Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
For one disorienting second, Austin felt as though he’d walked back into his father’s room.
Then he saw the empty desk. The lack of legal pads beside the telephone. The bedspread pulled smooth and tight.
Austin sat on the end of the bed without taking off his jacket.
Sometime after ten, the ice machine near the stairs cycled and shuddered into silence. A truck pulled into the parking lot below, idled, then cut off. Two doors slammed. A woman laughed at something, and the sound carried over the railing before fading.
His father was in the medical examiner’s cooler across town. The thought was still surreal.
Austin had made the calls. His supervisor. The ME’s office. An aunt in Delaware who cried and asked twice whether Jeff had suffered.
Austin had told her no both times, though he had no idea if it was true.
Now he needed to think about something other than his loss.
His father’s phone pressed against the inside of his jacket. He should have turned it over to authorities hours ago. He knew that. But once he surrendered it, the device might disappear into evidence for weeks—and whatever answers his father had left behind would disappear with it.
He’d turn it over—and soon. He just wanted to look at it one more time first.
For now, he pulled out his own phone and searched Nora Loveless.
He told himself it was relevant. Her name had been on Dad’s phone, and Jacob Morgan had appeared in the case notes. But looking into someone else’s life was also easier than sitting alone with what had happened to his.
The first results focused on Christian’s return. Beneath those were newer articles about Jacob.
Austin skimmed enough to understand the basics. Jacob Morgan had dated Nora for nearly four months. She had introduced him to her family and trusted him around her seven-year-old nephew. Then Jacob had kidnapped Mason and ended up behind bars.
The articles reduced the betrayal to a tidy collection of names, dates, and charges. They couldn’t explain what it had cost Nora, but Austin had seen some of the damage in her guarded eyes and in the way she seemed to weigh every answer before giving it.
No wonder she had studied him as if trust were something he would have to earn.
Austin closed the search and pulled his father’s phone from his jacket pocket. The cheap case was scuffed, one corner cracked. The man had safely carried a firearm for twenty-six years but had never managed to keep his phone from hitting the pavement.
He suppressed a smile at the memory.
He tapped the cell phone screen, and the device lit.
Hours had passed since Austin’s earlier attempts to figure out his father’s code, but the numbers he’d already tried had been useless. His parents’ anniversary. His mother’s birthday. The old passcode his father had used years ago.
He entered his father’s Bureau badge number—the one Dad used to recite like a punch line.
Wrong.
Austin stared at the screen.
He couldn’t keep guessing. Not when the phone might hold the last conversations his father had ever had. He couldn’t risk being locked out.
He set it on the comforter and pressed both hands over his eyes until orange bloomed behind them.
Think.
Austin picked up the phone and entered his own birthday.
The screen unlocked.
He stared at it, still in disbelief that his birthday had worked.
His mind went back in time. Suddenly, he was twenty-two years old again and standing in the hospital while his mother’s monitors went silent. Waiting for a father who arrived four hours later smelling like gas-station coffee.
Ten years of clipped phone calls. Christmases rescheduled around cases. Conversations in which Dad’s attention always seemed to be somewhere else.
A man who’d spent a decade searching for somebody else’s son.
And this was the pin number his father had chosen. Austin’s birthday.
Austin pressed his eyes closed and leaned over the phone.
One of his tears plopped against the cracked corner of the case. He wiped it away with his thumb, but another replaced it. Then another.
His chest tightened until he couldn’t pull in a full breath.
He pressed the heel of one hand against his mouth, holding back whatever sound wanted to come. The walls at the Mountain View weren’t thick. Besides, he wouldn’t have known how to explain the grief if someone heard him.
It wasn’t only that his father was dead.
It was that Austin would never get answers.
For several minutes, he sat bent over the phone as questions about his father’s death and his final moments pummeled him.
Finally, Austin’s breathing steadied. He wiped his face with his sleeve and opened the call log. His gaze went to his father’s last phone call.
