Hunted

by Alex Knight

Genres: Mystery; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

You're woken early by the doorbell. It's a young girl, the daughter of the love of your life. She's scared, covered in blood, she says her mother is hurt.

You let her in, try to calm her down, tell her you're going to get help. You reach for your phone, but it lights up with a notification before you touch it.

It's an Amber alert - a child has been abducted by a dangerous suspect.

The child is the girl standing in front of you.

The suspect? You.

Release date: June 25, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

Now

The banging on the door was the second indication of the morning that Jake Ellis’s life was about to collapse around him. He put the laptop down on the couch and walked quickly through to the cramped hallway of his third-floor apartment.

The banging continued, hurrying him along.

‘I’m coming,’ he yelled. He was wearing only jeans, so he grabbed yesterday’s T-shirt from the floor and pulled it on as the banging was joined by a voice. Urgent, panicking.

‘Jake, it’s Molly. I think Mom is dead.’

The words hit him like a physical blow. He unlocked the door and threw it open. If Jake had any lingering disbelief about what he was hearing, it would have been dispelled by the sight of her.

Molly was thirteen years old, tall for her age. Her face was flushed, her long red hair in disarray, some of it matted to the sweat on her forehead.

She was wearing black leggings and a gray long-sleeve T-shirt with an anime character printed on it. No coat, even though it was an unusually cool April in San Francisco. The T-shirt, along with her forearms, were covered in blood. A lot of blood.

Rachel’s blood.

He put his hands on Molly’s upper arms to steady her and guided her inside, closing the door.

‘What …’ he began, not knowing what to ask first. ‘Was there an accident?’

He dismissed the idea as soon as the words left his mouth. He could see Molly was in shock, but not just that. She was scared. He thought back to what he had just read on the screen of his laptop and knew that it was no sick joke.

‘Who did this? Where’s your mom?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know who it was. She was driving me to gymnastics club. We were parking and – and the window—’

‘The window …?’

‘It just exploded.’

‘Was she shot? Did somebody shoot her?’

As he talked, he was scanning Molly’s upper body and arms for a wound, but there didn’t seem to be one. None of the blood was her own.

‘Where is she?’ The urgency in his voice came out like a bark and she flinched back.

‘She – she …’ Molly was shaking, her pupils slightly dilated. Jake had dealt with dozens of people in shock during his career. Hundreds. Just like this, covered in blood, disoriented. Stunned that, out of nowhere, a previously benign world has decided to turn around and bite them. But this was different, because he was in shock too.

He put his hands on her shoulders, gently. The fabric of her shirt was damp from sweat. She must have been running for a while. He forced his voice into a semblance of calm professionalism.

‘It’s okay. Molly? It’s okay. You’re safe. But I need to know where your mom is. If she’s hurt …’

She swallowed. Blinked a couple of times. Her nostrils flared as she calmed herself enough to get the words out.

‘I think she’s dead. He shot at me too. I just kept running. I knew you lived here and …’

Jake felt his stomach dip. He guided her over to the couch, having to gently push her down to get her to sit.

He knew there was no point pushing her for details. It had to be related to what he had read on the screen of his laptop a few moments before. And that meant maybe this was all his fault.

‘Wait here, I’m going to get help,’ he told her.

Jake ran back through to the bedroom. His phone was right where he had left it, on the nightstand.

But before he could touch it, he heard a sharp, keening tone and the screen lit up with a message.

It wasn’t a text or an email. Before he had a chance to read the words, he recognized the distinctive notification: the rectangle with the rounded edges, the exclamation point inside a triangle, like a road sign warning of unspecified but imminent danger.

The notification was an Amber Alert.

Like everyone in the Bay Area and across the country, Jake had received more than a few of them in the last few years. He had even been involved in the process a couple of times in the course of his job. But this one was very different.

He scanned the message, part of him knowing what it would say before he had time to absorb the details.

