Chapter Five: Hidden Message

29 Hours Missing:

Within fifteen minutes, the team was on the sight of the warehouse. Guns drawn, they walked around the parameter of the building, looking for escapes that Cody could use. After they were covered, Jack knocked on the large front door.

"FBI! Open up!"

There was nothing.

"FBI! Come out with your hands up!" Jack yelled again.

There was still nothing. Jack nodded at Samantha and Vivian to follow him in. "Danny, Martin. Watch the escapes."

The three of them proceeded inside. Danny and Martin waited outside the building with baited breath. There wasn't any shouting, no gun shots. It wasn't necessarily a good sign because it meant that Cody had left.

Then there was a loud noise to Danny's left. He turned and saw the back door swinging open and a teenage boy running at breakneck speed away from them.

"Martin! He's going for it!" Danny yelled, but Martin was just a step behind as Danny took off after the boy.

"Hey! FBI!" Martin yelled after the boy.

The boy glanced behind him, but kept running.

Danny and Martin were gaining quickly, and finally he was within reaching distance. Danny grabbed his shoulders, and tackled him down on some stuffed trash bags. He pushed him face down on the ground and pulled his arms behind his back. Martin stood just beside Danny with his gun aimed at the boy.

"Where is she, Cody?" Martin asked through his heavy breathing.

"I don't know!" Cody managed to say as Danny put the cuffs around his wrists. "Ouch, damnit, I don't know!"

"Well, then, we'll just have to take you back to the FBI offices and see if you're more talkative there," Danny said grimly as he hoisted the boy to his feet by his collar.

---

"Where is she?" Jack asked Cody from inside the interrogation room. He had brought Martin in with him, but had forbidden Danny for coming in. He probably would have torn the boy apart if he was so much let into the room. But Jack knew without a doubt that Danny was standing right outside the room, watching and listening to the boy.

"I told you, I don't know," Cody repeated. Cody looked much like the waiter had described him: about 5'7" with short, dark hair. His eyes were very dark, and they moved around the room in such a way that he looked like some kind of rodent. His left cheek was bruised, there was a small cut at the corner of his mouth, and he was sporting a black eye. But that wasn't from Danny tackling him.

"Where'd you get the bruises?" Martin asked coldly.

Cody shrugged. "Brothers."

"You don't have any brothers," Jack replied sharply. "Now listen up, Cody. I've got a sixteen year old girl out there who is missing. She was last seen with you and your girlfriend after you extorted two thousand dollars out of her. You were also seen with her with a gun to her back. Now, here's what I think what happened. I think that after you dropped Heather off at her house, I think that you had no need for Natalie anymore. So I think you killed her. She must have put up a pretty good fight though. She gave you a nice black eye there."

"I didn't kill her."

"Then where is she?" Martin asked impatiently.

"I don't know!"

"Then what the hell happened?"

"I… I couldn't have her around anymore," Cody said unwillingly. "She knew too much. I knew she was going to tell someone eventually. And I'd go to jail…"

"Oh, well, you can bet your life that you're going to go to jail after we're done with you. What happened?"

"I called… one of my friends—"

"Drug buddies?"

Cody hesitated before nodding.

"And?"

"I told him that she had seen everything. I told him that I couldn't kill her though because she was my girlfriend's best friend."

"So he came and killed her?"

"I don't know. He told me to meet him in the warehouse at about midnight last night. And he'd take her off my hands."

"And so he took her."

"I have no idea where she is now."

"What's his name?"

"Troy… Baker."

"What kind of car was he driving?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know a lot of things," Martin said angrily. "Anything else useful? Do you know where he was going to take her?"

Cody shook his head.

Jack looked at the boy for a few seconds before standing up abruptly. "You are disgusting," he spat.

He walked over to the door and opened it. As expected, Danny was waiting there outside the door with his arms crossed, not taking his eyes off the boy.

---

"Jack, they searched the warehouse," Samantha said, catching up to him in the hall after he came out of the interrogation room. "And they found a letter."

"From Natalie?"

Samantha nodded.

"What kind of letter?"

