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she was more adept at controlling her emotions than he was.
    Of course, a ten-year-old would be better than Burke was in that area.
    The vehicle swerved again, and the agent slowed down even more. Peering out the window, she spied the patchy areas of ice glinting through the tire tracks on the road in front of them. No telling how long it was going to take them to cover the usual thirty-minute trip. At this rate, the warrant could beat them to Hubbard’s house.
    “Is that employee garage heated?”
    Travis lifted a shoulder. “Don’t know for sure, but I’d guess yes. The Mulder estate doesn’t seem to lack any of the amenities.”
    Kell seemed to know where she was heading. It was one of the few advantages to working with him. His quick wits were useful for more than coming up with smart-ass quips. “So we have to wonder if there was also surveillance in the garages and outbuildings. If it were me trying to protect my family, I’d have security there. Just another measure in place in case someone somehow bypassed the system at the gate.”
    She gave a satisfied nod. “So if he hid in the garage or car, those cameras were manipulated as well.” Because it was almost certain some of the others had been. “Otherwise someone would have noted it or the fact that Hubbard never returned to the vehicle at all.”
    Kell turned to look at her. “Which makes you wonder where the hell the bastard stashed himself from four o’clock until sometime after eleven.”
    “And how he got off the estate on foot, carrying the girl.”

    “The least the son of a bitch could have done was leave his garbage out.” The vents under the dash were blasting out heat, so Kell moved his feet farther away. Already they were sweating inside the insulated boots he wore. It was either freeze or sweat to death while they waited in the SUV. There was no middle ground. “We could at least legally go through that while we wait.”
    Despite Travis’s assurances to the contrary, they’d been sitting nearly two hours since their arrival, after it had taken them twice the usual time to cover the distance to Hubbard’s house from Mulder’s. Once the agent had badged the officers watching the house, they’d told them all they knew about the property, which had been exactly zilch. No one had been in or out of it since they’d been dispatched to the scene. The snow on the driveway was pristine. The partially filled-in boot prints up to and around the house belonged to the officers, according to them. Kell didn’t need the absence of tracks to be able to figure that Hubbard hadn’t returned here recently.
    They’d spent the intervening time door-knocking and talking to the neighbors they could find at home, largely in vain. Most claimed they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary around the Hubbard house for the last few days. Macy had elicited the only useful information.
    He glanced in the backseat to note her bent over her PDA. In deference to the warmth in the vehicle, she’d pulled off the butt-ugly hat she’d been wearing to allow her dark hair to curl around her face and shoulders. He remembered vividly that it was as fine and soft as a child’s. With those startling pale blue eyes fringed with absurdly long lashes, she looked about as intimidating as a kitten. No wonder Hubbard’s neighbor across the street had opened up to her.
    According to the lady, Paula Graves, the last time lights had been seen in the man’s house was the night before the kidnapping. She’d worked second shift and had seen one inside light on before she’d gone to bed, which had been nearly one. She’d remembered it, she said, because Nick wasn’t a night owl like she was. If he was home, his lights were always off by eleven.
    And that, Kell considered as he unzipped his coat, meant exactly nothing. Which matched what they had so far on this case.
    “So what’s a place in this neighborhood cost in Denver?” he asked conversationally.
    Travis reached