A missing child. Molly Donaldson, thirteen years old.

The suspect was male, Caucasian, forty-one years of age. Considered armed and dangerous.

The suspect’s name was Jake Ellis.

Fifty-eight minutes before

‘You know,’ Molly said to her mother, ‘they’ve carried out studies that show some people are genetically predisposed to being night owls.’

‘Predisposed,’ her mom murmured as she slowed for the left turn off Market, waiting for a gap in traffic. ‘Good word.’

‘Uh-huh. So it’s actually discriminatory for you to force me to get up at this time.’

‘Life is discriminatory, Molly.’ Rachel Donaldson raised an eyebrow at her daughter and took a sip of coffee from her reusable ceramic go-cup while she waited for a slow-moving bus to pass them, before hurriedly dropping it back into the cup holder as the driver waved for them to go ahead.

She waved thanks and made the turn.

‘See?’ Molly continued, eyeing the clock on the dash. ‘Plenty of time. I told you.’

‘We were lucky with the traffic.’

Molly rolled her eyes and looked out of her window. Bad enough that Mom acted like this every school day. Saturday mornings should be for sleeping in. But it was this class or nothing. Rachel worked late Tuesdays, which was the only other time available. Molly had offered to take the bus there herself. She was thirteen, not a baby. But Rachel had given that suggestion a hard pass. ‘Maybe when the evenings get lighter,’ she had said, in an unconvinced tone of voice that suggested she meant when the evenings got lighter in the year 2028.

Molly heard her mom take a sharp breath, then felt her seat belt catch tight. She lunged forward as the brakes slammed on hard. Their bumper stopped six inches from the man who had stepped out into the road. He was wearing a stained gray hoodie and carrying a bundled-up sleeping bag under his arm. He glanced at the car with disinterested eyes and held up a dirty hand in acknowledgment as he continued on his way to the opposite sidewalk.

Rachel muttered a curse and, after asking if Molly was okay, pulled away again. They drove two more blocks and reached the turn onto Sullivan Street. She pulled to a stop behind a truck making a delivery in the narrow street.

‘I can walk from here, you know.’

‘Just be patient,’ Rachel said. The tone of voice put that in the ‘do as I say’, not ‘do as I do’ category.

Something was on her mind about work. Molly could always tell. She had a Saturday morning meeting, which was why they were even earlier than usual.

The buzz of a phone notification cut across the sound of the Ariana Grande song on the radio. Molly felt an involuntary sinking feeling in her stomach as she reached for her phone. She hoped Kaitlyn Logan hadn’t commented on another one of her Instagram posts, calling her a carrot-top or whatever. But then she saw that it was the screen of her mom’s phone that had lit up.

‘Check who that is for me?’ Rachel asked, without looking down.

Molly put her own phone on the dashboard and picked up her mother’s. The caller ID said, Jake. Mom’s new boyfriend. Only, he wasn’t that new anymore.

‘It’s just Jake, want me to take it?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ll call him back.’

Molly heard the rev of a motorcycle engine from behind them and watched as the leather-clad biker slowed to pass them and the truck on her side of the window. Perhaps because she was looking out at him, the rider turned his head to look in the car as he passed by. He was going slowly enough for her to see her own distorted reflection in the blacked-out visor of his helmet.

She was only assuming it was a he, of course. In all that leather and the full-face mask, it could be somebody’s grandma riding that bike. Nicole would have reprimanded her for that, for treating the male gender as the default. She would have called it unconsciously reinforcing gender stereotypes. Whatever. The person on the motorcycle turned their head back to the road as they squeezed past the hood of her mom’s red Ford Escape. She noticed a custom decal on the back of the bike – flames and devils. Possibly not a grandma, but then who could say for sure?

She looked back at Rachel, who was sighing in exasperation as the overweight delivery guy made his leisurely way back to the driver’s seat, giving her a half-hearted wave of acknowledgment without making eye contact. He got in and the truck pulled away.

