And we're back for round 5. Hope you all enjoy. I'm pretty sure I actually managed to reply to all signed reviews this last time around (shocker), so for those of you anonymous people, thanks so very much for the encouragement! I hope to hear feedback from all of you again. Goodness, I sound like a broken record sometimes.

Chapter 5

10:33 p.m.

Something about the air seemed extra still tonight. Maybe it was because it had stopped raining at long last. The clear, quiet atmosphere was a stark contrast to the loud, pelting rain of earlier. All that could be heard when the car first parked was the occasional splash of another vehicle traveling down the rain-soaked side streets of Ontario.

A sense of hope bubbled up inside David as he stepped out of Colby's sedan. The call came in to Colby's cell phone about fifteen minutes prior—the Ontario Police Department had located Don's SUV parked in an alleyway beyond a row of warehouses. Finally. Don had been missing for over five hours and this was the first good lead they had.

At the alleyway's entrance, David and Colby flashed their FBI badges to a silent officer guarding the scene. Wordlessly, Colby lifted up the yellow crime scene tape and allowed David to step through first.

Up ahead stood the familiar form of Don's SUV. It was the same car he'd had for years. David couldn't count the amount of times he'd ridden in that exact vehicle, on their way to crime scenes and raids and sometimes just over to a nearby bar for a drink with the team after work. It looked so innocuous, parked where it was. Never could one tell that this particular car was actually parked where no one would have expected.

David and Colby were approached by the officer in charge of the scene. The man stuck his hand out, which David quickly shook.

"I'm Officer Harvey Gerrick," the uniformed officer introduced himself.

"Special Agent David Sinclair and this is Special Agent Colby Granger."

Gerrick seemed to sense that David just wanted to get down to business. The officer would know that one of their own had gone missing, and time was of the essence.

"Well, obviously, we found the car you've been looking for." Gerrick gestured towards the SUV. "It was sitting here just like this when we found it, driver's side door open and all. But that's not all we found here. We found a string of shell casings that start from right under the driver's side door and trail down the alley for a few yards, and then they stopped."

"Shell casings?" Colby asked incredulously. He wandered over to the other side of Don's SUV, towards the driver door and found the aforementioned shell casings trailing on the ground. "There's four of them here."

"All right, so if the gun was fully loaded, then whoever the shooter is didn't stop because he was out of ammo," David speculated. He came around to have a look at the shell casings himself. "He was probably running while he was firing, probably in that direction." He pointed towards the alleyway entrance.

"Right," Gerrick agreed. "We found one of the rounds inside an empty trashcan that had been laying out in the alley. Probably had been shot and knocked over."

"You bag it?" David asked. In response, Gerrick held up an evidence bag with the round he'd been referring to.

"Okay, so our shooter had to be shooting at someone," Colby pointed out. David heard what Colby didn't say - that the likely scenario was that someone was shooting at Don.

"Well, whoever his target was, he didn't hit them," Gerrick supplied. "There's no blood anywhere."

"So what the hell happened here?" David asked. He rubbed a hand over his forehead. This was frustrating. He just couldn't quite put all the pieces together here to get a coherent picture of what had happened.

"There's one other thing," Gerrick announced. "We've got some prints from inside the vehicle. They might just belong to your agent, but you know, maybe they don't."

"Right," David said, absently. He didn't feel like focusing on the fingerprints at that point. If they yielded some interesting results, great, but at this moment they didn't tell him anything new. He left Gerrick and Colby, wandering down the alley to where the trashcan still lay on its side.

"All right," he called back to Colby and Gerrick. "Well, going under the assumption that someone grabbed Don, maybe Don gets out of the car and tries to make a run for it somehow. The kidnapper shoots at him, but misses. He hits the trashcan, which falls out into the alley."

"Don doesn't have time to stop, so he trips over the trashcan," Colby added.

"Right," David agreed. "And the kidnapper doesn't really want to kill him, at least not yet. So he sticks the gun in Don's face and brings him back over to where he has another car stashed and they drive off."

"I wonder if there are any security cameras around here," Colby wondered.

"I'll go check on that," Gerrick offered. David nodded a thanks to the officer.

"Now we just have to figure out who the hell grabbed Don," David summarized. "And where they are now."

Finally, a real, solid lead on why Don had mysteriously vanished. A small modicum of excitement allowed itself to blossom within David. They were getting somewhere.

10:33 p.m.

Despite what movies and TV said, it was never normal for an FBI agent to be abducted and thrown into the trunk of a car. And trunks were not the optimal place in a car to ride. The fiery aches in Don's joints would testify to that.

Don had no clue where they were, just that they must have gone on one hell of a windy road to get there. The shifts in his equilibrium as he lay cramped in the dark trunk, after he'd regained consciousness from the blow to his head, had left him completely disoriented.

He also knew, now that he'd been released from said trunk, that he was in a forest somewhere. A difficult glance around toward his watch told him it had also taken them nearly two hours to get there. Although, accounting for the wet roads, they might not have actually driven as far as it felt.

There was also a small house, wherever they were, which Don knew for sure because he was now inside the house. More precisely, he was in the basement. Back in the trunk, Don had discovered that his hands had been cuffed behind his back. Eventually, when the car had finally stopped moving, Shore had come around and let him out of the trunk, grabbing his handcuffed wrists and steering him into the house. It was a small, plain house, but Don didn't see much of it before being shoved down a dark, narrow flight of stairs to a basement.

His hands had been uncuffed, pulled around a support pole behind him, and recuffed. He sat down, his hands now stuck behind him. Shore left, and Don was now alone in the cold, dark basement.

Okay. Although he'd been alone and in the quiet while stuffed in the trunk, the tight, cramped atmosphere was not conducive to any real thinking. Not to mention he had a splitting headache radiating out from where the butt of Shore's gun had struck him. But now for the first time, Don was in a position to seriously reflect on his current situation.

