feels weird. Going… what, freelance?”
“I know,” Laura said. “But, if this is what we need to do in order to save a life, then I’ve made my peace with it. Is that okay with you?”
Nate sighed deeply, but nodded again. “I guess it has to be. You’re right. Saving a life is more important than following protocol.”
“Now we’ve established that, circling back around to my earlier point – Dean will do a search for me and keep it quiet. He’s good like that.”
“Don’t you see how that makes it worse?”
Laura blinked at him. “Why?”
Nate rolled his eyes. “He has a massive crush on you, Laura. Like, huge.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Laura immediately refuted. “He’s just a good guy. We get on well, so he helps me out with stuff. He knows that if I get good results, he’ll be mentioned in the briefing after the case and he’ll get a better chance of a promotion.”
“Sure,” Nate said drily. “That’s it. Laura, you’re basically leading him on.”
“How am I leading him on? We’ve never even been on a date. He’s never evenaskedme on a date,” Laura said. She sighed and waved her hands between them, trying to physically clear the topic out of the way. “Look, it doesn’t matter. We can do as much research ourselves as we can for now, and then when the office opens in the morning, I’ll be able to give him a call if we still need help.”
Nate groaned. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m only okay with this because you haven’t been wrong yet, and I don’t want someone to die when I could have helped stop it.”
“Noted,” Laura said. “That’s why I’m doing this, too. So, I guess the first thing we need to do is start going through every place called Mickey’s that’s near some woodland.”
Nate lifted his hands into the air. “That’s going to take so long! Haven’t you got anything else to narrow it down by?”
“Yes, but we can’t use it yet,” Laura said. “I saw a car drive past. I saw the license plate. But we’re going to need to access the DMV system for that, and Dean’s our best help there, too.”
“Fine.” Nate scrubbed his hands across his face, then pulled out his cell phone. “I wish I had a computer for this.”
“Use my laptop, then,” Laura suggested, grabbing it from the coffee table. “I’ll use my cell. I don’t mind if it’s slow. So long as we get there.”
Nate nodded, firing the machine up and already focusing on the task at hand. “I’ll take D.C. first,” he said. “In case it’s close by.”
“I’ll go for Washington state, in case it’s not,” Laura said, with a half-smile.
They got to work in silence. Laura zoomed her map into the Washington state area and then searched for Mickey’s, biting her lip at the sheer number of results that came up but staying quiet. She didn’t want to admit to Nate that she thought this was going to be stupidly hard, too. But what choice did they have? The quicker they found out where the murder was going to take place, the better. It was probably three hours before Dean would be at his desk, if not four. In that time, they might even find it.
She scanned each result’s position, clicking on the ones that came up with a couple of other buildings nearby and an area of woodland on the side. One by one, she checked out the street view and ruled them out.
“Any of these strike you as familiar?” Nate asked. He clicked through five or six tabs he had opened up, each with an image of the front of the place – stores and cafés and diners.
“None of those yet,” Laura said. “Keep going.”
Nate sighed and settled deeper into the couch. “You realize this could take us all week?”
“We just need to keep going until Dean gets into work, remember,” Laura said. As a safety measure, she fired off a quick text message to the FBI tech in question, asking him to respond when he was at his desk. The second it was possible to do the search, they would be ready.
And in the meantime, Laura would spend every available second that she had to see if they could get to the solution faster – and maybe find the location before it was too late.
CHAPTER THREE
Laura looked at her buzzing phone and grabbed it from the coffee table, looking at Nate. “Time,” she said. “Dean’s in. He said I can call him whenever I’m ready.”
