28. Hendricks
HENDRICKS
The secure facility is outside of Bozeman, buried in a nondescript industrial park that looks like every other forgettable building in Montana.
Inside, it's state-of-the-art—biometric locks, encrypted servers, facial recognition software that can pull a match from a database of two billion faces in under three minutes.
I hand over the notebook to Marcus, my contact who specializes in digital forensics and database mining. He's ex-NSA, paranoid as hell, and doesn't ask questions I don't want to answer.
"Run it through everything," I tell him. "Facial recognition, missing persons databases, social media scrapes, dark web trafficking forums. Blow it up for details—background elements, reflections, metadata if there's any embedded. I need to know who she is and where this was taken."
Marcus takes the notebook and studies the photo. "Timeline?"
"Fast as you can get it."
He spins his chair to face the monitors. "Forty-eight hours, maybe less if I get a hit early."
I leave him to it and head back to the truck. The two-hour drive back to Iron Ridge should clear my head. It should give me time to reset, to rebuild the control that's been slipping since Mandy walked into my kitchen and made herself at home.
It doesn't work.
As I drive through stretches of timber punctuated by the occasional ranch gate, all I can think about is her in my house.
In my space. The way she looked at me this morning.
The challenge in her eyes, the way her body responded even when she was trying to hide it.
The way she said Gabriel's name and something dark and possessive clawed its way up my throat, so potent I had to leave.
I'm losing it.
I grip the steering wheel harder and force myself to focus on the road. On the case. On anything except the fact that she’s been under my roof for less than twenty-four hours and I'm already coming apart at the seams.