The Hunted

“A highly complex thriller…deft use of dialogue.”

—Publishers Weekly on Wildcard

“The Crimson Code is a smart, complex thriller with enough twists to knot your stomach and keep your fingers turning the pages.”

—New York Times bestselling author Alex Kava

“With its smartly paced dialogue and seamless interweaving of both canine and human viewpoints, this well-rounded story is sure to be one of Lee’s top-selling titles.”

—Publishers Weekly on Something Deadly

“A suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat read.”

—Publishers Weekly on Caught

“Rachel Lee is a master of romantic suspense.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

The Hunted

Rachel Lee

To the lost, and the men and women of law enforcement

who try to find them.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Epilogue

Afterword

Prologue

Caracas, Venezuela

She shuddered as she heard the bolt on the door open. She always did, even after…how many months had it been?

She was sixteen, she thought. Or maybe seventeen. Had it been two years since she’d left home, or three? It was hard to be sure. When she’d been on the streets of Denver, she’d been able to keep track of time. Even though one day had been mostly the same as the next—get high enough to function, then find a john to get money for the next fix—there were cycles. There were the days when the shelters offered free lunches and showers. There were Sundays, when it was more difficult to find johns because they were trying to pretend they were good, churchgoing men. There was the change of seasons.

It was the change of seasons that had done it. She’d already decided she wasn’t going to spend another winter in Denver. Phoenix would be nice, or Los Angeles. Somewhere warm. So she’d forced herself to cut back on the crystal—what a bitch that had been—to save enough money for a bus ticket.

“Anywhere warm,” she’d told the woman behind the ticket counter.

“How about home?” the woman had asked.

She’d actually thought about it—for perhaps two seconds. It would have been Thanksgiving soon. The thought of a home-cooked feast, the memory of her mom’s homemade stuffing and savory gravy, had almost made her mouth water. She’d almost said, “Yeah, is this enough to get to Virginia?”

But there was her uncle. Living two blocks down. Coming to spend the night drinking with her dad, and then, once Dad went to bed, coming into her room. Again. At least now she got paid for it.

“Nah,” she’d told the woman. “How about Phoenix?”

That had been the last decision she’d made. The bus to Phoenix wouldn’t leave for an hour, so she’d decided to get some food and crystal money for the trip.

The john had seemed nice enough. Reserved. Not outright leering. She knew the type. In her profession, the world’s oldest, you had to learn to spot them. The type who’d settle for a straight half-and-half, a blow job and a fuck, ten minutes each, if that. He didn’t even try to bargain. A quick fifty bucks.

Looking back, she realized that should have been the warning sign. Johns always tried to bargain. She was cute and clean, slender, a natural blonde, with high, firm tits and prominent nipples that showed through her T-shirt. So she could get a little more than the older girls who had been doing it for so long they looked and felt like worn-out kitchen sponges.

Even so, fifty had been more than twice the going street rate. He’d just nodded and said, “Fine. I know a place close by. What time does your bus leave?”

And that was when she’d disappeared forever.

Yes, it had been just before Thanksgiving. But what month was it now? She had no idea. When she heard the TV from the next room, it was muffled and in Spanish. There were no windows in her room, and the weather never seemed to change here.

No cycles anymore. One day truly was the same as the next. The food was the same, day in and day out. Even the john was the same. Two, sometimes three times a day. It had been more at first. He’d gotten bored, she guessed.

That’s how men were, except for her uncle. If he’d gotten bored, she would probably still be living in the Better Homes and Gardens fantasyland of Fairfax County, in the two-story brick front on the eighth-of-an-acre lot, with the perfectly manicured lawn, the three-car garage, the giant-screen TV in the family room always tuned to whatever game was on at the time, listening through the shared wall as her brother whacked off to Internet porn.

But her uncle never had gotten bored, and she couldn’t stand him anymore, couldn’t stand wondering if her brother whacked off listening to her uncle’s grunts and the creak of her mattress springs, wondering if her brother heard or cared when she’d lain in her bed afterward, crying into her pillow and counting the days, the hours, the minutes, until she could get the hell out of that house and never ever come back.

Well, she’d gotten out. And she would never get back.

The door opened, and he stood in the doorway with a bag in his hand. He tossed it onto the bed. “Get dressed. You go home.”

He pulled the door closed as he left. He didn’t bolt it. First time ever. She pursed her lips, wondering what that meant. His words didn’t matter. She’d learned to ignore words. Home. Beautiful. Love. Whatever. But he hadn’t locked her door. That mattered.

She opened the bag. Faded jeans and a green T-shirt. No bra or panties, but she hadn’t worn them in so long, she didn’t care. The jeans and T-shirt still had store tags clipped on. She bit the tags off and felt a tooth chip. It was the diet, the gritty tortillas that wore away at the enamel. But Dad was a dentist. He’d fix it.

