“A little, yeah. I mean… I thought we connected pretty well that night. I actually thought we were kind of on the same page.”

“How upset did it make you?” I ask.

“Like I said, it upset me a little… what is this all about? I’m starting to get the feeling this isn’t actually about me seeing this young woman,” he replies.

“Girl. She’s a girl,” Astra corrects him. “Did it upset enough that you’d hurt her?”

“Hurt her? What are you talking about?”

“Just answer the question, Mr. Richter,” Astra presses.

“No, I wouldn’t hurt her. That’s not who I am, Agents,” he replies. “I liked Shelby. I would have liked to see her again, sure. But I know the nature of these sorts of clubs. I know some of these young ladies are fickle and figured that somebody better came along. I mean, I know I’m not exactly leading man material…”

His voice trails off, and he looks away, seeming to be silently counting his shortcomings. He looks like a man who’s run through that list in his head a thousand times or more. Unfortunately for us, he doesn’t seem like the sort of man who’d snatch a girl off the street and take her to God-knows-where to do God-knows-what to her. He wouldn’t have the guts.

“Mr. Richter—”

“What’s happened to Shelby?” he asks.

“Mr. Richter, we need an accounting of your whereabouts for the last… week,” I say.

“What’s happened to Shelby, Agents?” he demands.

“We’re not at liberty to go into detail. But we need an accounting of your movements for the last week,” I tell him.

“I would never do something to her. I liked her. You have to believe me,” he pleads.

“Then prove it by giving us what we want,” Astra says.

He sighs and looks down at his hands as a thousand different scenarios seem to be running through his head. Judging by the look on his face, he’s weighing whether he should call his lawyer after all, or not. His shoulders sag, and that look of defeat blended with fear crosses his face again as he raises his eyes to us.

“If I give you what you want, can you keep my wife out of this?” he asks.

“Assuming everything checks out, I don’t see why she’d need to know. That’s between her, you, and your conscience as far as I’m concerned,” I reply.

“Fine. I’ll send you my calendar, and you can check it out,” he says. “But please, be discreet.”

“Discreet is our middle name,” Astra says.

He rolls his eyes as we get to our feet. I slide one of my business cards across the desk to him. Richter takes it and looks at it for a moment.

“Email me your calendar, Mr. Richter,” I say. “Soon.”

“I’ll have my assistant get right on it.”

“Good. Thank you.”

We leave his office without another word and head down to the lobby then out to the parking lot and make our way to the SUV.

“You don’t think he’s our guy, do you?” Astra asks as we climb in.

“Do you?”

She shakes her head. “Nah. It’d be nice if it were that easy, but… I didn’t get that kind of hit off the guy. I’m sure he’s a big, bad power broker in the professional world, but when we started talking about his personal life, he just kind of… withered.”

“Yeah. I got that hit too. He’s surprisingly timid for a guy who deals with some of the most powerful people in the world on a regular basis,” I say.

“Exactly,” Astra confirms.

“I can see that his work is the only thing that seems to light him up. I can see why he’s searching for a connection with somebody else. I totally understand needing to find that spark with somebody. It makes me feel sorry for the guy, honestly.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think he should be looking for it with an underage girl.”

“No. He shouldn’t,” I say. “But in fairness to Richter, I believe he didn’t know she was sixteen. His reactions seemed genuine.”

“She was underage though.”

I nod. “She was. And we’ll talk to somebody in local PD. Let them handle it,” I tell her. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“That’s fair.”

Astra’s phone rings. She pulls it out of her pocket and checks the caller ID. “It’s Paige.”

She connects the call and presses the phone to her ear. I listen to her side of the conversation which is brief and mostly filled with “yeahs,” grunts, and “I sees” before she hangs up and turns back to me, her tone as serious as her expression.

“What is it?” I ask.

“There’s been another abduction.”

Olange Residence, Norwood Heights District; Chevy Chase, MD

Peter Olange, six-one with neatly trimmed white-blond hair and a strong, athletic build, gets out of his car—a late model black Lexus SUV. It’s broad daylight, but the street beyond the driveway of the Olange home is empty, which makes sense. It’s a neighborhood full of professionals, and most are already gone for the day, so there isn’t a lot of traffic on the quiet, tree-lined street.

Peter grabs a backpack out of the back of his SUV and heads for the front door when a familiar black panel van pulls into the driveway behind him. Peter stops and turns around as the man in the black hoodie with a yellow smiley-face mask jumps out of the van and approaches him. In the blink of an eye, Smiley-Face pulls a Taser from his pocket and points it at Peter who is shouting at him. He drops his bag and turns to run, but it’s too late.

His body grows entirely rigid, and Peter falls to the ground, twitching as thousands of volts of electricity are pumped into his body. Smiley-Face seems to give him another goose of power, making the kid spasm again. Moving quickly, the man in the mask drags the large, well-built Peter back to his van, and though he struggles with the kid’s inert weight, he manages to muscle him into the back. He quickly puts a pair of zip ties around Peter’s wrists and ankles, then slams the door shut and dashes back around to the driver’s side and is gone.

“Two minutes. Tops,” Astra says as she stops the video feed.

“Efficient. Fast,” I say. “Our guy came into this with a plan and executed it flawlessly.”

I almost added “just like at the Barlow scene,” to the end of that sentence, but managed to bite it off before I did. If the Olanges noticed the omission, they give no indication. In fairness, they’ve probably got bigger things on their minds at the moment.

“Wh—what does that mean?” she asks.