Cade Read online

  It didn’t seem like Laszlo and the detective were done talking, but they shook hands; then Laszlo stood. He started to walk out of the station and turned to look at the two of them. “Are you ready?”

  Cade snorted. “We were ready a long time ago.”

  Laszlo had the grace to look ashamed. “Sorry, it’s so much easier to discuss these things in Norwegian when I’m here.”

  “I speak several languages,” Talon said. “But Norwegian isn’t one of them.”

  “English is spoken everywhere but Norwegian is easier for him. But the detective will run the numbers for us and see if he can get us access to the city cameras.”

  “When will we know?”

  “He’ll call me or Jair. He has a meeting with the superintendent this afternoon. He’ll ask then.”

  They stepped out onto the street to find it was getting dark.

  “Food?” Talon asked. “Are we staying in town until we hear from him in regard to the close-circuit cameras, or will we go to your family’s home?”

  Laszlo stood with his arms crossed for a long moment. “If he can get us access soon, I’d rather stay and go through that.”

  “How did your family do all day?”

  Laszlo shot him a look. “I had two of the neighbors bring over food for them. They’ll send me the bills.” Once again, Laszlo picked out a place for them to have dinner and ordered for himself and his two friends. And, as before, it was plenty of food and tasted great.

  Dinner done, they relaxed a bit, talking in hushed tones about Henry’s case, when Laszlo’s phone rang. He pulled it out, looked at the number and answered. “Jair, what’s up?” A moment later he turned toward Cade and Talon with a big grin. “We can see the camera feeds.” He stood, leaving money for the food and the tip, and headed outside. Cade and Talon followed.

  Chapter 5

  Faith heard the hospital room door open. It nudged her out of her dozing state. Six hours sleep, even in a real bed, still wasn’t enough. She glanced up to see a nurse once again entering the private room. Faith leaned toward her and said, “Still no change. But she’s also not worse. Surely that’s a good sign.”

  The nurse smiled encouragingly. “It is.” She took Elizabeth’s vitals then turned to look at Faith. “She is doing quite a bit better. Maybe she’s aware of your presence, and it is helping her heal.”

  Faith beamed, even though she knew it was just kind words. “She’s a beautiful person,” she said. “I’m so sorry this happened to her.”

  “The doctor will be in soon.” The nurse checked her watch. “He’s running late, but I hope to see him by dinnertime.”

  Faith nodded. “Maybe we’ll know more by then.”

  The nurse nodded and quietly withdrew. Sitting here beside her friend, Faith had lots of time to consider the shortness of life. Planning to live to old age didn’t cut it. Elizabeth was proof of that. And just because she was holding on didn’t mean she would make a full recovery. Any recovery would be lovely though. But so often there were injuries that took years to recover from. She understood Elizabeth couldn’t pull out of this coma because of the drugs, but Faith would like to believe that Elizabeth was calmer with Faith at her side. But again, it was just likely positive thinking. When the door opened yet again, she assumed it was the nurse.

  She looked up to see Mary walking back in with quite an odd look on her face. “What’s the matter, Mary?”

  Mary gave a headshake. “I just can’t believe she’s still alive,” she said softly. She walked over to her sister and gently stroked her fingers. “My mother and I came and said goodbye because the doctor said there was no hope.”

  “There’s always hope,” Faith said.

  Mary shrugged. “Of course we know that. But that doesn’t mean in every case it’ll happen. It feels like we’re just delaying the inevitable.”

  That was hardly fair. Faith enjoyed just being at Elizabeth’s side, and Mary hadn’t been in all day. But then maybe Faith was judging her too harshly. Elizabeth had been close to her sister but not as close as Elizabeth was to Faith. Then that was often the way of it.

  “I wanted to thank you for letting me know,” Faith said quietly. “I’m so glad I’m here for her.”

