LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 3

      Carrie tried to sleep, but every time she dozed off she dreamed of men in black whisking her away and carrying her down into darkness cold enough to freeze her lungs. She woke up gasping for air, so terrified she pulled the covers all the way over her head and cowered under the blankets, clutching her stuffed turtle close like she had when she was a frightened child.

      As dawn crept around the flimsy curtains and the city outside her window began to wake, she gave up on sleeping. She called Gary’s phone, and when there was no answer, she went downstairs to check the seals on his door. Please be home. Please be home.

      The red seal was still in place, the yellow crime scene tape undisturbed.

      Damn.

      Real dread for Gary’s safety roared through her, and her legs barely supported her weight as she fought the urge to cry. This was her fault. If she’d realized the abduction was real she could have run forward, fought the attackers. Two on two, Gary might have stood a chance of escaping.

      Who was she kidding? She barely weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet and didn’t know the first thing about self-defense. And Gary was no spring chicken. Still. There had to have been something she could have done.

      Heart heavy, she went upstairs and called the television show’s executive producer. It was barely 7:00 a.m. in New York and the guy didn’t pick up, so she left an urgent message that Gary was missing and appeared to have been kidnapped.

      She played the videotape again, unable to watch it now without spotting that distinctive twist and lift move put on Gary’s hand behind his back. She couldn’t stop watching the tape. Over and over, she watched the black shapes appear, move in behind Gary, grab him, and rush away into the night. But no matter how many times she watched it, the outcome was the same. Gary was gone.

      There had to be something useful she could do to find him or at least prove he was indeed missing.

      Had he received threats he hadn’t told her about? He had seemed distracted ever since they’d arrived in New Orleans. But she had put it down to his obsession with finding his lost treasure and proving that the last governor of Louisiana had been no friend of Napoleon’s.

      When critics lambasted him online for perpetrating a giant historical hoax, he’d muttered a few cryptic comments about having tangible proof this time. A few nights ago, when he’d come home late, more drunk than not, he’d even mumbled about being close to finding an incredible treasure while she’d taken off his shoes and tucked him into his bed.

       What did you get yourself mixed up in, Gary?

      She was choking down some dry toast when it belatedly dawned on her that Gary had put a duffel bag in their van yesterday as they’d left for the Pirate’s Alley shoot. She raced downstairs to the garage and threw open the back of the van.

      Opening the drab olive canvas duffel, she spied Gary’s laptop sitting on top of a pile of his filming clothes—flowing artist’s smock shirts with open collars that he thought were appropriate for a master ghost hunter. Personally, she thought they made him look like an old hippie.

      She grabbed the laptop and headed back upstairs to try to break into it. Detective LeBlanc might have told her to leave it alone, but she had to do something to find her boss. She couldn’t just sit back and wait for two days until the police got around to declaring him missing.

      A computer hacker she was not. However, she knew Gary pretty well, and she doubted he was the kind of guy to get too creative with his passwords. How hard could it be to figure it out? She tried a dozen combinations of his birthday, address, and the name of his childhood pet, a mangy mutt he still talked about, forty years later.

      Not that she could fault him for over-loving his dog. Her best friend, Shelly Baker, had often declared that the only reason she didn’t kill herself was because her cat would miss her too much. If a pet was a kid’s reason to live and sole source of love, Carrie supposed that was better than no love at all.

      Her own parents and her older brother had been okay. They’d been average people with average expectations of her. As long as she passed her classes and didn’t get into trouble, they didn’t pay much attention to her comings and goings.

      She’d tried to talk to them about Shelly when things had started getting bad at her friend’s house, but they’d told her to keep her nose out of it and that how Shelly’s mom and stepdad raised her wasn’t anyone else’s business.

      She added Gary’s agent’s name to the mix of possible password combinations, and on about the sixth try, his computer popped open.

      Yaaasss! She fist pumped the air.

      The past several days’ worth of emails didn’t yield anything that screamed of threats from a potential kidnapper. Gary got several hundred emails a day, though, and it was going to take a while to read through his entire backlog of emails and deleted messages.

      She pulled out her cell phone and Detective Leblanc’s business card. Reluctance roared through her. He was an authority figure and scary to boot. But he’d been adamant that she call him if she found anything new and that he would be mad at her if she didn’t call. It wasn’t even 8:00 a.m., though, and he’d been at her place until after three. Maybe she should let him sleep?

      No. He’d said to call any time.

      She dialed the number before she could second-guess herself.

      “Detective LeBlanc.” He sounded alert and not half dead like she would if she were woken from a deep sleep.

      “It’s Carrie Price. I found Gary’s computer and figured out his password. I’m into his email.”

      “I told you to stay out of his place.”

      “His laptop wasn’t in his apartment. It was in our van.”

      “And you failed to mention this to me last night why?”

      Crud. The detective sounded pissed. “I forgot,” she confessed. “I didn’t remember that Gary had put a duffel bag in the van yesterday until I was eating breakfast this morning.”

      “I need you to bring the laptop down to the station immediately.”

      She wasn’t sure how she felt about the prospect of seeing the hot detective again. Particularly at a police station full of cops. He was definitely pretty to look at. But. Cops. No bueno.

      “Umm, okay,” she managed to mumble.

      “I’ll meet you there in half an hour,” he declared.

      She wrote down the address he gave her and left the house right away. She still didn’t have the knack of navigating New Orleans’s copious one-way streets, back alleys, dead ends, and random pedestrian-only streets thrown in for fun. Parking turned out to be a challenge, as well. But, she found a spot a block away, ran for the police station and, exactly thirty minutes after her call, careened into the precinct, red-faced and breathing hard. Her cotton blouse clung to her back.

      “Can I help you?” a cop behind a tall desk asked her.

      “I’m here to meet with Detective LeBlanc.”

      “Name?”

      “Carrie Price. He’s expecting me.”

      “Elevator to the second floor, turn right when you get out, last door on the left at the end of the hall.”

      She more or less caught her breath in the elevator, and then lost it again when she realized she was about to see the hot detective who smelled like heaven.

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