Bounty Hunter [REWRITTEN VERSION]

Chapter 51: Interrogation

ALEC

A DAY LATER

If there was anything to say about it...between a detective, a seasoned bounty hunter, and a claimed tracker with a dog, he really thought they would have made more progress than they had.

Several hours had gone by, spent working on locating Kishan, with—much to Alec's dismay—not as much to show for it as he would have hoped.

They had even gone as far as to split ways—as much as Alec had first wearied against it. He hadn't wanted to repeat the same mistake that had landed them in this predicament in the first place; being caught off guard while split up. But after a stern reminder from Maize that she could more than take care of herself, and his honest minor concern for Ryder so long as the guy had that deadly canine with him—which he did, at all times—his opinion, though it had never been put to vote, was disregarded. At least it aided them in covering more ground.

They used new cell phones to keep in touch—just one of they multiple wonders from Ryder's underground warehouse of madness that they had allied themselves with. The last he checked, Ryder and his dog had been investigating around the local car shops and rentals, asking to see if anyone—especially anyone fitting Hill's description—had been seen looking for a set of wheels supposedly to leave town. But so far he hadn't reported anything.

Maize...well Maize had gone off to do he didn't even know what. Only every so often did she call in with an update telling them to mark off places that she had already been to. Once she did tell them that it hadn't been logged that any authorities had heard of the fire, or that there was any activity going on in their scanners. How she managed to get access to that information, Alec didn't even want to know. But no reported car thefts. Whether that meant Hill would show up later to do either—get a car or steal one—they didn't know yet. But for now, it meant their search was narrowed down to the town, and whatever small areas surrounded it.

Like he said, they were covering ground. But there wasn't much in terms of actual leads to show for it, merely things to rule out.

As for him, Alec had gone back to the caves—alone, to re-look at the scene they had left there where the abduction of his friend had taken place.

He didn't have a forensics team with him nor did he have a means to preserve the area like might have happened with his regular procedures following up a suspected abduction-case. But it never hurt to follow up on the scene of the crime—he thought that in their rush the day before, there had to be things that they had missed.

He was standing over the same spot he had been hours before, looking down and inspecting the reminiscents of crimson that had long since dried to a stain on the grey rock floor. It was almost like a sense of deja vu. Only this time, his mind wasn't struck into panic, his blood wasn't deranged and pumping from the effects of being shot at, this time he was calm, this time he would be looking at things more closely.

He had light with him, and this time, it was bright enough to illuminate five feet of the tunnel in each direction from where he was standing. Now that he had a full capsule of light, it was easier to see the whole crime scene as it was. And this time, it did not take him long to find what they day before they had missed entirely.

There was blood on the side of the wall, too.

Not as much as had been left of the ground, this was fainter, as if it hadn't had time to properly coat the surface of the rock as the other had. A quick, sudden strike. A faint mental image was beginning to form in the detective's mind; a figure jumps the other from behind, uses the moment of shock to slam their head into the rock and disable them, they the other body falls to the floor with a bleeding head-wound that seeps onto the floor. Creating the stain he was standing in front of.