54. Hendricks
HENDRICKS
Ilead Mandy down the reinforced stairwell, my hand at the small of her back. She's wearing my T-shirt again—and nothing else.
My cock pulses at the thought of her bare under the shirt. Apparently, being buried in her for hours wasn’t enough.
Focus, Hendricks.
At the bottom, I stop in front of her to punch in the eight-digit code and press my thumb to the biometric scanner. The vault door releases with a pneumatic hiss.
"Jesus." Mandy puts her hand on my back and tries to look over my shoulder. "You've been holding out on me."
I glance back at her. "You never asked."
"I asked if you had a computer."
"You asked if I could run facial recognition. I said yes." I push the door open and motion her inside. "How did you think I did it?"
“I don’t know. A Ouija board.” She steps past me into the comms room, and I watch her take it in: the three curved monitors mounted on the far wall, the server rack humming quietly in the corner, the secondary workstation with its array of external drives and backup systems. The room is small—maybe ten by twelve—but every inch is optimized.
"I have an electronics hard-on right now," she says, running her hand along the console of the main workstation. "This is beautiful."
"It's efficient."
"It's overkill." She runs her fingers along the edge of the center monitor. "What is this, a 49-inch ultrawide?"
"Forty-nine-inch curved, 5120 by 1440 resolution." I move past her to wake the system. "The side displays stay dedicated to live feeds. I don’t like windows stacked on top of each other."
"And the server rack?"
"Custom build. Commercial-grade workstation.
More processing power than most businesses.
" I pull up the secure email interface. "Redundant storage. Air-gapped archives. Dedicated AI accelerators. It’ll chew through facial recognition, satellite imagery, financial records, and communications metadata simultaneously without lag. "
"Stop.” Mandy fans herself. "You're turning me on."
I pull her between my legs, my hands on her hips under the shirt. "It’s just hardware."
"No, Adrian." She loops her arms around my neck. “It’s foreplay.”
I bite her nipple through the shirt, gratified when she gasps. "And I haven’t shown you the network architecture yet."
She grips my hair, pulling my head back. “Are you flirting with me, Hendricks?”
“I don’t flirt.” I slide my fingers between her legs and into her, watching her cheeks flush and her eyes go hazy. As I pump into her slowly, I snag a chair with my foot and roll it over. I ease my hand out and guide her to the seat. "Stop trying to distract me. We have work to do."
Breathing heavily, she watches as I lick her from my fingers. She tugs the shirt down, her thighs pressed together. “You are a fucking menace.”
Ignoring the fact that I’m harder than I’ve ever been, I turn back to the monitors and pull up the encrypted email from my contact.
The files load one after another. Raw images. Metadata. Search logs. Every dead end Marcus hit trying to identify the girl.
Mandy rolls the chair closer as I open the first file. Time to find out why someone went to so much trouble to make a woman disappear.
The young woman’s face fills the screen.
"Blown up like this, she looks really young," Mandy says quietly. “But she’s a little older than me when I was taken.”
For a second, all I can think about is the men who touched her. Most of them are dead. The fact that I wasn’t the one who killed them feels like a personal failing.
I force my attention back to the screen, zooming back out to take in the full frame. "Let's see what the photo itself tells us. Maybe we can ID her that way."
I start with the background. The setting is clearly equestrian—wooden stall doors visible behind her, hay bales stacked in the corner, riding equipment hanging on the wall. The lighting is natural, streaming in from what looks like a large window or open door to the left.
"Stable," Mandy says. "High-end, from the look of it."
"Agreed." I zoom in on the stall doors. "Look at the hardware. Brass fixtures, custom ironwork. This isn't a public riding facility."
"Private estate?"
"Most likely." I shift focus to the girl herself. "Now, look at what she's wearing."
Mandy leans in closer, her hair brushing my shoulder. "Riding jacket. Breeches. Boots."
"Designer riding jacket." I fight the urge to pull her onto my lap. "Not fashion. Equestrian. The cut, the stretch panels, the stitching. Custom or European." I zoom in on the boots. "Parlanti, maybe De Niro. Handcrafted. Fifteen hundred dollars once you add the custom fitting."
"So she's rich."
"Maybe." I enlarge the image again. "Or she spends time with people who are. Money buys clothes. Old money buys habits."