New clothes. The door not locked.

She was going home.

She washed up as best she could at the sink. Put on the jeans and the T-shirt. Brushed out her hair with her fingers. It had lost some of its blond luster, but the girl in the mirror still had the big brown eyes everyone had always talked about. Her face wasn’t quite as fresh. But with some exercise and makeup and a good diet again…Yeah. She could go home. She could be…

…who?

Candi was the name she’d used in Denver. Her parents had called her Candace. But no one had called her anything since she’d gotten here. Not a name, anyway. Just puta. Whore.

Who would she be when she got home? Her uncle’s puta? Candi? Would she even remember what it meant to be Candace? Or would she take one look at her dad’s face, then look at his crotch and wonder how many half-and-halves it’d take to get her tooth fixed?

“Are you ready?” he said, opening the door again. “You look good.”

Words. Whatever.

“Sure.”

She followed him out of her room and then the front room and then out into the courtyard. She’d only seen it once before, when she’d been brought here. Looking around, she realized she’d been living in the servants’ quarters. Well, that fit.

Terra-cotta tiles glistened in the morning sun. It had rained last night, and the air was thick with moisture and the sweet scents of the garish tropical flowers that bloomed in carefully trimmed beds around the courtyard. Not a stone, not a grain of sand out of place. That part was like home, at least.

The black SUV was new, not the same one she’d come here in. The leather was baby smooth under her fingers as she climbed into the backseat. He got in front and pushed a button, and a little screen came down out of the roof. “Movie?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

He put a DVD into the dashboard player, and moments later the screen flickered to life. Bugs Bunny, speaking in Spanish. He’d bought the DVD for a child. Maybe a daughter. Maybe she was sitting where this man’s daughter usually sat, watching the same cartoons his daughter would laugh at while he drove her…where? To school? To church?

She realized she knew nothing about this man. And that was probably why he was letting her go home. He was just another businessman in a foreign country. She didn’t even know what city she was in. She couldn’t identify him.

She fought the urge to look around as they drove. Part of her wanted to memorize everything, to pick out some sign, some landmark, that she could recall when she got home and tell…someone. Someone who could come and find this man. Instead, she just watched Bugs Bunny make a fool of Elmer Fudd. In Spanish.

They were climbing into the mountains. The man must have an airstrip up here somewhere. That would make sense. He could hardly put her on a commercial flight. She would probably be sitting atop a pile of cocaine. She wondered if it would be soft.

“We stop here to pee,” he said, pulling off onto a side road. “More hours to the airport.”

She didn’t need to pee, but that was fine. She was used to peeing on command. When Dad had taken the family to Yellowstone, he’d scheduled in every pee stop, a little X in yellow highlighter on his trip planner. She and her brother had giggled because Dad had used yellow for the pee stops. The thought made her smile.

There wasn’t a bathroom. That was fine. Living on the streets had taught her the more basic skills of life. She pulled down her jeans, carefully tucking the fabric back between her ankles, turning her hips forward as she squatted, pressing a finger on either side of her urethra and lifting, so she would shoot out rather than straight down, keeping her jeans dry.

She heard the schlick-schlick as he worked the slide, and she knew. Part of her thought about trying to run or turning to fight. But her jeans were around her ankles. There wouldn’t be time. It wouldn’t matter.

Fuck it.

Instead, she looked down at the leaves rippling under her stream, at how they flicked this way and that, and just waited. Her throat caught as she thought about Yellowstone, and she and her brother giggling at a yellow X. Back when she had been someone else. Someone innocent and soft and hopeful.

She heard the crack an instant before the bullet crashed through the base of her skull and exploded every thought, every memory, every sadness, every hope.

The blackness came fast.

She was home.

1

Special Agent Jerrod Westlake sat at his desk in the FBI’s Austin office, looking out a window at the late-afternoon sky. The ordinarily exquisite February weather was about to give way to one of those window-rattling, tree-toppling thunderstorms for which Texas was known.

He watched the clouds turn blacker by the second over toward Balcones. If it had been raining up in the hill country to the west, floods wouldn’t be far behind.

But Jerrod wasn’t really thinking about the storm. At thirty-eight, he had a decade under his belt as an agent, and he looked at the building storm with the uneasy sixth sense that life was about to imitate meteorology.

The case file that lay all over his desk, sorted into types and sources of information, screamed things that burned into his brain. Fourteen-year-old runaway female, last seen hawking herself on the streets of Houston. This time, unlike most times, she had been reported missing by another prostitute, an older woman who had tried to take the child under her wing and protect her. It was this woman who had reported the girl’s disappearance. Usually they just disappeared into inky silence, without a trace.

Another rumble of thunder, too low to be audible, but strong enough to be felt, passed through the office.