"It's… odd. I'm not really sure what she thinking…" Samantha handed him a piece of paper with handwriting on it.

"Mom, Dad, and Justin,

First off, Mom, there's a COVER LETTER for my English paper in my bedroom. There are a few corrections: the whole words are underlined and the single letters are marked.

Second of all, I really hope and pray that you understand what's going on. Dad, your cool fish do make your pond amazing. Have faith in me. There are some things that you have to do really urgently so that you can be happy. Justin, give that book back that you took from his house. Yes, I know about it. I'm in a quandary about what to ware to that party at the girl's house. It's at 11:15 on Wednesday night. I know that's late, but I really want to go. A man in the mall dropped something one day and I was going picking it up for him. He thanked me. Up in the sky, Sirius will be visible soon. He was my favorite character as well because he's loyal I think I know too much about Harry Potter. I think that he's going to kill Harry in the last book. That hurt me. I saw his movie about a car. The movie was lame, but the cover was cool. It was black and it had his license plate on it. I'll order it off eBay. The product code is A30. Order it for me using my debit card. You'll need to know the last three digits of my card which are 4G5. We're going to see a movie, if that's OK.

Mom, Dad, and Justin, if I never see you again, please know that I always love you. I'm sorry for anything that I ever did to hurt you. Take care of Lucy, and make sure she doesn't pee on my bed. Tell Heather that I forgive her, and that I hope she stays on the right path. Oh, and Mom, your birthday present is under my bed. I haven't wrapped it yet. I really do love you all.

Natalie.

"It's very… random," Jack said, frowning as he looked over it. "Except for this last part. That looks true."

"You don't think this is a suicide note, do you?" Samantha asked gently.

"No. I don't think so. This was in the warehouse where she was?"

"Yeah, and so was this other piece of paper. I don't know what it is."

She handed him another piece of paper that had some random dots and dashes spread out across the page.

"It's definitely not Morse code…" Jack said.

"What's not Morse code?" Danny had just walked up.

"This is a letter Natalie left in the warehouse. And it doesn't make any sense," Jack said handing it to him. He noticed the papers in Danny's hands. "What've you got?"

"Forensics' report on the warehouse. There was definitely trace of drugs found, and blood—AB positive. Same as Natalie's." Danny was now looking at the letter Natalie had written and the piece of paper found with it. "Hey, can I take this really quick?" he asked suddenly.

"Sure. And check in with Martin on that background of Troy Baker."

Danny nodded and walked back to his desk. He spotted Martin's back as he typed away madly on his computer.

"So what's the deal with Troy Baker?" Danny asked, looking over his shoulder.

"Not good. Armed robbery. Drug possession. He got off on technicalities. This guy is not good news."

"And we can find him…?"

"Nowhere. The address he listed was that warehouse. The phone number is one to a payphone. He's going to be hard to find. I'm going to tell Jack."

Martin got up and left, leaving Danny with Natalie's letter in hand. His eyes scanned the piece of paper. There were so many weird things about the letter. Why was "cover letter" in all caps? What on earth was she talking about? And what was the piece of paper with the random marks on it about?

Danny sighed and put the randomly marked piece of paper over the other one as he walked back to his desk. He glanced down at the papers again, and stopped.

The papers were relatively thin and he could see through randomly marked one and still read the letter. With the corners of the papers lined up so that ones was directly and symmetrically on top of the other, there was a line that went directly under the word "ware." Almost as if it was underlined.

Danny reread the sentence: "I'm in a quandary about what to ware to that party at the girl's house." He frowned. Why would an A+ Honors English student use the wrong use of the word "ware"? She clearly meant "wear," and yet she had written "ware."

Frowning still, Danny's eyes glanced up to the top of the letter where it said "COVER LETTER."

"The whole words are underlined and the single letters are marked."

He looked at the two pieces of paper on top of each other and realized that several of the words were underlined. The word underlined after "ware" was… "house."

Danny's heart leapt and he ran to his desk and grabbed a pen and began to translate Natalie's hidden message.