  In her mind she refused to say the word “die,” but it seemed like Mary wanted Faith to acknowledge that her sister wouldn’t make it. Trouble was, Faith was stubborn. She was pragmatic, but she sure wouldn’t give up without a good fight. “Having said that,” she said firmly, “I believe Elizabeth will pull out of this.”

  Mary glanced at her with pity in her eyes. “You know that’s not likely, right?”

  Faith smiled, infusing positivity into her voice “Whether it’s likely or not, I firmly believe it will happen. I also believe she can hear us.” She smiled down at Elizabeth. “She’s too full of life and joy. She has too much in her to have her beautiful life cut so short.”

  “Accidents happen,” Mary said dismissively. “I know that all too well.”

  That’s when Faith remembered how Mary’s husband had died in a freak accident when walking along a street. Scaffolding had fallen down on top of him. Impulsively Faith stood and placed a caring hand on Mary’s shoulder. “Yes, accidents do happen. But they don’t happen to everyone all the time. We must let Elizabeth have her chance to fight.”

  But Mary seemed destined to believe the worst. “I just don’t want you so devastated after you build up all this hope.” She motioned to the machines. “Without the drugs and the machines, she wouldn’t be here now.”

  “But she is here now,” Faith said, keeping her voice calm, when all she wanted to do was yell at Mary, tell her to smarten up and to be positive. But negative people were more common than positive people. And their sour attitudes permeated every sector of life. Faith didn’t know why she should be surprised. She’d heard Elizabeth talk about Mary’s pessimism often. Faith just hadn’t realized how it would impact something like Elizabeth’s accident. And Faith had to wonder, what if something happened to Faith? Would anybody care? Would anybody sit at her side and try to keep her around?

  Her own mother was as negative as Mary and Faith’s mother and would likely tell the doctors to let Faith go. Why put anybody through all that darn suffering only to die anyway? Just as her mother had prophesies of everything in the world crashing down on Faith for having dared to become a pilot. It was a sad attitude. And Faith knew that many people would look at her hopeful attitude and say she was not grounded in reality.

  She’d always been an optimist. Always had been somebody who believed in something better down the road. And she couldn’t give up hope on her best friend. Because, from what she could see, Faith was the only help her friend had.

  Mary turned and walked back to the door. “You have my email address,” she said. “You can let me know if there’s any change in her condition.” And she walked out.

  Faith would have thought Mary was nothing but cold and callous except she heard the sniffles as she left. Maybe along with being a negative personality, Mary couldn’t handle disasters or grief. Maybe she cared too much. It was easy to be judgmental when other people reacted differently than you did. At the same time, it made Faith feel very sad for Elizabeth to have such negative people in her life—in her immediate family even.

  Faith walked over to her friend’s bedside and gently stroked Elizabeth’s cheek. “So much easier to bury yourself in the kids you loved than to be with a family, so depressed all the time and so focused on the negative, wasn’t it?”

  She cast her mind back to when she’d first met Elizabeth. The two girls had been sitting at basketball tryouts. Both had wanted to be on the team, but neither had planned to attempt it because they came from a world where it was normal not to try, since the foregone conclusion was that you would never make it anyway. But somehow they ended up challenging each other to try out anyway.

  The funny thing was, neither made it onto the team. They were awful at basketball. But because they made an att
empt, they didn’t feel bad. The whole point of picking a basketball team was to pick the best players. Or at least those with potential. Who would have guessed that what came out of that meeting was that both girls had found each other? And realized that so much of their upbringing had conditioned the way they were looking at life.

  And they made a pact back then to not get sucked into their respective family’s negativity, to do things because they wanted to and not to avoid them because others had told them they couldn’t.

  Faith sat down beside Elizabeth. “Remember that boy you really liked?” she asked with a big smile. “Remember how terrified you were that he wouldn’t like you? And you desperately wanted to go to the dance with him. Every time he came close to you, you ran. Until I dared you to invite him yourself. Dared you not to be such a scaredy-cat, to go after something you really wanted.” Faith chuckled at the memory.

