Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wyatt’s kitchen table was a mess of coffee rings and paperwork he hadn’t touched in three days. The laptop sat open in front of him, screen casting a blue glow across his hands. His phone was propped against a half-empty mug, speaker on.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” His mother’s voice was tight, the way it got when she was trying to hold something together.
“I’m fine, Ma.” He wasn’t. His fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up the program he’d written five years ago. Back when paranoia was just good sense. “Are you?”
“Don’t lie to me, Wyatt. Not about this.”
He exhaled through his nose. The ghost user ID initialized, a string of code that would make his access look like routine system maintenance. Someone running a check on server protocols. Nothing suspicious. Nothing that would ping Sam’s radar.
“The body they found,” he said. “It’s the one from my trunk.”
Silence on the other end. Then: “You’re certain?”
“Same clothes. Same everything.” His jaw flexed. “It’s only a matter of time before they match fibers from my car.”
“Oh, Wyatt.”
“Yeah.”
The program finished loading. He was in. The case file sat there, waiting. All he had to do was click.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” his mother said. “Your father.”
Wyatt didn’t answer right away. A car passed outside, headlights sweeping across the window. He froze, hand hovering over the trackpad. The light slid past. Just a neighbor coming home late.
He forced himself to breathe.
“Of course it’s him,” his mother continued. Her voice went flat. Resigned. “No one else would do something like this. Put a body in your trunk and then move it. Make you find it twice.”
“He wants something.”
“He always wants something.”
Wyatt clicked. The file opened. Pages of reports, photos, forensic data. He started scrolling, scanning for anything that might tell him what his father was after.
“He’s brutal, Wyatt. You know that. I know that.” She paused. “Whatever he wants, he won’t stop until he gets it.”
“I know.”
“So what do we do?”
Wyatt found a section marked Street Contact.
Most of it was scrubbed—names replaced with blocks, addresses blurred, entire lines missing—but the bones were there.
An interview date. A note about a “female transient” who’d been picked up behind the bus station.
Another note: Left Shelter / Unknown Whereabouts.
His stomach turned.
“You need to go,” he said.
“What?”
“Out of town. Tonight. Somewhere he can’t find you.”
“Wyatt, I can’t just—”
“Yes, you can.” His voice came out harder than he meant. He softened it. “Ma, if he’s here, if he found me, then he knows about you. You’re leverage. You know how he operates.”
The line went quiet except for the faint sound of her breathing.
“I have people,” she said finally. “From before. They can get me somewhere safe.”
“Good. Do it. Tonight.”
“What about you?”
Wyatt kept scrolling. Each page felt like a betrayal. Each click was another lie to Sam, to the team, to everyone who’d trusted him.
“I’ll handle it,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
His mother sighed, and he could picture her—standing in her kitchen, one hand pressed to her forehead, trying to think through options that didn’t exist.
“He’ll hurt you if you don’t give him what he wants.”
“He’ll hurt someone else if I do.”
Wyatt hit another subsection. The kind no one wrote unless they wanted it buried.
Female Contact provided details re: disposal procedures.
Contact claims knowledge of organizational hierarchy.
Contact refused formal statement. No fixed address.
Follow-up failed. Contact whereabouts unknown.
His mouth went dry.
“When are you leaving?” he asked.
“I’ll call them now. Be gone by morning.”
“Don’t tell me where.”
“Wyatt—”
“I mean it, Ma. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell anyone. Just go.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“I love you,” she said.
His throat tightened. “I know. I love you too.”
“Be careful.”
“Always am.”
The line went dead.
Wyatt set the phone down and stared at the screen. The case file was still open, waiting. He could close it now. Walk away. Pretend he’d never accessed it.
But his father wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t disappear just because Wyatt refused to cooperate.
And the body in the woods was proof of what happened to people who got in his way.
Wyatt dragged a hand through his hair, then started downloading the file. The progress bar crept across the screen. Five percent. Ten.
Every second felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.
Outside, the night was quiet. No cars. No wind. Just the hum of the laptop fan and the soft click of the hard drive spinning.
Twenty percent. Thirty.
He thought about Sam. About Jo and Kevin and the way they’d welcomed him into the team without asking too many questions. About trust and loyalty and all the things he was about to destroy.
Fifty percent.
His phone buzzed.
Unknown Number: Tick tock.
Wyatt’s hands curled into fists. He forced them flat against the table.
Seventy-five percent.
He could still stop this. Delete the file. Turn himself in. Tell Sam everything.
But then what? His father would just move to the next target. The next leverage point. And people would die.
They always did.
Ninety percent.
The download finished.
Wyatt sat back, staring at the confirmation message on the screen.
He’d crossed the line.
No going back now.
He closed the laptop and stood, legs unsteady beneath him. The kitchen felt too small suddenly, walls pressing in.
He walked to the window and looked out at the dark woods beyond his property line. Somewhere out there, his father was waiting. Watching. Planning his next move.
And Wyatt had just given him exactly what he needed to make it.
His reflection stared back at him from the glass—hollow-eyed, jaw tight, looking like a stranger.
He turned away.
There was work to do.
And not much time left to do it.
Wyatt returned to the table and opened the laptop again. The downloaded file sat in his secure partition, encrypted and hidden. He clicked it open.
Standard information first. Victim identification—James Cooper, FBI. Initial scene reports. Forensic findings. The kind of data any investigator would see.
Then he scrolled deeper.
A section marked [Restricted - Source Id] stopped him cold.
The file was from almost a decade ago. Most of it was blacked out, solid bars of black across entire paragraphs. But fragments remained. Pieces that hadn’t been fully scrubbed.
Female source. Estimated age late teens at time of contact.
Approached agents for cash/food.
Details given regarding disposal procedures and chain-of-command.
Last known seen: outreach shelter intake.
Status: ran off / not located.
Wyatt leaned closer to the screen, squinting at the metadata. His fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up properties, examining the digital fingerprints left behind.
The scrubbing had been done by FBI. Not local PD. High-level access. Multiple layers of security.
Not because she was protected.
Because she was a loose end.
His phone buzzed again.
Unknown Number: Tick tock.
Wyatt stared at the message. Then back at the screen.
Female source.
Disposal procedures.
If she’d talked once, she could talk again. To Sam. To a reporter. To a grand jury.
Wyatt pushed back from the table, chair legs biting the hardwood with a sharp scrape.
His hands shook.
But this had been ten years ago. This witness could be dead already.
Wyatt stared at the redacted lines. At the crumbs of detail that told him just enough to make him dangerous.
His father didn’t just want information.
He wanted a person.
Someone who ran.
Someone Wyatt now had to find first.