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No logos. Everything fits perfectly. She’s standing like she’s been on a horse since she could walk.” I tap the screen. “People who buy riding clothes for the aesthetic don’t wear the boots in.”
Mandy's quiet for a moment, studying the image. "What's that?"
"What's what?"
She points at the screen. "There. On the saddle behind her. That shadow."
I zoom in on the area she's indicating. There's a saddle resting on a rack in the background, partially visible. And on the saddle flap, there's a mark—faint, but distinct.
"Brand," I say. "Or a maker's mark."
"Can you enhance it?"
I pull up the image enhancement tools and isolate the section. The software processes for a few seconds, then renders a clearer version. The mark is still shadowed, but the shape is visible now: a stylized W with what looks like a mountain peak integrated into the design.
"That's not a saddle maker's mark," Mandy says. "That's a ranch brand."
She's right. I've seen enough Montana ranch brands to recognize the style. "Which means this photo was taken on a specific property."
"Can you search it?"
"I can try." I screenshot the enhanced brand and open the ranch brand database. Montana requires all livestock brands to be registered with the state. The database is public record, searchable by design.
I upload the image and run it through the pattern recognition software.
The search takes longer than usual—the brand is partially obscured, which means the software has to run multiple iterations with different parameters. Mandy shifts beside me, her hand coming to rest on the back of my chair.
"Come on," she murmurs. "Give us something."
The software pings. Three potential matches.
I pull them up side by side. The first two are close but not quite right—the mountain peak is wrong, the proportions off. But the third one—
"There." Mandy points at it. "That's it."
She's right. The W, the mountain peak, even the slight curve to the base. It's a perfect match.
I click on the entry. The registration information loads.
Brand: Whitlock Mountain W
Registered Owner: Whitlock Cattle Company
Location: Paradise Valley, Montana
Registration Date: 1879
"1879." Mandy whistles. "That's—"
"Old money," I finish. "Very old money."
I open a new search window and type in "Whitlock Cattle Company Montana." The results flood the screen.
The Whitlocks aren't just wealthy. They're Montana royalty.
Cattle barons going back five generations. Tens of thousands of acres in the state. Diversified holdings in real estate, energy, agriculture. Political connections at the state and federal level. The kind of family that has buildings and scholarships named after them.
"Jesus," Mandy says, reading over my shoulder. "These people are untouchable."
"No one's untouchable." I pull up the family tree. "But they're close."
The current head of the family is James Whitlock, 67, widowed. Two sons, both involved in the family business. Younger brother, deceased, ranching accident. Former sister-in-law, remarried and living in California. One niece.
"There," Mandy says, pointing. "Click on that family photo."
I click on it.
It's a stiff photo you’d expect from a family like this: a gathering of unhappy people staring with dead expressions, probably taken for a Christmas card. The one bright spot in the picture is a little girl with red hair.
Mandy leans in. “It’s the girl from the notebook. I just know it.”
I nod. She’s younger here—maybe thirteen—but it’s unmistakably the same person. Same eyes, same bone structure, same slight tilt to her chin. I search for Whitlock’s brother’s obituary and three seconds later we have a name.
"Clara," Mandy says softly. "Her name is Clara."
"She's twenty-four now, same age listed in the notebook," I say, checking the dates.
"We need to find her.” Mandy stands. She pushes her hair back. "We need to make sure she’s safe."
“We will.”
“Why would they target her?” Mandy shakes her head. “It doesn’t make sense to go after someone so high profile, even if she’s buried in the system.”
That’s the question. I turn back to the monitor, but something else is bothering me. Turner didn’t hide Clara’s photograph—he hid the memory card.
I pull up the directory Marcus sent over and open the folder containing the accessible files.
Mandy sits back down. “What?”
“The photograph told us who she is.” I scan the file names. Photos. Documents. Three encrypted files Marcus is still working on. “But someone cut a compartment into the binding of that notebook to hide this.”
Her expression sharpens. “Which means?”
“It means Clara isn’t the secret.” I click on the first file. “Whatever’s on the memory card is.”
Her eyes narrow. “Meaning whatever’s on it is important.”
“Important enough that Turner didn’t want anyone finding it.” Photos. Documents. Three encrypted files Marcus hasn’t cracked yet. I open the first file.
Finding Clara was the easy part. Now we have to figure out why Turner wanted her—and why every road leading to her seems to run straight through Mandy.