“Not raccoons?”
“There would be little scratch marks—the earth is dry, but those would have shown. And there’s some garbage in here that I think a raccoon would have gone for, but a person wouldn’t think was still edible.”
“Do you think she’s living in the brush back there? That’s dangerous.”
He looked up at her from his hunched position. “Right. And a sad statement on whatever is going on. She’d rather face insects, snakes and more than whoever she’s afraid of.”
“We should go after her.”
“Run around in the snake-infested wilderness to try to find someone who knows the lay of the land and will be even more terrified if she sees us coming after her?” he asked.
“We really need to find her.”
“We do. But we won’t manage it tonight. Let’s hope she found something good, and try for a few more hours of sleep. We’ll need to get back in to talk to Pastor Colby tomorrow.”
“All right,” Amy said, looking into the darkness of the night beyond the motel.
“We’d need an army—and by the time we could get a troop of FDLE, cops and FBI out here, she would be long, long gone.”
“Right.”
“Trust me. Sometimes, people figure out how to come to us. We’ll have to make ourselves as visible as possible.”
“Okay.”
He stood. He was shirtless. Amy noted his chest was lean but extremely well-muscled, bronzed—nice. He should model for a denim company. For one frightening moment, she thought about just how attractive a man he was.
In the physical sense. She was still weighing in on his character.
“Great. Sleep. Let’s go for it,” she said, turning. As she headed back around the front of the old-fashioned motor inn, she remembered she hadn’t bothered with the buttons on her shirt, and started surreptitiously doing them up.
The lights in the office were dim. She noted a sign on the office door she hadn’t read before. Office Closes at 10:00 p.m.
“Wait,” she told Hunter, running back around the edge of the building.
The owner’s ranch-style home was a couple hundred feet to the right and rear of the motel itself.
The house was dark; a single light was on at the front, over a small, tiled porch.
Hunter came up behind her.
“I think we need to find out more about our host, as well,” he said.
“Billie could be in there.”
“If so, I think he’s helping her.”
“Why wouldn’t he have said something to us? And if she was being helped, why root through the trash?”
“Maybe Billie needed more than what was given—proud people, even desperate, don’t take more than they need to. And just because we’re FBI doesn’t mean someone might trust us. If money like the kind Ethan Morrison has is behind any of this, we could be suspect—we could be on the take.”
“I would never be on the take!” Amy said passionately.
He grinned. “You know that. I believe that. But our witness may not. We’ll get someone on our motel owner tomorrow. I have access to records you wouldn’t believe. For now—”
“Right. Be patient. Let people or things come to us,” she said. “Or we could just march up to that door.”
“And do what? Demand entrance? We’d need a warrant. And again, by the time we could do anything, our ‘Billie’ could be long gone. And if you’re thinking about pounding a door in, give it up. I’m not losing a murderer in court because we made mistakes.”
Amy sighed. “I know, I know.”
He turned and headed around the motel again. She followed him. They reentered by her door and he headed straight for the connecting door to his room.
He paused there and turned back.
“The next time we hear raccoons, we have to move a hell of a lot faster. Good night.”
The connecting door remained open. But he was gone.
Amy sighed and threw herself on the bed, frustrated.
And exhausted. While she was ruing the events of the night, she drifted to sleep.
When she woke again, the sun was shining through the drapes. She leaped up, glancing at the old clock on the bedside table.
It was just after 8:00 a.m.—time to get moving, certainly.
She started to make a mad dash for the shower, but when she reached the bathroom door, there was a tap at the connecting doors.
She called out, “Ready in ten!”
“Hey, no worries. I wanted to let you know I’m leaving a bag on your bed. Special Agent Ryan Anders drove all the way back here after agents from the Miami office gathered some things for us. Clean clothing is in the bag.”
“Oh—thanks!” she called.
She wondered how in hell agents in Miami knew what size she wore. But that wouldn’t have been a mystery for the tech department of an FBI field office, she supposed. Photographs, maybe? Or an educated guess.
She closed the bathroom door. Time to get ready for work.
* * *
Hunter was impressed by Ryan Anders’s dedication to his new job. While Hunter worked out of the DC offices—and had spent time giving and receiving information from the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico—Anders had drawn an assignment to the Miami field unit.
Ryan had considered that to be icing on the cake—he was from a rural, north-central part of the state, far north of Disney and Universal Studios—and the concept of working by a beach was, to him, definite icing.
That Ryan had made the drive down to Miami and back again and still had the appearance of having slept through the night was impressive. That he’d gotten a skeletal night crew to arrange for a change of clothing for Hunter and Amy, something Hunter hadn’t even thought to ask for, was excellent.
Amy rapped on the connecting door, showered and dressed. Ryan was seated at the foot of Hunter’s bed, waiting on orders.
“Ryan, thank you!” she told him. “This is great.”
“Hey, I had one of those moms who thought that cleanliness was next to godliness,” Ryan said. “It was no problem.” He looked at Hunter. “What’s next?”
“Sometime during the day, I’ll have you get to my hotel room and then—” he paused, then looked over at Amy “—if it’s agreeable to Amy, you can head to her place in Orlando to pick up some things. Amy, do you have a friend or someone who could put things together for you?”