‘Finally,’ Rachel muttered, following the delivery truck for another block before making a left into the parking lot.

The Elite Center was a one-story brick building with a couple of windows either side of the door, one of which seemed to be permanently shuttered, and a sign over the door that read ‘Elite Gymnastics’. Molly thought the place looked like a crack house, but it was much nicer on the inside. Appearances can be deceiving.

The lot was virtually empty, but Rachel made for the parking spot she habitually chose. Molly unclipped her seat belt and reached for the door release, ready to pop it open and go as soon as the car came to a stop. The caretaker opened the building at seven, and she didn’t mind Molly hanging around inside until the start of class.

‘You got your water bottle?’ Rachel asked.

Molly didn’t answer, because she was distracted by the sound of the motorcycle engine approaching again. The revving sounded angrier, more urgent, the engine working hard. She glanced out at the road and saw the bike emerge from the direction it had gone and turn sharply into the lot.

‘Molly?’

Molly turned around as she watched the bike arc around the lot to Rachel’s side of the car. He seemed to be slowing. Rachel turned away from her and watched as the biker approached her window.

‘Oh shoot, I hope I don’t have a tail light out ag—’

Molly wondered why she had stopped and then she saw the gun in the biker’s right hand. Pointing straight at them.

‘Molly—’ Rachel said. She didn’t have time to complete the sentence.

The driver’s-side window disappeared, and Molly felt something wet spatter her face. It seemed like it took an eternity for the sound of the gunshot to catch up. The gloved hand redirected the gun, the biker leaning into the car to improve his angle. Molly saw the muzzle of the gun and flinched back as she saw a searing-white flash. She was falling backwards as she heard the sound of the second shot, this one duller than the first in her ears. Dimly, she realized that she was falling out of the door. It had opened as she flinched with her hand still on the handle.

She scrambled to her feet and moved to the rear of the car, keeping low. She screamed as another shot rang out and the window above her head shattered. She kept moving to the rear fender as she heard the engine rev again. Oh Jesus, her mom, was she …? She forced herself to focus. The easiest way to corner her would be for him to get off the bike. She heard a curse, muffled by the helmet, and there was another shot. This one blew out the back window.

She glanced around frantically. About twenty feet away, there was a narrow alley between the Elite Center and the row of units that lined the street outside. She froze.

She couldn’t risk it. But she couldn’t risk staying put, either.

And then she heard the strident blare of a horn. A blue pickup truck had stopped on the street outside the parking lot. A big, bearded guy with a black-and-red Giants cap was staring out of his window in disbelief at the scene.

‘Get away from there!’ he was yelling. His voice was commanding, but his eyes looked terrified.

Molly didn’t waste any more time looking.

She took off at a run for the alley, not looking back as she heard a gunshot. Then there was another, but she was already in the alley.

Forty-two minutes before

It always starts with chaos.

Later on, when a full picture of the situation emerges, things settle into a groove. Manpower and technology and tested strat­egies can be deployed to the greatest effect. Sometimes there’s a happy ending, sometimes not. But no matter what, the first hour of an abduction case is a whirlwind. Everything can go right, or everything can go wrong as those first few precious minutes tick away.

Special Agent Catherine Lark was reading through her monthly reports in a coffee shop on Van Ness Avenue when her phone rang. It was her SAC, Anthony Finn. She flipped over the page she had been reading and scratched down brief notes on the back as she listened to Finn’s voice on the other end. He needed her to go immediately to the scene of a double shooting. The clock had already started ticking. SFPD were on the scene and had requested FBI assistance. They had two gunshot victims and a missing child.

She looked up the address on her tablet as her boss was speaking. ‘I’m close, I’ll be there in five minutes.’

She abandoned her espresso on the table, directing a rueful raise of the eyebrows at the barista as she made for the door. It wasn’t the first time she had had to leave breakfast in a hurry, which was why she had gotten into the habit of paying in advance everywhere she went, on duty or off.

