The Doll by Taylor Stevens Page B

bureaucratic aggravation necessary to gain access to Breeden’s visitor records. Pinpointing who she’d been talking to was easy considering there was only one name on record, though not one he recognized.
    In the Explorer, Bradford shut his eyes and ran through their conversation, making mental notes and jotting words down on paper so as not to forget them. Lack of sleep and twenty-four hours of stress was starting to take a toll and irritation was setting in, made worse because he was now uncomfortably into his second day in the same set of clothes.
    He pulled his phone from the console. Missed call from Samantha Walker. No voice mail, just a text asking him to get back to her. And a missed call from Alexis, Tabitha’s daughter, which got his mind churning. He waited until he was on the road, heading east on 84, before he returned Walker’s call.
    “What did you get?” she asked.
    “Enough to know we’re moving in the right direction,” he said, “but not enough to take a shortcut. You at the office?”
    “I’ll be there in five,” she said. “I’m on my way back from Addison Airport. Why?”
    “I’ve got a name for Jack to run, can you pass it along?”
    “Yeah. And I’ve got a name for you,” she said.
    “Who?”
    “Michael Munroe.”
    “You’re shitting me.”
    “Nope. They had docs in her name—or I should say
his
name. And the guy accompanying her—him—is Valon Lumani.”
    Bradford swore under his breath. The name Lumani was familiar to him from the blackmail pages. He was a kid, trained monkey and right-hand man to the Doll Maker, an orphaned nephew who had been under the Doll Maker’s wing since he was in diapers. That Lumani had been personally sent to collect Munroe was telling, as was the fact that he’d come prepared with documents for Munroe’s male persona. But the detail that put Bradford’s foot to the floor and sent the Explorer surging was that Lumani had traveled under his own name.
    If the profiles assembled in the documents were accurate, the Doll Maker was a perfectionist, a stickler for detail, a man who lopped off fingers and toes, sometimes arms and legs, to punish those who failed to meet his expectations. If the nephew wasn’t worried about putting his real name on the line, then they weren’t worried about Munroe coming back after them.
    He said, “Off the top of your head, who do we have on reserve?”
    “Adams and Gonzalez.”
    Men that didn’t get a lot of hazard time but were kept on call in case personnel was needed on short order. They weren’t vested as part of the core team but had been with the company long enough to step in just about anywhere when needed. “Bring them both inand set them up for surveillance,” he said. “I’m going to need them for round-the-clock tracking.”
    “For how long?”
    “As long as it takes. I’ll pay the bill out-of-pocket, so don’t harass me about the resource expense, and I need you and Jack to start breaking down threads from that dossier and see what you can pull.”
    “We’ve been on it all night,” she said. “I’ll call the guys in as soon as I get back to the office.”
    “Listen,” he said. “I need you to do me a favor and swing by a couple of places—just drive-by stuff, see if you spot anything out of place: surveillance, odd activity, that type of thing.”
    “Okay,” she said, but he could hear the sigh in her voice. “Where to?”
    “Michael’s sister’s place. I just need to be sure we’re not overlooking anything.”
    “More hostages?”
    “Yeah, exactly. I’ll text you the details.”
    He sent Walker the information, set down the phone, and stared through the windshield at the three hours of road ahead. He didn’t have the manpower, the resources, to protect everyone. His mind churned over what Breeden had said, and more specifically what she hadn’t. She’d pointed the Doll Maker’s men toward Munroe and Logan, but the why escaped him. What need did a man like the Doll