  “And he said yes, didn’t he? You were the happiest, proudest girl ever. And even then your mom laughed at you, telling you that you shouldn’t have asked him because it wasn’t feminine and it showed he didn’t really like you enough to ask you out himself. You were so depressed when she said that. And I understood because it’s exactly what my mother would have said too. But just as I challenged you to go and to have a good time and challenged you to go into teaching because you love children—even though your mother said, ‘Why bother when you can’t have any of your own? Why put yourself through that torment?’—it was you who pushed me to go into flight school. And I’m so glad you did. And I’m so glad I went. But I’m most glad I found you. And I’m so glad to be here with you right now.”

  As she sat here, gently stroking Elizabeth’s fingers, caught down memory lane, she could feel the fingers wiggle underneath hers. She slid her fingers between Elizabeth’s. “Elizabeth, are you in there?”

  The fingers wiggled again.

  Faith gasped. “Was that just a reflex? Are you responding to my voice, to my question? If you are, squeeze my fingers.”

  And the fingers just lay there. Lifeless. And yet there was such a sense of peace on Elizabeth’s face.

  Faith didn’t know if that was a case of having made a great effort and achieved something, like wiggling her fingers, or if it was a goodbye, and she was ready to walk off this Earth.

  For a long moment, Faith sat, urging Elizabeth to try again. But there was no more movement. Faith didn’t know if she should mention it to the nurse or doctor when she saw them next, already knowing they’d tell her it was just nerves and not a conscious reaction.

  But it made Faith more determined than ever to stay at Elizabeth’s side. Because who knew? Maybe there was one more miracle to be had in this hospital room. And maybe Faith had just enough hope for both of them.

  The men were seated in the officer’s control room, the screens in front of them. They were tracking down the license plates on the two rented SUVs as a starting point. The detective said they could sit behind the officer as he searched the traffic cameras for the vehicle they were looking for. The theory being that the more eyes, the better, but they weren’t to interfere in the investigation in any way.

  Cade and Talon had agreed, as had Laszlo. But Laszlo’s chair was slightly more forward as he sat closer to the control room officer, the two of them speaking the same language. The screens, a dozen in all, flashed as the computer searched out the license plates. The monitor on the left started to flash more so, as it picked up the license plate of the first SUV leaving the airport. It tracked and then lost the vehicle. The one in the middle picked up the same license plate heading through the main intersection from the airport, out on the highway toward downtown Oslo.

  After that was only darkness for a long time. But when it came to an intersection with a roundabout heading north and south, the SUV was picked up going in the direction of the small town where Henry lived.

  Laszlo tapped the monitor. “He’s still going in the right direction.”

  The monitors had picked up the other SUV license plate through the city cameras, but it appeared to be stopping frequently just within the city itself. The officer made a couple comments on the locations.

  Laszlo nodded. “It looks like the second SUV rental is sticking to some of the less-popular areas.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Hard to say. He is alone.”

  The SUV was parked outside the warehouse district for four hours. It was picked up again going through different intersections. And very quickly it returned to the airport. At that point they had no way to know if he changed vehicles, went to a hotel, stayed there until his flight out or took an earlier flight or was traveling under a different name.

  There were so many unknowns, they were just guessing. Until Laszlo picked up the first SUV on the next day, heading back out to his town. “This is his second trip. In two days.”

  “This trip is in the morning.”

  They took several screen shots of the license plate, the front and the side of the SUV, and when they caught it on the cameras returning to the city, Laszlo yelled, “Freeze.” The officer froze the image and then had to back it up frame-by-frame. There was a decent photo of the front right-hand side of the SUV. And there was a slight dent on the front corner. Everybody sat back and stared at that for a long moment.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cade snapped. “That’s where he hit your father, isn’t it?”