Weekend morning traffic was quiet. Finn had told her one male was dead at the scene and a female victim was en route to the hospital. That would most likely be Zuckerberg General, named after the Facebook guy when he kicked in seventy-five million dollars for the building.

As Lark reached the scene on Sullivan Street, she saw the flashing lights of the two San Francisco Police Department patrol cars on the scene. They were parked outside a low-rise brick building. Some kind of community center.

She saw a blue pickup on the street outside the parking lot, the large-built male driver draped over the steering wheel, freshly shed blood misting the inside of the windshield. The lot was almost empty, just four vehicles aside from the pair of police vehicles. Three of them, two sedans and a silver SUV, were tucked neatly into the spots nearest the door of the center. The other, a red Ford Escape, had come to a stop askew, as though the driver had swung around to reverse into one of the open spaces, and then gotten distracted.

Lark knew exactly what had distracted the driver. She parked on the street and got out. The officer standing at the edge of the taped-off perimeter around the lot waited for her to show her ID before he stood aside.

‘Special Agent Lark, FBI,’ she said, looking beyond the cop at the red Escape. ‘We have a missing kid?’

He nodded and turned to yell at the group of officers by the car.

‘Greg!’

One of the officers turned at the shout. He was black, in his early thirties, tall and slim. He jogged over to the perimeter.

‘Feds,’ the first cop said by way of introduction. There was none of the animosity she occasionally encountered from rank-and-file cops, just matter-of-fact.

The second cop raised a finger to his temple in acknowledgment. ‘Officer Wilkins, good morning, Agent.’

‘Catherine Lark,’ she said, looking beyond Wilkins at the car. ‘You were first on the scene?’

He shook his head. ‘Davis and McCormack got here at oh seven forty, I was a couple of minutes later.’

‘Nine-one-one call was seven thirty-six, that’s a pretty good response.’

‘My partner and I were pretty close by. How’s the other vic?’

‘Still breathing, last I heard,’ Lark said. ‘May I?’ She gestured at the tape.

Wilkins lifted it so she could duck under. He kept talking as they approached the car. The open passenger side door was closest as they approached. The rear window on this side was blown out.

‘The lady was in a bad way, Davis and McCormack thought she was DOA as well at first. If they hadn’t been looking after her, they would have seen it first.’

The driver’s window was blown out as well, crystals of glass scattered over the dark gray upholstery of the front seats. There was a lot of blood, most of it in the driver’s seat and headrest, but Lark could see spatter on the felt of the ceiling and all the way across to the passenger side window. The blood distribution on the window was more concentrated toward the edges. Something had been blocking the path of the spray. Something, or someone.

‘Seen what?’ Lark said as she drew level with the car. And then she saw it, too. There was a pink canvas backpack lying on one of the back seats. It was small, with some kind of cartoon character on the front. The bag of a teenage girl, not a thirty-nine-year-old woman like the victim.

‘Yeah, the backpack,’ Wilkins said as he watched her eyeing it.

‘Victim’s name was Rachel Donaldson, right?’ Lark said, realizing she was using past tense prematurely. ‘Who’s missing? Daughter?’

Wilkins nodded. ‘A teen girl’s clothing and a pair of sneakers in the bag, size four. We checked and the victim has a thirteen-year-old kid, name of Molly.’

‘Father?’

‘Deceased.’

That at least eliminated the most likely suspect.

Lark glanced at the blood in the front seat, not even dry yet, and reflected that it was amazing how quickly you could start to gather information these days.

‘Boyfriend?’

‘We’re looking into that.’

Lark leaned in the window, being careful not to touch any of the fragmented glass still in the frame. There was a leather purse in the driver’s footwell. A mugger would have taken the purse. Clearly the motive wasn’t carjacking, because the car was still here.

‘So this may or may not have been a targeted attack, and either way, we have a child abduction.’

‘Agent Lark!’

