Crossing Paths (Beneath the Wild Sky #2)

One

“Pax Bond Recovery,” Norah answered her cell phone.

“Which of you Pax girls is this?”

At Barney Thompson’s distinctive voice, she made a face. She would’ve rather talked to pretty much anyone other than the slimy bail bondsman who held the deed to their family home. Thanks for that, Mom.

“This is Norah,” she answered. “What can we do for you, Mr. Thompson?”

“Norah…Norah… Oh, you’re the mousy blond! POS’s kid. How’s he doing?”

“Fine,” she lied, not wanting to go into the gory details of the mess her dad, Dwayne “POS” Possin, was currently making of his life—especially not with Barney Thompson of all people. The only reason they were giving Barney the time of day was because they still hadn’t found their currently-on-the-run mom, and he could make their lives miserable if she missed her first court hearing. “What do you need?”

“All business, aren’t you?” he asked with a stiff laugh.

She scrunched her nose at the two out of four of her sisters who were watching with a mixture of sympathy and apprehension. Norah could barely deal with talking to people outside her family. Making nice with a scumball like Barney was not part of her skill set.

“I have another job for you,” Barney continued.

Her relieved exhale was silent. Even though he sounded a bit peeved, at least he was willing to get down to business. “Who’s the skip?” she asked.

“Devon Leifsen.”

The name didn’t ring any bells, so she repeated it for Molly and Cara to hear. Both of them gave her a blank head shake. “What did he do?”

“You mean what is he accused of doing?” Barney corrected archly.

“Sure.” There was a snap in her voice that she couldn’t help. Barney was quickly wearing through her thin veneer of patience.

“What with your mother’s…situation, I would think you’d be more of a stickler about the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing.” He paused as if waiting for her to comment, but she held her silence until he finally answered sullenly. “He’s accused of being a hacker. He was arrested for deactivating home security systems so his buddies could burglarize the places.”

Norah felt cold rush through her as her gaze flew to Cara. Her sister had been kidnapped a few weeks ago after their security system had been disabled. Maybe it was just a coincidence, since there were lots of hackers in the world, but Langston, Colorado, wasn’t a huge place. Cara gave her a questioning look as Norah asked, “Is he local?”

“If you call Denver local, then yeah.” Barney sounded bored now that she hadn’t risen to his earlier bait. “Look, it’s all in the file I sent over. Find him fast, or you’re not going to like the consequences.”

Norah was already opening her email app and pulling up the business’s account. If there was a chance that this guy helped kidnap Cara, then she was going to relish her part in bringing him in.

“Hello?” Barney’s voice echoed faintly from her phone, and Norah twitched her shoulders in irritation. He’d said that everything was in the file. Why hadn’t he ended the call already? “Hello? Did you hang up on me, you little—”

Returning to the phone display, she pressed the end button. A snort from Molly brought her gaze from her phone screen to her sister’s amused expression. “What?” Norah asked.

Cara sighed, but the corners of her mouth twitched in a way that meant she wasn’t really that exasperated. “Don’t hang up on clients, Norah.”

“It was Barney.” She turned back to her phone, wanting to read the file.

“True,” Molly agreed, the laughter in her voice slipping away. “But as long as he may have the ability to evict us in the near future, it might be a good idea to say ‘bye’ at the end of conversations.”

Distracted by the contents of Devon Leifsen’s file, Norah just grunted an acknowledgment. “The skip is a hacker who’s been disarming residential security systems so his friends can burglarize homes.” She heard Cara’s sharply indrawn breath as Norah continued to scroll through the information. Even though she’d barely glanced at the file, she knew in her gut that Leifsen had to have been at least partially responsible for her sister’s kidnapping. Cara had almost died .

For that, Devon Leifsen was going to pay. Norah would track him down so her sisters could make sure of that. She looked up as she promised, “I’ll find him, Cara.”

“Of course you will,” Molly said, giving Cara’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “And then I’ll bring him in. He’s as good as locked up.”

“I know,” Cara said, although her voice shook slightly.