  “Most likely but we’ll check with the rental agency.” After a short lull, Laszlo stood with a start, his fists clenched to match his jaw. “That SOB took a goddamn tank of an SUV to run over my father, with twice the body mass of most cars on the road. To run over a seventy-four-year-old man walking alongside the road.” Talon shook his head, adding, “It’s a miracle he survived.”

  No one spoke. What could be said?

  After that Talon took to silently pacing the small control room.

  Now that they had confirmed which SUV had been the weapon used in Henry’s attack, they focused on every image they had picked up, including until it was returned to the airport. What they were looking for was an image of the driver’s face. As he came through the cameras leaving for the airport parking lot, he ducked his head a bit, and they caught part of his lower jaw. He had a beard and a moustache, hair that curled to his shoulders. But they couldn’t get a picture of his eyes. It was in the smoked windshield section. With that printed, along with the other photographs, the men stood, thanked the officer and walked out.

  “What do you think?” Cade asked.

  “I think it’s our best bet,” Laszlo said. “Now let’s confirm people who may have seen him. See if we can get more of his face somehow.”

  “Any chance of running that through facial recognition?”

  “The officer said, because it’s only a partial and because the beard obscures a lot of the important facial markers, it probably won’t work. In cases like that, they need the forehead, brows and nose markers. But he will run it through and see.”

  The men nodded.

  “I don’t think it’s an accident that we don’t have a full facial image. However, we should show this to the hotel staff. They should have cameras as well.”

  Laszlo nodded. “I’ll see if I can get the detective to do that.” He reached for his phone as they walked outside to find it dark. Laszlo spoke to the detective for several long moments. Then he turned back to Cade and Talon. “I think we should head back.”

  “You feeling nervous about your father?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But the fact that this asshole left him alive, to me that means either he was careless, thinking the old man couldn’t possibly survive, or he was on a schedule and couldn’t afford any more time.”

  “If it was deliberate, wouldn’t he have stopped the vehicle and made sure your father was dead?”

  “Honestly most people would have thought he was already. His pulse was so faint that the ambulance paramedics had trouble picking it up. Even they thought he was probably gone.”

 
Cade and Talon nodded. “Fairly common in an older person.”

  “There’s old, and then there’s old. My dad has always had low blood pressure issues.” Laszlo’s phone rang. He answered it. “Jair, what’s up?” He spoke for a few moments and then hung up. “My father’s gone to bed. His day was okay. There is leftover food if we want to eat at home.”

  The two shook their heads. “No, because that’s a meal for them tomorrow,” Cade said. “We had an early dinner. Honestly I’m okay with just a sandwich later on.”

  “In that case, I can make that at home, but we do need groceries soon.”

  They got in the vehicle and headed toward Henry’s house.

  “I suggest we stop at any gas stations or points of interest along the way to see if somebody may have seen this guy. We’re driving in at the same time of day the attacker would have been driving as well.”

  Laszlo nodded. “Good point.”

  Up ahead was a gas station. He pulled off to the side, picked up the pictures and exited. Cade and Talon were right behind him. Cade worried about Laszlo. It was one thing to track down answers. But it was another thing entirely when the answers were difficult. Cade was still reeling from the thoughts that somebody had attacked all their families.

  As soon as they got back to Laszlo’s place, Cade wanted to make some calls and see if anybody had an update. The time change was brutal. But, in this case, it worked to their benefit.

  Laszlo was ahead of them, just enough that he was already talking with a man by the time Cade entered the building. The clerk looked at the photos and shrugged.

  “He doesn’t remember,” Laszlo said. “He said there are not many people at night unless it’s tourists.”

  “Well, it was a rental vehicle,” Cade said.

  Laszlo reminded him of that. But the young man shook his head. “Okay, no help there.”

  They hopped in the vehicle and went on to the next gas station just on the outskirts of town. They pulled in to ask the same questions. But this time they got a completely different response. The store and gas station were run by an older man and his sons.