Lately too many of his cases seemed to settle around government contractors. The rush of often poorly overseen privatization of government work, coupled with the spending bonanza of the “global war on terror,” had led to a boom in contractor fraud. For a while, it had gone largely unnoticed and unchecked, but then courageous whistle-blowers had begun to come forward. Sadly, despite the whistle-blower protection laws, he knew that those witnesses would probably find themselves out of work and unemployable in the government-contracting sector.

But those cases were not his passion. They were just his job. As another rumble of thunder passed through the room, he looked at the framed photo on his desk. The girl who looked back at him from a face framed by blond curls appeared to be just on the cusp of womanhood, entering the awkward stage of life where her smile was the impish one of childhood mixed with the almost-sensed mysteries of adulthood. Elena. Resident forever in his heart, an ache that would never end.

He’d known he wanted to be a cop from the time Elena had disappeared. He’d been sixteen then, six years older than she was. Family tragedies hit in a lot of ways. His sister’s abduction had sent his mom into an alcoholic spiral and his dad into a withdrawal from which he’d never fully emerged.

After Elena disappeared, all that remained was the silence.

It was his father’s sudden, overwhelming sense of powerlessness that had energized Jerrod. He decided he would become a cop. He would step in for fathers whose invulnerability had been irretrievably shattered. He would rescue his father, even if he never found Elena.

That had led him into the army’s military police program, the fastest way to get into uniform and on the job, and a way to pay for the college education he would need in order to work for the FBI. His rugged athleticism and quick, keen mind had attracted the attention of recruiters in the special-ops community, shadowy heroic figures who’d told him he was destined for better things than waving cars through the front gate.

Six years later, he’d passed through the revolving door that led from special operations into private military contracting, where the pay was better and the missions even farther from public awareness. The company he’d worked for had specialized in overseas personal security, protecting U.S. businessmen and key employees in parts of the world where a U.S. passport was all too often irresistible bait for rebels who financed their operations with ransom money.

It was there, in that dark, shadowy world, that he’d learned what happened sometimes to those little girls and boys who disappeared. It was the first time he’d learned that there really was a white slave trade.

He’d become an expert in finding the missing, sniffing out clues that others might miss, able to project complex networks of informants, sources and dark alliances onto a screen in his mind. He followed links that seemed obvious only in retrospect, guided by intuition, supported by a twenty-hour-a-day work schedule when he was on a case.

And then he’d blown the whistle himself.

Ultimately, the case had gone nowhere. He knew what he knew, but too much of what he knew lay in inferences he had drawn from that screen in his mind. The investigator who had worked the case couldn’t verify any of Jerrod’s claims, at least not enough for prosecution.

But it had pushed him out of the private sector and into the job he’d always wanted. He’d joined the FBI. And he’d joined with a résumé and a passion that had quickly turned into a specialty.

He worked all kinds of cases, but Special Agent Jerrod Westlake had quickly emerged as the go-to guy on abductions. A photo album in his desk drawer was filled with the faces of kids he’d found. The bulletin board over his desk was also covered with photographs, those he hadn’t yet located.

And on his desk, surrounded by a simple white frame, was a photo of Elena.

He looked at her now, sensing more than hearing the rumble of thunder that reverberated through his window, strong enough to feel in the arms of his chair.

Elena, as sweet as a spring morning, a tiny little elf of a girl who had come into the world one day after his sixth birthday. His mom called her a surprise gift from God. His dad just plain doted.

And it still pained Jerrod not to know. Despite all the resources he could call on, he could find no trace of Elena Westlake. Not even among the hundreds of Jane Does who filtered through morgues and into anonymous plots of ground provided by cities, counties or states.

His reputation now preceded him, and he claimed a network of friends and allies throughout law enforcement who kept him abreast of new cases. When local authorities wanted help, they asked for him by name. And whatever field office he was working from, his special agent in charge would book him on the next flight out.

Twenty-two years ago this week. That was when Elena had disappeared. A ten-year-old girl waiting for her school bus had been yanked into a car by a dark-haired, middle-aged man of medium height and build, driving a late-model blue sedan. The recorded story of Elena Westlake ended on that cold February morning, the description of her last known moments dragged out of the terrified boy who had been awaiting the bus with her.

He knew Elena must be dead. Still, he hadn’t given up. One day he would find his sister’s body. At least his mom and dad would know what had happened.

The storm rumbled again. Georgie Dickson appeared in the door of Jerrod’s cubicle and placed a Starbucks coffee on his desk. Then she sat in the chair beside the desk and sipped her own coffee.

She was a beautiful woman, her café-au-lait skin shining with the good health that came from being physically fit. Georgie had no vices, although the rest of the crew was always trying to find one. It had become a game. Did Georgie ever have a drink? Did she eat meat when she thought no one was looking? Did she really go to church every Sunday?

