if Nate hadn’t caught her, she likely would have collapsed onto the ground.
“Where are they?” she begged. And she just kept repeating it.
Nate glanced all around them. There were thick woods on one side of the road and an open meadow on the other. The grass didn’t look beaten down on the meadow side so that left the woods. He shoved his hand over Darcy’s mouth so he could hear any sounds. After all, two gunmen and three hostages should be making lots of sounds.
But he heard nothing other than Darcy’s frantic mumbles and the approaching siren.
“They were here,” Nate said more to himself than Darcy, but she stopped and listened. He took the hand from her mouth. “That’s Kimmie’s diaper bag.” It was lying right against the point of impact.
“And that’s Noah’s bear,” Darcy said, reaching for the toy.
Nate pulled her back. Yes, the children had likely been here, but so had the kidnappers. The diaper bag and the toy bear might have to be analyzed. Unless Nate found the children and kidnappers first.
And that’s exactly what he intended to do.
“Wait here,” he told Darcy. “I need to figure out where they went.” He tried not to think of his terrified baby being hauled through the woods by armed kidnappers, but he knew it was possible.
By God when he caught up to these men, they were going to pay, and pay hard.
“Look!” Darcy shouted.
Nate followed the direction of her pointing index finger and spotted the name tag. It was identical to the ones he’d seen Tara and the other woman wearing in the preschool. This one had the name Marlene Lambert, a woman he’d known his whole life. Her father’s ranch was just one property over from his family’s.
“The name tag looks as if it was ripped off her,” Darcy mumbled.
Maybe. It wasn’t just damaged—one of the four crayons had been removed. He glanced around the name tag and spotted the missing yellow crayon. It was right at the base of the rear doors.
“She wrote something.” Darcy pointed to the left door at the same moment Nate’s attention landed on it.
There was a single word, three letters, scrawled on the metal, but Nate couldn’t make out what it said. Later, he would try to figure it out, but for now he raced away from the van and to the edge of the road that fronted the woods.
Nate didn’t see any footprints or any signs of activity so he began to run, looking for anything that would give them a clue where the children had been taken. Darcy soon began to do the same and went in the opposite direction.
He glanced up when Dade’s truck squealed to a stop. His brother had put the portable siren on top of his truck, but thankfully now he turned it off. Unlike Darcy and Nate, Dade was coming from a straight part of the road and had no doubt seen the collision in time. That was why Nate hadn’t bothered to go back to his car and try to retrieve his cell phone so he could alert whoever would be coming from that direction.
“They’re not inside,” Nate relayed to his brother, and he kept looking.
Dade cursed. “There’s a helicopter on the way,” he let Nate know. “And I’ll call the Rangers and get a tracker out here. Mason, too,” Dade added the same moment that Nate said their brother’s name.
Mason was an expert horseman, and he was their best bet at finding the children in these thick woods. First, though, Nate needed to find the point at which they’d left the road. That would get him started in the right direction.
And he finally found it.
Footprints in the soft shoulder of the road.
“Here!” he called out to his brother. But Nate didn’t wait for Dade to reach him. Nor did he follow directly in the footsteps. He hurried to the side in case the prints were needed for evidence, and there were certainly a lot of them if castings were needed.
But something was wrong.
Hell.
“There’s only one set of footprints,” Nate relayed to Dade.
Dade cursed too and fanned out to Nate’s left, probably looking for more prints. There should be at least three sets since the adults would be carrying the babies.
“The person who made this set of prints could be a diversion,” Nate concluded, and he hurried to the other side of the road, hoping to find the real trail there.
Darcy quickly joined him. She was still limping, and blood was trickling down the side of her head. He hoped like the devil she wasn’t in need of immediate medical attention or on the verge of a panic attack. He needed her help, her eyes, because these first few minutes were critical.
“Go that way,” Nate instructed, pointing in the opposite direction where he intended to look.
He ran, checking each section of the pasture for any sign that anyone had been there. He knew the kidnappers weren’t on the road itself because Darcy and he had come from one end and Dade the other. If two kidnappers and three hostages had been anywhere near the road, they would have seen them.
Nate made it about a hundred yards from the collision site when he heard Dade’s cell ring. He didn’t stop looking, but he tried to listen, hoping that his brother was about to get good news. Judging from the profanity Dade used, he hadn’t.
“This van’s a decoy,” Dade shouted.
Nate stopped and whirled around. Darcy did the same and began to run back toward Dade. “What do you mean?”
“I mean two other eyewitnesses spotted black vans identical to this one.”
Darcy made it to Dade, and she latched on to his arm. “But there’s proof the children were inside. Noah’s bear and Kimmie’s diaper bag. Marlene’s name tag is there, too.”
Dade looked at Nate when he answered. “This was probably the van initially used in the kidnapping, but the children and Marlene were transferred to another vehicle. Maybe they were even split up since at least two other vans were seen around town.”
Nate had already come to that conclusion, and it made him sick to his stomach. He couldn’t choke back the groan. Nor could he fight back the overwhelming sense of fear.
“If they split up, then there are probably more than two of them,” Nate mumbled.
That meant things had gone from bad to worse. The kidnappers could have an entire team of people helping them, and heaven knows what kind of vehicle they had used to transfer the children.
Nate was betting it wasn’t a black van.
It could have been any kind of vehicle. Darcy and he could have driven right past the damn thing and wouldn’t have even noticed it.
“We have people out on the roads,” Dade reminded them. “More are coming in. And there’s an Amber Alert and an APB out on the van. SAPD and all other law-enforcement officers in the area will stop any van matching the description. We’ll find them, Nate. I swear, we’ll find them.”
