Page 5 of Preying Heart
I don’t need a million, and if I find this woman, I might just keep her for myself.
Then again, if I turn him down, he’ll find another hunter—one whose ethics aren’t as upright as mine.
ChapterThree
Heath
I call the number on the contract while staring at the glossy photo of Remi Bruckner. I don’t for a moment believe in the million-dollar price tag. It’s there to goad my curiosity or it could be a prank. Even more nefarious, someone from my past has me figured out.
It was a risk to do the hunting and tracking jobs, but a man with my skills would get mighty bored sitting on the mountain with nothing to do. The jobs keep me busy and humble. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop. That kind of thing.
“Yeah?” a man’s rough voice answers.
“Tristan Summer here.” I use my pseudonym. “I was told to call this number.”
“Oh, right. I have a job for you.”
“It’s bullshit. You don’t have a million dollars. I just want to know why you can’t find your own girlfriend.”
“You’ve obviously not done your research.” The man snickers. “I thought you were better than that. I can count on you to be discreet, but I didn’t count on you being a bonehead. As for Remi, she is under high emotional stress and may give you grief. Once you have her in your custody, call me and we can arrange the exchange. A million is a small price to pay.”
“I’ll want it in Bitcoin. Half down.”
The man chuckles. “How do you know I didn’t offer the job to others? The first guy who deposits her at the safe house gets the bounty—but only if there’s no publicity. I don’t want my name associated with any news articles. I know you don’t want publicity or you wouldn’t be hiding up there in Divine, Idaho.”
“I don’t need the trouble,” I tell the arrogant jerk. “Get someone else to do your dirty work.”
“Don’t you want to know the reason behind all of this?” He laughs with a maniacal pitch and hangs up.
I’ll have to admit he got me there. A pretty woman worth a million-dollar bounty. I get on the internet through a VPN, or virtual private network designed to disguise my location, and tap into several online databases. Whoever this Remi Bruckner is, she doesn’t have much of an online presence. No social media. No arrest record. No property.
There is, however, a high school graduation listing at one of those online yearbook and classmate sites. I bring up the scanned yearbook and compare her senior picture with the glossy. There’s no mistake it’s the same woman.
Armed with her high school information, it takes me no time to tap into the school district’s records. That’s when I realize this job might have legs after all.
Remi Bruckner is the foster daughter of Stan and Deana Greasley—prominent Seattle area philanthropists behind Operation Persephone, an organization that rescues human trafficking victims.
An online image search reveals Remi shows up at fundraisers flanked by the Greasleys. She doesn’t appear to do anything else but accompany them to social functions—the pretty face in a boardroom or cocktail party.
I still have no indication that Remi has a boyfriend or that the caller is legit. But as they say, curiosity kills the cat, but I’m a cat with ninety-nine lives.
The department of social services which runs foster care is as easy to tap into as the school system, and soon, I discover Remi has a brother who has a rap sheet a mile long.
I’m browsing through screens and connecting the dots when it all clicks together. The brother, Slade Bruckner, was recently bailed out by his sister and awaiting trial for breaking into Gavin Greasley’s mansion and scaring his wife. I now have a time and a place for a starting point.
I still haven’t decided to take the job, but a short trip to Seattle will give me a much-needed change in scenery. And my gut tells me there’s something not quite right. No one is so hard to find that she warrants a million dollars. There’s got to be more behind the story, and I’m betting the Greasleys are involved.
It’s either a publicity stunt for Operation Persephone or a trap for me—the cop who busted the head of Seattle’s sex trafficking ring only to have a Greasley-connected judge grant him immunity. Their charitable foundation paid me the bounty for the bust, but I got the message loud and clear.
Get lost and stay lost.
Remi
I wake up with a start, my heart pounding like rocks tumbling off a windswept cliff. I’m not in my antique bed, and I’m still pregnant. Gavin’s going to be super pissed that I didn’t check in, and even worse, he would have left a ton of messages on my phone—the one Slade smashed somewhere on Interstate 5.
“No, no!” I palm my aching eyes away from the sunlight filtering in through the gaudy tribal-patterned curtains at the casino’s motel. The reek of stale cigarette smoke and insecticide along with the rattle of a wheezy window air conditioning unit remind me how much I miss my penthouse. I miss everything about Seattle except facing Gavin and telling him I never made it to the clinic.
I tell myself I needed more time. There are big consequences. What if this baby is the grandson his parents always wanted? Surely, he’d realized we don’t make rash decisions when it involves family. Deanna Greasley once told me that she tried so many times after Gavin’s birth to have another child but was met with a string of miscarriages. By the time she thought about adopting, she felt she was too old. She would complain about Gavin’s wife, Claudia’s, inability to get pregnant and how her meds and unstable moods would disqualify them to adopt.