Georgie knew about it, and Jerrod was sure she enjoyed every moment of being a mystery.

She was also one of his best friends in the office.

As if she’d been reading his mind, she leaned over and picked up Elena’s photo. After a moment, she sighed and put it down again. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“Big storm,” she remarked.

He nodded, glancing toward the window. There was an ugly swirl to some of those clouds now, the kind of swirl that might portend a tornado. “Has anyone listened to the weather?”

“The usual. Severe storm warning, tornado watch. Were you expecting something else?”

Almost in spite of himself, he chuckled. Georgie was good at dragging him out of his brooding.

“So how did it go, testifying in the Mercator case?”

“Pretty well, I thought. I hung around afterward to listen to some of the other testimony. I got the feeling there might be another whistle-blower, one we never identified.”

“Is it worth looking into?”

He shook his head dubiously. “I honestly don’t know. This was the stupidest case of fraud I’ve ever worked. The prosecution won’t rest their case until next week, though, so I guess we’ll hear about it if they want us to look any further.”

Government fraud cases were as varied as the human mind’s capacity for dreaming up ways to root a few extra dollars from the public trough. Jerrod divided them into three categories: the sinister, the slick and the stupid. The sinister were the most dangerous, occurring at the junction of policy and profit. The slick were the most clever, often using one set of regulations against another, tucking away sometimes obscene piles of money, so close to the legal line that they were often impossible to prosecute.

The Mercator Industries case, on the other hand, was in the category of the stupid, a case where the acts were so obvious and the payoff so small that you had to wonder why they’d even bothered.

“Really dumb,” Georgie said, apparently thinking over the facts of the case. She laughed. “I mean, c’mon. Persian rugs and Italian leather executive chairs? What were they thinking?”

“It was a cost-plus contract,” Jerrod said, shrugging almost humorously. “They were real costs, right?”

Cost-plus contracting required the contractor to itemize the costs of performing the work. The government paid the costs, plus a profit percentage specified in the contract. Slick contractors looked for creative ways to pad the costs and thus increase the base from which their profit was calculated. This padding often involved layers of subcontracts to companies that were subsidiaries or even mere shells for the principal. Those subcontracts included a profit which was added to the prime contractor’s cost, even though that cost was simply money being shifted from one accounting column to another in the corporate books.

When the contractors were slick enough, this padding slipped right through the audits, enabling them to “profit on profit.” The Mercator people weren’t that slick. Not even by half.

Instead, they’d claimed that the contract had required them to open a temporary office in Houston to oversee the work being done locally. Under the regulations, if the office was temporary—opened solely for that one contract—reasonable office costs were chargeable to that contract.

The key words were temporary and reasonable. And the office complex in Houston was neither.

Mercator had bought two floors of a downtown high-rise, and its Houston complex housed two dozen executives and their staffs, overseeing no less than ten different contracts throughout Texas and Louisiana. The lavish furnishings might still have slipped through, had Mercator not billed the whole cost of the complex on each of those ten contracts. Fortune magazine had broken the story in a three-part whistle-blower saga aptly titled Deca-Dipping.

“Y’know what I can’t understand?” Jerrod asked, as Georgie thumbed through one of the stacks of paper that had been resting on his desk.

“What’s that?”

“Why are they even fighting it? It makes no sense. They have no defense. Christie Jackson said she offered them a quarter-million-dollar fine to plead out. That’s spare change for a company like Mercator. Why not just pay the damn fine and move on?”

“They’re worried the three-strikes law will actually get passed,” Georgie said.

She did have a vice, and Jerrod knew what it was. Georgie was a news junkie. She subscribed to a dozen online newspapers, from the Times of London to the Beijing Evening News, and a score of newsfeeds. If you wanted to know whether a pilot was missing in Afghanistan or a panda mating in China, all you had to do was ask Georgie.

Which Jerrod did. “What’s that?”

“There’s a joint contracting reform bill winding its way through committee,” she said. “Among other things, it has a three-strikes rule. Get popped for fraud three times and you’re out of the government contractor pool.”

“Like that will ever pass,” he said.

She shrugged. “It might. There’s a lot of support for it in the Netroots.”

“Huh?”

“The blogosphere,” she explained. “More and more, online communities are learning how to lean on government to get things done. When it rose from the traditional media we called it a grassroots movement. When it happens online…”

“I get it,” Jerrod said. “But how much influence do those people really wield? Yeah, they can get a story from the outhouse to CNN, but these contractors give huge sums to congressional campaigns. They’ll hold a hearing or two and talk about how something has to be done, and then some lobbyist will remind them that they’d shut down a big chunk of the government if they passed a law like that. Hell, we’ve farmed out so much of what government does, it’s not as if we can just turn off the spigot.”