“How did you get free?”
She frowned, then looked back at the underground parking garage. “I might be able to lead you back to the same room,” she said, “but I’m not going in there alone without some law enforcement. I don’t want to get picked up again,” she said. “We were down below, three floors, I think. They left us in a little cement room. We were tied to our chairs.”
At that, her sister broke in. “I don’t know how she did it,” Melinda said. “She was amazing. One minute we were sitting there, all tied up. The next thing I knew, she stood and did this flip, and, all of a sudden, she was free. And then she got me free. We checked all the basement rooms on our floor, looking for our parents, and then we found the parking garage by going up a few flights.”
A second man joined Gavin. He smiled at them, nodded, and said, “I’m Shane. Why don’t you lead us back down to where you were.”
Rosalina looked at her sister. “You go with Steve back to the hotel and make sure the kids are okay,” she said. “I’ll take these men down again.” Her sister hesitated, but Rosalina smiled and encouraged her to go. Then she turned to the first man. “Are you sure you don’t want to bring a few cops with us?” she asked. “I really don’t want to get taken again.”
“We won’t be needing cops,” Gavin said, his voice flat.
She studied him carefully, then nodded. “If you say so. Don’t let me down.” She turned, and, without another word to her sister, she headed back down.
Gavin exchanged a look with Shane, the two of them a little unsure about this very direct person. But they followed her quickly. She motioned to the door that they had come out of into the parking garage. It was locked. She frowned.
Gavin said, “It’s normal to have some of these doors be locked all the time, but, if you’re on the inside, you can get out.” He quickly unlocked it, without letting her see how.
With the door open, she said, “Now three flights of stairs down.” She immediately took the lead and headed down the stairs.
Gavin raised an eyebrow and followed her. He checked the surrounding areas, but there was absolutely nothing different about this. It was simply an empty stairwell in a very large hotel with commercial buildings on the street level and shipping, parking, and storage units down below. Gavin wasn’t even sure what all three underground floors were used for, but it wasn’t uncommon in large cities to have a setup like this for laundry purposes, for additional storage, for garbage collection, for deliveries.
As soon as they hit the floor that she wanted, she opened the hallway door and stepped through. He followed with Shane right behind him. She looked left and right, then frowned and turned to the right and walked over a few doorways. At the third door she stopped. “This one.”
He used his sleeve to open up the doorway and to step inside. Sure enough, he saw cut ties and a chair missing three legs. He looked at the one remaining leg, frowning.
She shrugged and said, “I took three with us, just in case. Two for me and one for my sister. I ditched them in the parking garage.”
“Interesting.” He walked the small room, nodded, and said, “We’ll get forensics in here, just in case,” he said. “I suspect nothing viable is left, but you never know.”
“Good enough.” She followed the men back to the hallway. Outside, Shane marked the door in a subtle way that wouldn’t be obvious, but they could direct the cops to it.
Gavin urged her to walk with him and asked, “Do you have any other recollection of this building?”
She shook her head. “What I don’t know is whether I was left so that I could get out,” she said, “or if they were planning to come back, assuming we couldn’t get out?”
“We’ll leave somebody here to watch,” Gavin said, opening the stairwell door for her. “But how did you get out?”
She shrugged and explained, but she appreciated the quick gleam of approval in his eyes. She gave him a lopsided look. “Another thing I don’t understand is why Melinda was gagged and I wasn’t.”
“Did it help you at all either way? Did it change anything?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I didn’t need a gag one way or the other.”
He nodded and tucked away that bit of information as they took another flight of stairs and neared the ground floor. “Did you see your kidnappers at all?”
“Not really. Only that they wore all black with hoods, and I only saw that much for a quick second before they adjusted my blindfold,” she said. “I might identify the van though.”
“We’ve already got it,” he said, pushing open the Exit door to enter the parking area. “They traded it for another vehicle. What about that one?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know they did that. I was fighting them, and one of the men smacked me hard against the head,” she said. “I hit the side of the van and must have blacked out. When I woke up, I was in that room down there.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get you back to the hotel and get you a medical check. Then we’ll have a bunch more questions for you.”
“Anything I can do to help,” she replied, now staring out at the street.
“Any idea why someone would take your parents?”
“No,” she said. “I’d still like to go back and check every other floor.”
“We’ve already got two local teams coming in,” he said quietly. “We’ll find your parents, if they’re in that building.” He watched as that sank in. “The real question is, who could be behind this?” he asked. “Are you sure you have no idea?”
“No, I’ve been trying to figure it out this whole time.”
“Problems with the company?”
“No. Nothing I know of.”
“That’s a really good point,” Shane said. “How much do you have to do with the business part of the company?”
“I work there,” she said, “but honestly I don’t deal with the board at all.”
“By choice?” he asked.
She shot him a look. “I can’t do politics,” she said. “I’m a very direct person, and I don’t play games.”
“Well, we appreciate that,” Gavin said. “And we do find that often these kinds of scenarios are really power plays.”
“Which just sucks,” she said, “because it puts me out of my depth. I don’t have a clue how to handle people like that.”
“What about your father? Does he play those games?”
She shrugged. “I guess it’s possible,” she said, “but it’s not necessarily a normal state for him. He likes the game—I mean, like the art of negotiating—but, more than that, he is dedicated to the type of research we do.”
Gavin continued, “Do you think anybody is after your research?”
She frowned at that and stared at him, considering his question.
Her eyes were the palest of blue. How had he not noticed before? They were almost a soft gray.
“Anything is possible,” she said, “but you have to understand that we have any number of research projects in progress at any given time.”