---

Jack was sitting at his desk with his hands over his face. It didn't seem that there was any hope left for Natalie. They had hit a dead end with Troy Baker. They didn't know where he was, who he was (besides the fact that he was dangerous), or how to reach him.

He really hated cases like these. The ones were the victim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. It was so awfully depressing. It was times like these that made Jack hate what he did.

"If this girl was ten years older, I think I'd marry her," Danny said, pushing the door open to Jack's office.

"Danny, what are you—"

"You would think that an A+ Honors English student would know the difference between the words 'ware' and 'wear,' right?" Danny asked, excitedly.

"They sound the same to me…"

Danny made an impatient noise and wrote the two words down on a notepad on Jack's desk. "Those two words. You'd think she'd know the difference, right?"

"Right…"

"Well, look. See, here, she confuses the two words," Danny pointed to the mistake.

"Danny, what is this about? A grammar lesson?"

"No, no, no, no, no. You see this piece of paper here?" Danny held up the randomly marked one. "This, this is her cover letter."

"The cover letter that she talks about?"

"The very one. She said that 'the whole words are underlined and the single letters are marked.' Jack, look. If you put this piece of paper over the letter, some of the words and letters are—"

"Marked. She's sent us a message."

"And my guess is that she put it in code because she didn't want Cody to know about it."

"You've already got it written out, I assume."

"You've assumed correctly," Danny grinned. He pulled another sheet of paper out of his pocket with his messy handwriting scrawled on it. "And she writes: 'Heather and Cody have me. There are drugs at his house. I'm in a warehouse. It's 11:15 on Wednesday night. A man is picking me up soon because I know too much. I think that he's going to kill me. I saw his car. It was black. The license plate is A304G5. We're going to OK.' OK must be Oklahoma. Jack, they're headed to Oklahoma."

"I think we need to hire her when she graduates," Jack said as he stood up. "Alert all stations, hotels, and restaurants from here to Oklahoma to look for that license plate—"

"Martin, Vivian, and Samantha are already on it. We figure that they couldn't have gone further than Illinois by now, so we're covering up to there."

"You've hit your stride," Jack said, smiling for the first time in days. "You ran the license through the DMV records?"

"Of course," Danny said, handing Jack a sheet of paper. "It's registered to Troy Barker, who has a house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He either switched the name here or he gave Cody the fake name. You know, if I was going to change my last name, I'd change it a little bit more than from Baker to Barker."

"You would, would you?" Jack asked him, with his eyebrows raised.

Danny didn't reply as he got very interested in the DMV papers.

"Why the hell would he drive up from Oklahoma?" Jack asked, knowing better than to push the matter at the time.

"He was probably in town, doing some business in New York, got the call from Cody, and figured he'd just take her down to Oklahoma with him. It's further away. He probably thought the further away from New York that they got, the less chance that we had of finding her."

There was a knock on the door. The two men looked up to see Vivian standing there with a small smile.

"We've got a sighting," she announced. "Local police just spotted the license plate in a small town outside of St. Louis. And the motel there just got a reservation with the name of 'Trey Baker.' It's him."

"Well, let's get out there," Jack said as he pulled on his jacket.

---

A/N: Last night I watched the movie Thirteen. I cried. I just completely broke down. It's a really well done movie, although it's rather disturbing. If you want to understand who Heather really is, check out that movie. The movie hit so close to home because of my friend who went through the exact same thing. To see what had happened that vividly was just too much. Watch it with your friends, with your mother, with your siblings.

This is the second to last chapter of the story. Short and sweet. Well, ok, not really sweet. But remember that this is supposed to run like an episode. Anyways, reviews are again appreciated a lot. They keep me going. School is a beast. I'm already dropping one of my honors courses. I just can't deal with it. So expect the next chapter to be up… sometime next week. Thursday or Friday? I'm not sure. Anyways reviews love.

Oh, and if you want to try to figure out how the letter works out, be my guest. It really does work out. I'll show you how at the end of next chapter.

And on one last note, be sure to look for my Danny/OC story coming soon. Currently, I have it titled "It's Like Nothing I've Ever Known."