Without a Trace Read Online Free PDF Page A

the access through the windows. They’d come in the front, he concluded, and a search of a room this size wouldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes.
    “You’ve still got your tail, Doc.” He turned but didn’t sheath the knife. “Pick up what you need. We’ll talk next door.”
    She didn’t want to touch the clothes, but she forced herself to be practical. She needed them, and it didn’t matter that other hands had touched them. Moving quickly, she gathered up slacks and skirts and blouses. “I have cosmetics and toiletries in the bath.”
    “Not anymore you don’t. They dumped the lot.” Trace took her arm again. This time he checked the hall and moved quietly to the room next door. Again he braced Gillian against the wall and opened the door. His fingers relaxed on the handle of the knife, though only slightly. So they hadn’t made him. That was good. He signaled to her to come in behind him, double locked the door, then began a careful search.
    It was an old habit to leave a few telltales, one he followed even off duty. The book on his nightstand was still a quarter inch over the edge. The single strand of hair he’d left on the bedspread hadn’t been disturbed. He pulled the drapes, then sat on the bed and picked up the phone.
    In perfect Spanish that had Gillian’s brow lifting, he ordered dinner and two pots of coffee. “I got you a steak,” he said when he hung up the phone. “But this is Mexico, so I wouldn’t expect it for about an hour. Sit down.”
    With her clothes still rolled in her arms, she obeyed. Trace pushed himself back on the bed and crossed his legs.
    “What are they after?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “They’ve got your brother. Why do they want you?”
    “I occasionally work with Flynn. About six months ago I spent some time with him in Ireland on Horizon. We had a breakthrough.” She let her head tilt back against the cushion. “We believed we’d found a way to immunize the individual cell. You see, in ionizing radiation injury the main structure affected is the single cell. Energy rays enter the tissue like bullets and cause localized injury in the cells. We were working on a formula that prevented molecular changes within the affected cells. In that way we could—”
    “That’s just fascinating, Doc. But what I want to know is why they’re after you.”
    She realized she’d nearly been reciting the information in her sleep and tried to straighten in the chair. “I took the notes on this part of the project with me, back to the institute, to work on them more intensely. Without them it could take Flynn another year, maybe more, to reconstruct the experiment.”
    “So you’re the missing piece of the puzzle, so to speak?”
    “I have the information.” The words began to slur as her eyes closed.
    “You’re telling me you carry that stuff with you?” God save him from amateurs. “Did they get it?”
    “No, they didn’t get it, and yes, I have it with me. Excuse me,” she murmured, and went to sleep.
    Trace sat where he was for a moment and studied her. Under other circumstances he would have been amused to have a woman he’d known for only a few hours fall asleep in the chair of his hotel room in the middle of a conversation. At the moment, his sense of humor wasn’t what it might have been.
    She was deathly pale from exhaustion. Her hair was a fiery halo that spoke of strength and passion. Clothes lay balled in her lap. Her bag was crushed between her hip and the side of the chair. Without hesitation, Trace got up and eased it out. Gillian didn’t move a muscle as he dumped the contents on the bed.
    He pushed aside a hairbrush and an antique hammered-silver compact. There was a small paperback phrase book—which told him she didn’t speak the language—and the stub of a ticket for a flight from O’Hare. Her checkbook had been neatly balanced in a precise hand. Six hundred and twenty-eight dollars and eighty-threecents. Her passport picture was