That tremor made Norah even more determined to locate Leifsen. Even though she wouldn’t be the one physically chasing down the skip and dragging him back to jail, she could at least do her part by discovering his whereabouts. He’d try to hide, but Leifsen would soon discover what hundreds of other skips had learned—the Pax sisters were very good at their job.

***

After dinner, with her belly full and her brain already occupied with Devon Leifsen’s file, Norah settled back on her bed with her laptop warming her thighs. Probably hoping for leftovers, their dog, Warrant, had chosen to stay downstairs with Cara as she did meal cleanup. Although Norah appreciated having the space to stretch out her legs, she missed the furry beast’s warmth.

She read through the bare bones of Leifsen’s entire file, letting the information settle into her brain. He had a few possible connections in Langston, although his home base and main associates were in the Denver area. He was young—only twenty-three—but he’d managed to rack up a solid list of suspected offenses in the five years since he’d been a legal adult. Norah was pretty sure his sealed juvie file would be interesting reading as well.

Like Barney had said, he’d been arrested most recently for his part in three Denver burglaries. of his accomplices had given him up as part of a plea deal. Before that, he’d been accused of numerous crimes, from bank fraud to planting cameras in the dressing area of a local beauty pageant. Norah’s nose wrinkled at that last one.

Not only is he a thief, he’s a sexual predator too. Gross.

Most of the charges against him had been dropped immediately, and he hadn’t been convicted of anything. He’d never been married, and there were no known girlfriends or boyfriends—past or present—listed. His mailing address matched his parents’ house in Golden, and they’d been the ones to bond him out before he skipped bail.

After scanning through the last page of his file, she started searching online for information, starting with his parents, Karen and Bryon Leifsen. They owned several auto body shops along the Front Range, and the couple’s names popped up quite a bit in the Denver social scene. Karen had a few speeding tickets, but otherwise the pair seemed to be generally law-abiding—or at least were good at not getting caught.

A light knock on her bedroom door made Norah jump, her laptop bouncing with the sudden movement. “Come in,” she called, and Cara stuck her head in.

“I’m heading to bed,” Cara said. “Find anything?”

“Not really.” Norah had taken in a lot of information, but she wasn’t ready to start processing it yet, so there were just a bunch of facts about Devon Leifsen floating around her brain.

“Don’t stay up too late.” Cara always told her this, even though she knew Norah almost never took the advice.

“I won’t,” she responded as usual, although she’d probably still be digging deeper into the rabbit hole far into the wee hours. Once she found a trail, it was almost impossible for her to stop chasing it, even for critical needs like eating and sleeping. She worried that if she took a break, she’d never be able to pick up where she’d left off, and that lead would be gone forever.

Once Cara withdrew and softly closed her bedroom door, Norah moved on to searching for information on Leifsen’s few friends mentioned in the file. of them, a Chloe Ballister, was in a modern rock band that played at a bar in Langston on a semiregular basis.

“Of course it’s Dutch’s,” Norah muttered as she made a note of it. The local bar had been a hot spot for trouble over the past few years. “Everything shady seems to come back to that place.”

Chloe was also a regular at open-mic nights at Chico’s Coffee, one of Norah’s favorite places. She wondered if she’d ever been at the coffee shop at the same time as Chloe—or even Leifsen—without knowing it. The thought gave her a shiver. Norah was happy to track skips remotely—she was really good at it, in fact—but the idea of confronting them in person like her sisters did made her want to go hide in a closet.

A faint beep drew her eyes back to her laptop. A black text box with a flashing cursor opened in the corner of the screen, and she blinked at it as confusion slowly morphed into understanding. As letters appeared on the screen—letters that were not typed by her hand—she could only stare in horror.

Hi Norah!

Someone had gained access to her computer.

Her brain couldn’t wrap around this fact. Despite layers and layers of top-notch security, someone had managed to hack into her heavily protected system. Her hand hovered over the touch pad, unsure if she should engage or do her best to kick out the interloper. They didn’t seem to be attempting to access her data, however, and the cheery greeting—including an exclamation mark—threw her off guard.

