“Other than Sean about the car? No. No one, but she doesn’t know where he lives, right?”
“Not unless he told her,” Clark confirmed, “but the police should have been able to pull his address off his driver’s license record using just his name.”
“You’d think that would be the first action that the police took when she showed up with a ransom note, wouldn’t you?” Clint mused. “Contact the local LEOs and have someone verify he wasn’t tucked up in his bed?”
“Normally,” Clark agreed. “I can’t think of any good reason why they wouldn’t have, but obviously they haven’t contacted our local cops because Sean didn’t know he was missing.”
“Unless they are trying to limit their own liability,” Jackson’s quiet voice came from the loveseat. Everyone turned his direction and he shrugged. “Think about it. Mitch’s father was taken down for being a corrupt cop, right?” He paused for the murmur of agreement. “We know he was involved in a trafficking ring and we suspected some of the members were dirty cops but couldn’t prove it. If these cops are trying to skate the line between helping her and not getting busted, maybe they weren’t willing to leave a digital fingerprint by illegally accessing private records.” He shrugged. “If they already had him, there’d be no reason to risk it, right?”
“Then how’d they find him in the first place?” Clint asked.
No one had an answer.
“She’s got to be involved,” I said with absolute certainty. “Shelly hasn’t seen or communicated with her since the sentencing.”
“You’re sure?” Colby asked.
“Positive.”
“He’s right,” Jackson said quietly. “Mitch and I were just talking about her last week. Well, in a roundabout way, anyhow,” he clarified, his cheeks flushing. “He was considering contacting a lawyer to find out if he qualified for a preemptive restraining order.”
“And it wasn’t because she’d been in contact?” the other twin, Colt, pressed.
“No. I pushed him on it and he insisted he hadn’t had any contact with her, he was just trying to keep it that way.”
“Would anyone else know they are estranged?”
I shrugged. “I doubt it. Shelly doesn’t like to share his private business with strangers.”
“What do we know so far?” Colt asked.
Clark gave a quick rundown on the weirdly minor car accident, the scent of nitrous oxide in the car, the yoga balls, and was about to start on the break in at All Things Wild and the deleted camera footage when Leia cleared her throat.
“Dad? I need a map.”
“Of what, honey?”
Leia’s eyes fluttered open for the first time and I nearly gasped at the luminous violet color. Her mouth tightened slightly in annoyance but I wasn’t sure if it was because of me or her dad’s question. “He hasn’t gone far but Uncle Clint and Colt won’t be able to follow his trail.”
“Why not?” Colby asked, digging through a satchel on the floor beside him and pulling out a large road atlas.
“They put him in a box,” she said, her sightless eyes nearly glowing as she stared at him. “Like a coffin but made out of concrete board to keep his scent in.”
I sucked in a breath and her eyes turned toward me, her face softening. “He’s not still in it,” she assured me. “It was just until they got him where they were going.”
“Is he..can you tell if he’s okay?” I asked, hating the quiver in my voice.
Leia shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m pretty sure he’s still alive, but I don’t know if he’s injured. If Uncle Trevor was here, we could try to reach out on the astral plane but I can’t do that alone.”
Colby laid the book of maps in front of his daughter and gently led her hand to it, smiling when she snorted.
“Yeah, yeah. We both know you know it’s there. Just humor your old man, honey.”
Leia snickered and shook her head, carefully opening the cover of the book and gently thumbing through the pages, stopping to stroke her hand over each page as she did. When she was about two thirds of the way through the pages, Leia stopped suddenly, her brows drawing together as she touched the print.
Leia’s second hand joined the first, all ten slender fingers sliding over the image before her left hand came to a stop.
Colby leaned over eagerly. “What do you have?”