It had happened on Wednesday at 11:42 a.m. Incoming. Twenty-two seconds.
The number had no name attached.
Austin did a quick search for the number but, just as suspected, it didn’t turn up anything.
Twenty-two seconds wasn’t much time for a conversation.
But it might have been enough to send his father out of that motel room—and toward the trail where he died.
Nora had the dishwasher half loaded when Wren walked into the kitchen from the hallway.
“Mason’s finally asleep in the spare bedroom.” She lowered her voice as she crossed the room. “It took twenty minutes, two glasses of water, and a promise that nobody was going to disappear tonight.”
Nora slid a plate into the rack. “Where’s Bo?”
“Stretched across the doorway like a furry barricade. I nearly broke my neck getting out of the room.”
“Good.”
After everything they’d learned tonight, neither of them wanted Wren and Mason sleeping in the cabin. It was only a hundred feet from the main house, but it suddenly felt much farther.
Wren leaned against the counter. “Mason wanted to know if the FBI man was coming back.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know.” Wren rubbed her thumb along the counter’s edge. “Then he asked if the FBI man’s dad got taken like he did.”
Nora froze with another plate in her hand. “He heard us talking?”
“More than I realized. I thought he was playing with his Legos.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That nobody took Austin’s father.” Wren rubbed her jaw. “I stayed beside him until he fell asleep, but every time the house made a noise, his eyes opened again.”
Since Mason’s abduction, ordinary sounds didn’t feel ordinary anymore.
“Mom’s asleep?” Wren asked.
“She took her pill at nine.” Nora placed the last plate in the dishwasher and closed it. “Christian’s upstairs. He hasn’t come down since Austin left.”
Wren pulled out a chair and sat sideways in it, one arm hooked over the back the way she’d sat since she was twelve. “Did you see his reaction when we mentioned the note about the Renshaws?”
The muscles across Nora’s chest tightened. “I did.”
“He nearly dropped his glass.” Wren glanced toward the hallway as if making certain no one had come downstairs. “Marlowe was upset when she left. She thinks we’re all keeping things from her.”
“We aren’t.” Nora folded the dish towel over the handle of the oven. “At least, not intentionally.”
For most of Nora’s life, protecting her sisters had meant standing between them and whatever might hurt them. Somewhere along the way, she’d started deciding what they could handle without ever asking. The habit was hard to break.
“I can’t believe Agent Donnelly is dead,” Wren said after a moment.
“Me either.”
“You don’t have to carry it all by yourself, you know.” The exhaustion beneath Wren’s eyes had deepened since Mason’s abduction. She still checked the locks twice. Still watched her son whenever he wandered more than a few feet away. Yet she sat here asking Nora to give her more to carry.
“I thought I was helping,” Nora said.
“I know.” Wren rose and crossed the kitchen. “But sometimes you protect us so hard that it feels like you’re shutting us out.”
Her words landed because they were true.
Nora stared at the closed dishwasher. “Marlowe said that?”
“Not in those words. There were more motorcycle-related threats in her version.”
A small laugh escaped Nora as Wren wrapped her arms around her. Nora held on, and for a moment, neither of them said anything.
“You don’t have to figure everything out before you tell us,” Wren murmured. “Sometimes you can just tell us what you know.”
Over Wren’s shoulder, movement beyond the window above the sink caught Nora’s attention.
A dark figure stood at the edge of the woods behind the barn. A man, maybe. Facing the house.
Nora blinked.
Then there was nothing. Only trees shifting in the wind.
She blinked again.
Exhaustion must be playing tricks on her. That was all. She didn’t mention it. Wren already had enough reasons to be afraid without Nora frightening her over a shadow.
But the unsettled feeling remained in her stomach.
Ghosts from the past were materializing . . . she could feel the unanswered questions as if they represented danger itself.
But how could she protect her family from what she didn’t know?