Chapter 25 – Jensen
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jensen
I paced to the window in the office at Resting Warrior Ranch and ignored the throbbing in my head.
But damn, it hurt like a fucking bitch.
It didn’t fade as I turned back and strode to Jude’s desk on the other side of the room. Back and forth. Over and over. I couldn’t stop thinking about Kenzie. She had to be terrified. Was she hurt?
Worse?
I couldn’t even allow myself to think about that.
I pivoted too quickly and almost lost my balance. Once my head quit spinning, I started my steps again. Back and forth. There was no goddamned way I could stand still. I needed to move and burn off energy, too full of pent-up anger.
“Jensen?” Lucas asked from behind Daniel’s desk, where he was staring at the computer screen. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital and at least have them check for a concussion?”
I grunted, debating if I should even answer him. My reply would remain the same. No .
When I’d woken up at the cabin, I’d found my head a bloody mess and Kenzie gone. My heart had almost stopped as I feared the worst, but she hadn’t been dead. I’d clung to enough clarity in my mind to call Lucas.
Lucas and Harlan had been in town and raced to the cabin immediately. While Lucas was helping me, Harlan did a quick search, confirming what I already knew. Kenzie was gone.
With effort, they both got me into the truck and drove back to the ranch to rally the others while Harlan filled in Charlie on the phone. He was currently off following up on a lead from the highway patrol, but he said he’d check in with us soon.
“Jensen?” Liam repeated, his tone even, when I didn’t answer Lucas.
They were handling me. Managing me. I was a liability, and everyone in here knew it.
“No. There is no way in hell I’m wasting time worrying about myself.” I rolled my eyes, regretting it immediately as pain pierced my skull, and started pacing again. “We need to focus on finding Kenzie.”
Because of the attack at my cabin and Kenzie’s kidnapping, it was now all hands on deck. A couple of the Resting Warrior guys were out of town, but everyone else was searching and calling in every favor they could to try to find her.
They’d found nothing but me at the cabin, and I hadn’t seen much except a guy in a mask and a baseball bat swinging at my head. It was lucky I’d managed to get my arm up to partially deflect the blow or I’d probably be dead now.
Harlan had searched the cabin inside and out. He’d managed to find two sets of footprints in the snow but not much else.
Tracks from another car were there, but they didn’t help much either. I couldn’t even confirm a timeline; I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. We had nothing to go on, but my friends were all determined to work on this from as many angles as we could.
Liam watched the security camera footage from nearly every shop in town that had one, hoping we’d get lucky and capture an image of the vehicle that had taken Kenzie from the cabin.
Harlan was checking back through the hotel employee list. I knew I should have looked too, but with the pounding in my head, I was afraid I’d be sick if I tried. I’d only seen my attacker for a few quick seconds, and he’d had a mask covering his face. I recalled the man was tall and thin, but without being able to see his face, I knew there was no way I could match him to anyone in the records.
We’d gotten slightly luckier with the second man, a bald, stockier guy, whose image had been captured on an old camera I’d set up near the back of my cabin to catch still images of wildlife that came by. The image was blurry, but at least it was something.
Jude had contacted every computer specialist he knew to see if we could get the image cleaned up and obtain info on the man. Since he’d been outside alone, he hadn’t put on his mask yet, so we might get lucky with his ID.
Jude slammed his hand down on the desk. I winced as we all turned toward him. “Finally caught a break. Got an ID on the bald guy. It’s Mark Cruz.”
Lucas scoffed, shaking his head. “Now, why am I not at all surprised by that?”
I turned toward him, hating how fast I moved my head. It hadn’t been just my head that had taken a hit. My neck was sore too, likely from the angle I’d fallen and passed out. I wouldn’t complain, though. I couldn’t, not when I feared Kenzie suffering a far worse fate.
“Who is Mark Cruz?”
“A lowlife we’ve had a run-in with before,” Lucas summed up.
Harlan nodded. “He’s got a brother who’s done time for assault. He’s the worse of the two, but apparently Mark’s making a name for himself as a criminal too.”
“He was arrested a while back during the dogfighting ring roundup, but charges were dropped. Nothing could be pinned on him directly,” Liam added.
The dogfighting ring. I’d heard about that. I doubted any of them would ever completely forget that nightmare. I hadn’t been around Resting Warrior at that time, but I’d heard about it later at family dinners when they reminisced. Something like that didn’t ever really go away.
But considering that was how Noah and Kate and Daniel and Emma had all found each other, both good and bad memories were involved.
Jude scrubbed a hand down his face. “But Mark’s got no ties to Alan Ard. Still, I’m going to call Charlie and have him head to Mark’s last known address, see if we can turn up anything. It’s about an hour from here.”
“I’ll head out there too,” Harlan volunteered. “Poke around, see if there’s anything to be found.”
I looked at Harlan then around at the other guys, not sure if I should insist on going or not.
Lucas walked over and squeezed my shoulder. “I think you’re needed here more than there. Harlan will let us know immediately if he finds anything. The chances of Mark Cruz going back to his place are slim.”
I nodded, but I didn’t like it.
“I’ll keep you posted, I promise,” Harlan said then took off at a jog out the door.
