Page 22 of Stand By You
Her call ended soon after and she was sniffling.
“What did he say?” he asked.
“He urged us to leave finding Travis to the professionals, but aren’t you a professional?”
Nick chuckled. “Did he realize you were with me looking for Travis?”
“I’m not sure,” she said and gave a little laugh. “I don’t think I told him. Heavens, I hope he didn’t imagine it was me and Mrs. Hudson driving around looking for Travis.”
Nick smiled at the image of a housekeeper and a nanny solving this caper and bringing the child they cared for home safely. It would be a happy conclusion for sure. When he glanced back at his phone, he noticed the red flashing dot was no longer on the screen.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
“What?” Jillian demanded.
“We’ve lost them.”
CHAPTER 7
“How?”Jillian demanded. “I don’t understand. You had them on surveillance?”
“I’m also driving so I can’t watch the road and my phone at the same time.”
“Travis!” she wailed, covering her face with her hands.
Nick pulled off on a side street and parked as soon as he could, staring at the phone silently willing the red dot to magically start moving again, but it didn’t. Muttering under his breath, he got out of the car and called Swede. The tech guru answered on the fifth ring.
“Did you get them” Swede asked.
“No. I lost them,” Nick replied. “I don’t know what happened. I was following the red dot and then the signal vanished.”
“Okay. This is not ideal,” Swede said, his voice calm, calmer than Nick would have been if he’d just received the news. “I just replayed the footage on my end, and I see what you are talking about. I can’t tell for sure what happened. Could they have gone underground?”
“Underground?”
“If they got on the Metrorail-which goes underground in places-or onto a city bus we could have lost them because Ididn’t factor in either of those when I modified the program for their bikes. My bad, but easy enough for them to vanish so quickly.”
“I see,” Nick said. “So, we’ve lost their trail.”
“At this point, I’m afraid the answer is yes at this point,” Swede said. “However, on the bright side, they did show up again when we lost them before, and I strongly believe they’ll show up again. I have no doubt about it.”
Nick withheld his sigh wishing he had Swede’s confidence. “Okay. They were riding black Sirrus X bikes if that helps your programming. Call me the minute you see anything on your end, and I’ll do the same.”
“I’ll write a new script and take into account other modes of transportation,” Swede said. “However, with this added variable I can’t give you a guarantee on the search result. There is no way of knowing that what my program notices this time will be your guys. When it was the car going to the bikes, we knew it was them, but now?”
“I get it,” Nick said. “It’s still worth a shot.”
“Agreed,” Swede said and ended the call.
Nick closed his eyes, tilting his head back to let the heat of the day bathe his face. He wished he had answers to give to Jillian when he got back into the car, but he didn’t.
Stalling for time, he called Simons and gave him the update.
“At least we know they’re headed into Miami and if your guru is keeping a watch on them, we may find them again,” Simons said taking the news better than Nick had anticipated.
“But isn’t time running out on our finding Travis?” Nick asked. “I know that twenty-four-hour window you gave McGinty sure is. Will you be releasing an Amber Alert soon?
“Statistically, yes. However, there’s always that one in a million chance that we’ll find our unseen benefit,” Simons said. “And we won’t have to put out that alert.”