She looked up at the sound of her name and saw the first cop approaching her, holding a cell phone.

‘We got a suspect.’

Six minutes before

Sometimes it’s the little things.

The hairline crack in the ceiling plaster that turns out to be major structural damage. The snapped retort that’s the harbinger of the end of a marriage. The mole that will develop into a melanoma in a few short weeks. In this case, it was a coffee ring. Or, more precisely, the absence of a coffee ring.

Jake’s laptop was a basic Hewlett Packard workhorse. Nothing fancy, but good enough. He had bought it from Amazon three years ago, and it had served him well in that time. It had a very slight crack in the top-right corner of the screen, and the bottom-left control key stuck from time to time. There was a sticker on the middle of the back of the screen, covering the HP logo. The sticker showed Elmo from Sesame Street inside a crossed-out red circle, like the Ghostbusters logo. An inside joke with the guys, after he had busted an overly aggressive Elmo impersonator who had been harassing tourists in Union Square last year. He had noticed that a lot of people had stickers on their laptops. Some people did it to personalize their device, he supposed. He mainly did it because someone else at his local Starbucks had the exact same model laptop, and they had almost been mixed up, once.

He didn’t know what made him look at the Elmo sticker at that moment, but he knew at once that something wasn’t quite right.

The edge of a coffee ring, about a quarter of the full circle, had been visible on the edge of the sticker for almost as long as the sticker itself had been there. He could have switched the sticker out for a fresh one, of course, but he liked the crossed-out Elmo, and the coffee stain made it extra-personalized.

Over the months, the stain had faded to a light tan, but it would never disappear. It was dyed into the fibers of the paper.

And yet, somehow, the coffee ring had disappeared.

He opened the laptop and examined it. The little crack in the top-right corner of the screen was still there. Then he tried tapping the control key. It didn’t stick any more.

He scratched the morning stubble on his cheek while he thought about the conundrum. He logged in and opened a browser window.

Everything looked normal at first. His bookmarks were there. He was still logged into Amazon and his Google account. His email inbox looked the same as it had yesterday. His browsing history contained all the websites he’d visited recently.

Only, not quite. Where was the site he had visited last night, the rare vinyl place? It didn’t show up on his history. Neither did his Google search for the nearest place that would sell a turntable.

He looked back in his emails. There was the purchase con­-firmation for the record: an old R.E.M. single, signed by Michael Stipe and Peter Buck. For Rachel’s birthday in a couple of weeks.

So why was that search missing from the history? The most recent page visited before this morning was an op-ed in the Chronicle. It was about the city’s spiraling homelessness problem. He remembered reading it yesterday lunchtime, before the start of his shift. His browser history only went up to around 2 p.m. yesterday.

A glitch, perhaps.

But he was immediately thinking back to a case he had assisted on last year involving a small-time cybercriminal. The perp had hacked his victims’ devices when they thought they were logged into public Wi-Fi and had been able to access their online banking. This wasn’t quite the same, though. Now that he was really looking, the laptop itself felt slightly different. The control key might have loosened of its own accord, he supposed. But the machine just felt a little newer, a little less-used. And, of course, there was the missing coffee ring.

This wasn’t his laptop. But it was in his apartment.

He closed the browser window and checked his emails again. All as he remembered. That didn’t mean anything, though, since emails synced across devices.

Wait – the emails weren’t quite as he remembered.

The draft folder had a number one in brackets next to it. He couldn’t remember saving a draft.

He opened it.

The subject line was: I’m sorry.

The intended recipient was his girlfriend, Rachel. The sender was his own email address.

It started: I had no choice. I had to kill you and Molly.

That was when the banging on the door started.

Two minutes before

The San Francisco field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was housed on the thirteenth floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building at 450 Golden Gate Avenue. There was a beautiful view of the city from that height. At least, there was a beautiful view on days unlike today, when the view was obscured by low cloud. On days like today, it was like being inside a frosted glass jar.