A few minutes later, Daniel walked in from the other room, phone to his ear. The grim expression on his face warned me that he wasn’t here bearing good news. He hung up, shaking his head.
“What?” I asked.
“That was the prison. I wanted to set up an early-morning visit with Alan and talk with him before he was released. See what we could observe from him if he was asked face-to-face about Kenzie. ”
“Prison said no?” Lucas rolled his eyes. “Did you tell them Kenzie has been kidnapped?”
Daniel shook his head again. “Worse. Alan Ard was let out yesterday.”
I tensed, fisting my hands, wanting to lash out. “ What ?”
“What the fuck?” Lucas said at the same time.
“Why in the hell would they release him early?” I asked.
“Evidently, the parole board had a last-minute schedule change. They ended up shifting as many cases and hearings as possible. Alan was moved up,” Daniel explained.
Our frustration was shared, and we all had to adjust our plans now. We’d planned to have someone follow Alan when he got out next week. Even though the parole officer would be in contact with him after his release, we were going to make sure someone tailed him for a while. If he was the stalker, he’d make a mistake.
Lucas looked over at me. “Could Alan have been the one who caught you with the baseball bat?”
Jude pulled up an image and spun his laptop around so I could see it. Bastard was handsome in a slicked-back-hair way.
“How tall is he?”
Jude turned the computer back to himself. “Says 5’10”.”
I shook my head. “Then no. I’m 6’1”, and this guy had a couple of inches on me. And he was sort of skinny. Alan is more muscular.”
And the fucker had used those muscles to hurt Kenzie. I wanted to put him in the ground.
“Okay,” Lucas said. “So, the second guy was probably hired along with Mark Cruz too. Honestly, I doubt either of them is the stalker, just hired thugs.”
“Unfortunately, the news about Alan gets worse,” Daniel said. “The prison official I spoke to said that he personally didn’t agree with Alan being released. He’s been in for thirteen months, and for the first six, he was a troublemaking pain in the ass. Fights, even talking about how he was going to kill the people who put him in jail.”
“Fuck.” I kicked the leg of a chair as I paced back again. I did not want to hear that. Alan had to have been talking about Kenzie. She was the only person who’d pressed charges against him and got him arrested.
He wanted her dead.
“But then in the past seven months, his behavior improved remarkably, enough that they shortened his sentence.”
“Overcrowding,” Jude quipped unhappily.
“Alan was an asshole, risking a longer stay, but then he did a one-eighty and became a model prisoner,” Daniel continued.
It was interesting that Kenzie’s stalker problems had started about six months ago, not long after Alan started behaving himself. But Alan couldn’t have been the stalker from prison, right?
Something wasn’t adding up here.
But one thing I knew for sure: I didn’t trust the fact that the man had changed his tune. Alan hadn’t gone from wanting to kill Kenzie to model prisoner for no reason.
He’d had a plan.
“Find out anything else about him?” Lucas asked.
“Not many visitors at first.” Daniel crossed his arms over his chest. “Then about eight months ago, a Jada Moyer started visiting him. She met Alan when she was visiting her brother, who is also in jail there. But then she stopped logging in to visit her brother to visit Alan instead.”
“Sounds like a romance,” Liam said. “And could be the reason he cleaned up his act.”
Daniel nodded. “The prison official seems to think the same.”
I finally gave up on pacing and slumped into a spare chair, frustrated beyond measure. I didn’t give a flying fuck about this little love affair. I failed to see how this applied to Kenzie’s situation.
If anything, Alan finding a new woman to have in his life reduced the likelihood that he’d want to screw around with anything to do with Kenzie. Alan moving on should be a good thing.
My friends talked on, debating how to interpret this news about Alan’s release. They were all able to do something to help find Kenzie. They all had their purposes. All I could do was sit there and nurse this killer of a headache.
Beneath the throbbing pain, though, something nagged me. The more I tuned out the others and tried to pick at the errant thought that wouldn’t let go of me, the louder it became.
Jada.
It wasn’t too common of a name, and I’d seen it somewhere. I pulled the spare laptop over and scrolled through the hotel employee list again. I might not be able to match a picture of a man to someone in here, but if I could find this woman…
There. I slapped my hands to the desk, pulling myself up straighter.
“What? What is it?” Jude asked.
I pointed at the image that was on my screen. “Jada is a unique name. I remember seeing it when Kenzie was looking through photos of people who work at the hotel. There’s a Jada Banks.”
“Jude,” Daniel said. “Look up what you can find on Jada Banks.”
Within a few seconds, he was rattling off info. “Moyer was her maiden name. She’s divorced, but she never went back to it. Yep, brother’s name is Moyer too.” His fingers clicked rapidly on the keyboard. “And yep, Jensen was right. She’s a PR associate at the hotel we’ve been looking into.”
We all looked around at one another, one by one .
“Holy shit,” I muttered. “Kenzie’s stalker is a woman .”
And I had no doubt in my mind she was working with Alan. She clearly had a connection to him, visiting as regularly as she did. While he’d been locked up on the inside, she was out and about, free to do whatever she could to attack Kenzie.
“Call Charlie and update him about this,” Daniel told Jude, who was already on the phone making that call.
Jada Moyer might be a woman, but that didn’t mean she was any less deadly to Kenzie.