The Grifter
Chapter 30

Something was wrong.

Shawn looked at Frankie’s empty work station for the trillionth time that hour, unease sticking into him like needles. Technically, she was only thirty minutes behind schedule, but she’d never been so much as a minute late the entire time she’d been working with them. She had stopped by Annette’s with Mr. Prickles, so maybe that had taken up some time. Or maybe an accident had created a traffic jam that was holding her up. But it wasn’t like her not to call, even with the tension of last night between them.

Where the hell was she?

Grabbing his phone, Shawn gave up a mental f**k it and scrolled through his contacts to call her.

Hey, this is Frankie. I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me your name and number…

He ended the call with a curse. A curse that Garza noticed, because his dark brows popped upward as he looked at Shawn from his adjacent desk.

“Everything okay?” he asked, and great, now Hale had stopped what she was doing to listen in.

Shawn pulled another f**k it from what was turning out to be an endless supply. “Frankie’s late, and she’s not answering her phone.”

He told them about her errand to Annette’s, and Hale shrugged.

“Maybe she stopped to have breakfast with Isla and Annette and left her phone in the car,” she suggested, but Shawn shook his head.

“When was the last time you left your phone in your car when we were working an active case? Plus, it goes right to voicemail.”

“So, that suggests it’s off,” Capelli said.

Under any other circumstances, Shawn might be grumpy about the lack of privacy their office provided. But since he was starting to get really freaking worried, he said, “Yeah. And that’s not like her.”

“No, it’s not,” Hale said. “Maybe call Annette?”

Of course. Christ, his lack of sleep was really going to mess with him this morning. Shawn picked up his phone, his pulse hopscotching through his veins when it rang in his hand before he could even pull up his list of contacts.

“Annette, hey, I was just going to call you,” he said, unable to miss the relief in the woman’s voice when she replied.

“Oh, good. So, Frankie’s with you, then.”

Shawn froze. “What?”

“Well, she didn’t show up to drop off Mr. Prickles. I just wanted to be sure she was with you. I assumed you two had a work emergency.”

No, no. Something about this was very wrong. “You haven’t seen Frankie at all?” he asked, snaring the attention of every detective in the room. He put her on speakerphone just in time for her answer.

“Well, I suppose there’s a chance she dropped Mr. Prickles on the porch or something, although that wouldn’t really be like her. Let me check.” A minute later, Annette came back to the phone, her voice dropping and taking Shawn’s gut along for the ride. “Shawn, Mr. Prickles was down by the mailbox. Frankie’s car is halfway up the street, but…I don’t see her anywhere.”

“I’m pinging her phone,” Capelli said, at the same time Hale murmured, “I’ll have dispatch send a patrol car out there right now.”

Dread leaked through Shawn’s limbs, his composure threatening to detonate, but he had to focus. He had to think.

First thing’s first.“Annette, I need you to do me a favor. Are you back inside with Isla?”

“Yes, of course. It’s freezing outside.”

Relief slammed into him. “Good. This is just a precaution, but I want you to make sure all of your doors and windows are locked. Take her with you to check, okay? And stay on the phone while you do. I’m going to put Detective Garza on the line with you while I try and clear this up.”

“Okay,” she said. Shawn passed over his cell phone, grateful as hell for Garza’s cool head as he began to talk Annette through checking the house.

“What are we looking at?” Sinclair asked, striding into the main office space from his own office in the back hallway. Hollister appeared at the sergeant’s side—he must’ve run to get Sinclair as soon as Annette had said Frankie was MIA—and Shawn fought the panic rising in his throat so he could reply.

“Frankie was supposed to drop Isla’s favorite stuffed animal off at my babysitter’s on her way in this morning. She never showed, but the stuffed animal was on the ground in front of the house.” He followed up with the exact time of his text conversation with Frankie, and Isabella frowned.

“Frankie clearly made it to Annette’s. Assuming it took her fifteen minutes from the time she texted Shawn until the time she arrived, that means she’s been off-radar for about thirty-five minutes.”

“Annette’s is secure,” Garza said, giving Shawn at least a little room to exhale.

“Good,” Sinclair said. “Let’s get a hustle on that patrol unit, and send backup. I want officers canvassing every residence within a three-block radius and a thorough search of Rossi’s car, along with that entire street. If anyone so much as walked their dog in that neighborhood in the last two hours, I want to know it. What’s the word on Rossi’s phone?”