Lark had a morning ritual when she was on duty. She would arrive early enough to grab a cup of coffee from Peet’s, then take the stairs, not the elevator, for a burst of cardiovascular exercise. Along with the caffeine, it got her physically and mentally ready for whatever the day ahead would bring. When she got to the thirteenth floor, she would take a minute to look out of the window, either at the view or the silhouettes of the buildings in the gray, and sip her coffee, organizing her thoughts.

There was no time for the ritual this morning. She rode the elevator up, no coffee. The office was filling up fast, a well-rehearsed operation springing to life.

Special Agent Kelly Paxon met her at the elevator. She was thirty, a diminutive five feet one, with strawberry-blond hair and glasses with thin, dark red frames. She had transferred in from the Chicago field office at the end of last year, and Lark was already wondering what she had done without her before.

‘SFPD are at Ellis’s apartment; he’s not there. Finn wants the Amber Alert out now,’ Paxon said.

Lark gave a resigned nod. Her instinct would have been to wait just a little longer, but she understood why her superior didn’t want to be seen to have hesitated if this went bad.

‘So who is this guy?’ she asked. ‘He’s a cop?’ An eyewitness had called in shortly after the shooting with a description that had quickly led to one likely suspect.

Paxon was carrying a neat stack of printouts. She nodded without consulting the papers. ‘Officer Jake Ellis. SFPD for the last fifteen years.’

‘What’s his record like?’

‘Unremarkable. Until last year – he was involved in some kind of beef during a traffic stop. There was a police brutality claim, he was suspended; eventually it was settled.’

‘Okay, we’re looking out for his vehicle, and SFPD are at his apartment. Doubtful he’ll go back there.’

Lark’s phone rang before she could ask anything else. It was Grier at the authentication center, confirming the details for the alert.

There were strict criteria for authorizing an Amber Alert, but there was no question that this case checked all the boxes: first of all, the subject of the abduction was under eighteen years old. Second, the child was certainly at serious risk, given the perpetrator had already shot her mother and one other person. Lastly, they had an identified suspect, along with his vehicular details.

Because she had Paxon right in front of her with Ellis’s file in her hands, Lark read the details out while holding eye contact with her. ‘Caucasian male, forty-one, Jake Ellis.’ She spelled both names, and then read out the address and the license plate of his personal vehicle, a 2015 Subaru. Paxon nodded and Grier confirmed on his end. She went through the same with the kid’s details.

‘Good to go?’ Grier asked.

She lifted the phone from her ear for a second to take a note of the time: 8.27.

‘Okay, do it,’ Lark said.

She hung up and folded her arms. She looked over at the window, seeing the silhouettes of the high-rise buildings through the fog. She imagined the message spreading between the buildings. Surging through the main streets and the alleyways, like a flood.

She knew the Amber Alert was something of a gamble: it would get the word out, in a way that couldn’t have been imagined even ten years ago. But it would tip off the target that they were on his trail.

Paxon looked nervous too. She let out a sigh and took her phone out of her pocket.

‘Okay everybody,’ Lark said, raising her voice to take in the rest of the office. ‘The Amber is going live now, so be ready for the rush.’

No sooner had she finished the sentence than it began.

The first notification was a sharp tone from the phone lying on the desk of Rick Telfer, the silver-haired veteran agent working two desks down from where they were standing. Then Paxon’s phone lit up. Then Lark’s. As she looked down at her screen, more and more phones sounded. All with the same piercing sound effect. The same message appearing on the screen of every phone in the office.

And not just in the office.

AMBER ALERT: San Francisco,CACHILD:13 Cauc F 5’0 110 Donaldson, Molly1SUSP:41 Cauc M 5’10 185 Ellis, JakeVEH: LtBlu 4drSubaruSuspect armed, do not approach415-553-0123

At a stroke, the alert went out to every media, law enforcement and partner ag. . .