Shore was holding him in at least a somewhat remote location, stuffing him down into a basement and cuffing him to a pole. It'd be impossible to escape from his current position, obviously, so somehow he'd have to overpower his captor the very first chance he got. It wasn't realistic to count on a rescue at this point. If he had no idea where he was, then how the hell would his team find him? He supposed Charlie could have some sort of magical algorithm that would pinpoint his location, but he couldn't count on that either. Charlie never performed his best work under the stress of a loved one in danger.

Obviously Shore had taken him out of revenge. And clearly, he intended to kill Don and he intended to make it slow and painful—otherwise he would have just shot Don back in the alleyway and disposed of the evidence.

Don shifted; his arms were cramping painfully in the awkward position they were stuck in. They were already a little sore from being pinned underneath his body while in the trunk, and now they'd been cuffed behind him and around a decent-sized pole for the last couple hours. He craned his neck around and shifted his hands as best he could to get a look at his watch. Yep, he'd been down in the basement for just over two hours.

He needed to come up with a good, solid escape plan. Attempting to overpower Shore back in the alleyway had ultimately not been the greatest idea, but maybe there was a more effective way to accomplish that particular goal.

He'd have to somehow get Shore to uncuff his hands long enough for him to take advantage. To Don, Shore didn't seem like a hardened criminal so much as an aggrieved brother who'd let his anger fester for a decade. After ten long years, he'd let his rage push him to the tipping point—and he'd finally taken action against the man he'd felt responsible for his brother's death. Don figured Shore probably had never committed a felony in his life until today. The man was bound to make a mistake somehow.

But on the other hand, Shore also seemed really smart. The only stupid mistake he'd made so far was letting himself get kicked with a car door—but even then he'd recovered quickly and regained control. But he'd been hesitant. Back when they were driving around in the valley in Don's SUV, Shore had refused to tell him anything about why he'd been abducted. There was really no logical reason for that that Don could see. It seemed like Shore had just been exerting needless power over him for the hell of it—just to show that he was in control of the situation. To Don, it had seemed almost desperate.

But how to exploit that? Don wondered. How could he use Shore's inexperience to his advantage?

He'd have to catch his captor making another stupid mistake born from lack of knowledge.

Don had an idea. It was rough and seemed kind of silly, but maybe it would work.

10:33 p.m.

Unfortunately, Charlie was all too aware of how dysfunctional he was in situations like this. He knew all too well how much his mind would tend to just shut down, as if someone had hit a giant "off" switch in his brain. As Don had told him last time a loved one was kidnapped, the stress would hit too close to home and he couldn't see straight.

As was the case now, clearly. After he'd arrived at the FBI office a few hours ago with Amita, Nikki, and Liz, Amita had come up with the idea of running a Bayesian filter on some of Don's old cases—much like Charlie had done when a Federal judge's wife had been murdered a few years before. Unfortunately, there were far too many variables and not enough data to narrow anything down. At that point, there'd been no forensic evidence, no established motive, or any information at all, for that matter. There was no way to narrow down the suspects without information with which to build an equation.

It didn't matter to Charlie, though. He was driven to work and rework the equation no matter how sparse the results were. He had to be missing something.

At this moment, Amita was returning to the room War Room, bringing him a cup of coffee. She set it down on the table while Charlie continued scribbling on the board in a frenzy.

"Charlie," Amita said, and Charlie could almost detect amusement in her voice—which, in his current state of mind, was not appreciated. "Charlie, you're writing so fast that I can't even read what you're doing anymore."

He stopped, turning to her and staring at her. He had no idea what she was talking about. He turned back to his board, stepping back and looking closely at it. She was right. His writing was getting a tad sloppy.

"Charlie, I think you need to take a break," Amita continued. "I mean, now would be a perfect time. I don't think you're going to really make this equation work right now. Maybe later, someone will find something and we'll have more to work with. Until then, let's just take a break, maybe clear our heads a little."

No. His wife was not making sense at all. "Take a break?" Charlie asked incredulously, his voice cracking. "How can I take a break? How can I take a break from searching for my own brother? He's out there somewhere and he needs us and who knows what's happening to him and if anyone can find him—"

"You're right. If anyone can find him, it would be you." Amita walked around the table to stand next to him, their shoulders touching. "But obviously, this isn't working. You've lowered the parameters so much that any results you might get aren't really going to mean anything, and I know you know that. So let's just stop, take a break, and then later we'll try to think of something else, okay? But taking a quick break is important, or you're going to wear yourself out and then you really won't be any help to Don."

Charlie sighed, accepting the coffee cup that his wife was holding out to him. He knew she was right. He was going down that path again, and he knew it. Glancing again at his harried, indiscernible scrawl on the clear board next to him, he could see it mathematically. The equations written there were vague, revealing practically nothing—except one thing. They stood out as a clear testament to Charlie's anxiety and fear. These equations weren't the work of a confident, brilliant mathematician. They were the desperate hopes of a man worrying about a loved one.

How many times had he been in this situation? More times than he could count, and he was supposed to be a math genius. It had started with his mother, he supposed, and a few months spent in the garage with the infamously unsolvable P vs. NP. Then again with Don, less than a year later, the loss of his mother still fresh in his mind. He'd retreated into the same problem again, unable to cope with the prospect of loss again—especially when he'd felt that it was his fault Don had been put in danger and had nearly had his head shot off by those bank robbers. Then Don had been stabbed a few years later, and Amita had been kidnapped only a few short weeks after that. He hadn't handled that well, either, and he knew it. And now? When would life stop threatening to take the ones he loved? Maybe then he'd stop having these types of mental breakdowns.

TBC