“It’s off,” Capelli said, shaking his head. “Last ping was the cell tower six blocks from Annette’s house, twenty-nine minutes ago. But wait”—his eyes lit behind his dark-rimmed glasses—“does Annette have a wireless security system? One of those setups with the camera at her front door?”

Shawn’s heartbeat tripped faster. “Yeah.”

“All I need is Annette’s password, and I can tap into the cloud storage to pull the feed,” Capelli said. “If the angle is wide enough to show the street down to her mailbox…”

“Do it,” Shawn said, his voice mingling in with Sinclair’s. It took ten excruciating minutes to download the footage and roll through a whole lot of business as usual, then the footage of Shawn dropping Isla off, before Frankie came into view.

“There!” Shawn said. Capelli slowed the footage, zooming in as much as he could on the grainy image. Although she was a little blurry, Shawn would know Frankie anywhere, her shoulders braced against the cold and a Mr. Prickles-shaped blob in one hand. She nearly collided with a guy who seemed to have materialized just off-frame, jerking back a beat later as she looked at the man’s face.

Shawn’s breath was trapped in his lungs. No, no, no, that couldn’t be—

“Beck,” Hale whispered, her eyes wide. “How the hell did he make her?”

“He didn’t make her,” Shawn said, fear sinking into him like hooks as he watched Beck take Frankie’s weapon and calmly lead her out of the frame a minute later. “She wasn’t supposed to be there. Beck wasn’t at Annette’s for her. He was there for Isla. For me.”

Realization punched through his chest. Frankie wasn’t supposed to be there. Yes, she’d clearly taken Beck by surprise, but she’d never go anywhere with him willingly.

Unless she knew exactly what Shawn knew, and she’d been trading herself for Isla.

Oh. God.

“Patrol just turned up Frankie’s cell phone across the street from Annette’s house,” Hollister said, his own phone still up to his ear as he relayed the message from dispatch. “Phone is smashed, and her weapon isn’t in her car. And”—he hitched, his mouth pressing into a thin line beneath his auburn scruff—“there’s b***d at the scene. Not a lot,” he added, and Shawn realized he’d just launched out of his chair. “But it’s fresh.”

“Sarge,” Shawn said, his voice ragged. He knew it must be obvious that his feelings for Frankie were above and beyond what he should feel for a partner, but he didn’t give a sh!t. All he cared about was replaceing her. Even if she went back to Atlanta and he never saw her again, he had to replace her, to protect her the way she’d protected Isla.

He couldn’t let her die.

“I want footage from every single home security system on that block. Someone has to have caught the two of them either running or hiding,” Sinclair said, and Hale shook her head.

“Beck’s not from Remington. He’s only got a handful of places he could go where he knows he’d have privacy. And if he has Frankie…”

“He’s going to take her somewhere to hurt her,” Shawn said, nearly choking on the words.

Garza’s stare hardened, and Christ, Shawn was grateful for the guy’s determination. “So, we’ve got Alfie’s house, the warehouse by the pier, and the abandoned restaurant where we were going to do the drop.”

Shawn forced his adrenaline aside and made himself think. “There are probably squatters at the warehouse. They’d want to seek shelter. It’s too cold for him to risk going there and being seen.”

Isabella nodded. “Both Alfie’s house and the restaurant would give him more privacy, for sure. But he’s also not stupid. He knows we know about both of those places. Chances are, he’d try for something else.”

“Okay, but that leaves us with hundreds of maybes,” Hale said. “We don’t have time for that.”

“But we’ll waste time if we go to Alfie’s house and the meet site and they’re not there,” Garza said. “There’s got to be some way we can figure out where they might’ve gone. Frankie’s smart. She has to have left us something.”

Silence stretched through the room, tugged tighter and tighter with tension as each second dropped off the clock. Garza was right, Frankie was an exceptional cop, and Shawn wracked his brain, trying to think of anything she might do to leave them a breadcrumb to follow.

Wait… “Capelli,” Shawn said, a fresh batch of adrenaline rattling through his veins. “Where’s Frankie’s burner phone?”

Capelli, thank f**k, didn’t hesitate for so much as a nanosecond before turning to his keyboard. “Not in the equipment locker downstairs. She’s still got it checked out.”

Shawn’s voice shook as he said, “Ping it.” Please, God. Please let her have it. Please…

“Holy sh!t,” Capelli said. “The burner phone is at Forty-nine Sixteen Maplewood Avenue. That’s Alfie’s house.”

“Everybody go,” Sinclair barked out, but Shawn was already halfway down the hall.

He was going to get Frankie back. Even if he had to put his life on the line to do it.