Who is this? she typed, even as certainty settled inside her. It had to be Devon Leifsen, the hacker she was researching at this exact moment. Anyone else would be too much of a coincidence.

Devon. Nice to meet you.

Her heart was thundering now. She balled her hands into fists, taking reassurance in the bite of her short nails into her palms. Despite the confirmation, doubt took hold. Could it be a prank? Someone pretending to be Leifsen? The only people who knew she was investigating him were Molly and Cara, and neither of them would do something so cruel and pointless. Barney knew, but Norah was willing to bet her left kidney that he didn’t have the know-how to hack her computer. In fact, she was reasonably sure he had to have help sending an email.

What are you doing? Her shaking fingers made it hard to type accurately.

Chatting with you! She’d never seen such a sinister smiley face.

Why did you hack my laptop? The voice in her head was now screaming at her to shut him down, but she had to know.

Because I wanted to introduce myself to the beautiful woman who’s investigating me now. *waves* Hi pretty bounty hunter!

Norah’s gaze flew to the dark window for a terrified second before she looked back at the small, circular lens at the top of her laptop screen. He’s not watching you , her brain tried to reassure her. He’s just trying to scare you.

It was working. She was full-on terrified. Her safe world, hidden behind her laptop screen and passwords and firewalls, had been broken into, and she’d never felt more vulnerable and exposed. With just a few lines of text, Leifsen had destroyed the anonymous security that’d allowed her to help her sisters. How could she do her research work now that the very skip she was looking into had virtually walked into her bedroom to confront her?

With trembling fingers, she closed the text box and then shut down her laptop. As soon as the screen went black, she closed the computer and kept her hands pressed against the top as if to keep Leifsen from remotely opening it, as impossible as that would be. She mentally vowed to cover the laptop camera before booting it up next time. Her gaze darted around her shadowed room, dark without the light from her laptop screen, and landed on the black window again.

Forcing herself to put the computer aside and slide off the bed, she moved to the window, her heart hitting her ribs so hard it felt as if it was going to break out of her chest. The darkness of the room spooked her, but she couldn’t turn on a light, not if he was watching her.

He’s not out there , she tried to convince herself as she drew closer to the glass pane. He’s holed up somewhere miles away, messing with your head from the safety of a friend’s couch.

Despite the logic of that and the high likelihood that he was nowhere near her house, the shadows took on a menacing quality. Someone could easily be lurking in the darkness, staring up at her, taking delight in her fear.

Her breaths came quickly, fogging the glass, and she couldn’t drag her gaze away from the thousand and one possible hiding places right outside her home. Wait—was that a flash of light? She blinked rapidly, but that just made it harder to tell if she’d imagined the glow or not. Her stomach twisted as his typed words ran on repeat in her mind. He could be just a few steps away from her house. If he picked the lock, disabled the alarm, and crept up the stairs, he could be outside her tiny bedroom in mere minutes.

At the thought, her gaze flew to her closed door. Is that creak just the house settling, or did someone take a stealthy step? She went completely still, listening. It felt like the house held its breath along with her. All she could hear was the rapid thud of her heartbeat in her ears, telling her to run.

But she was trapped in her closet of a bedroom. There was no escape.

Her first instinct was to text her sisters. She knew they’d come running to protect her, and they’d deal with the problem so Norah could return to her safe comfort zone, but something in her rebelled at the thought. Leifsen had broken through her security on her laptop. Unintentionally, she’d left a back door unlocked, and he’d used it to slither into their home. Leifsen was her mess, and she needed to protect her sisters from him rather than expose them to danger.

You can handle this . Fear still filled her, vivid images of terrible possibilities flashing rapid-fire through her brain, but she forced herself to shove those unhelpful thoughts away. Grabbing hold of the tiny kernel of anger inside her, she focused on making it grow. Leifsen had destroyed her safe, happy place, ruined the only thing she could do to help her sisters, and she wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He’d dragged her out from behind her screen…so he’d have to deal with the consequences.

Because now Norah was mad.