Maybe they could find Good Boy and get him back.
Maybe he was okay.
She prayed that was the case.
Micah pulled through the gate at Refuge Cove and parked near the house.
For a moment, he didn’t move. He sat there, hands still on the wheel, processing what Hadley had said.
The man who’d picked up the dog wasn’t the registered owner, nor did he know the dog’s real name.
The whole situation had been calculated.
All of it had been a lie.
Micah’s jaw clenched.
Someone had used Good Boy as part of some sort of agenda.
“Let me run those plates.” Micah pulled out his phone and opened the DMV database app. He found the license plate number on the note where he’d jotted it and typed it in, his fingers moving quickly across the screen.
Naomi shifted in the back seat. “Anything?”
Micah waited as the search loaded.
Finally, the results populated. “Got it.”
“What does it say?” She leaned closer.
“Vehicle’s registered to a man named Gary Lee Foster.”
“So the supposed Arthur Bleakman, that guy who made up a name for Good Boy, also used a fake name when he introduced himself to us?”
“Or the guy who met us could actually be Arthur, but he could have borrowed Gary Lee Foster’s vehicle. That is a possibility.” Micah scrolled through the details. “Gary’s address is in Cooperstown.”
“Is there a picture?”
“Let me look.” He did a search and frowned before showing it to Naomi.
“That doesn’t look like the man who picked up Good Boy. How about Arthur Bleakman? Does he have any kind of digital footprint?”
Micah checked for that next. But he couldn’t find anyone with that name within sixty miles of here.
He told Naomi the news, and her frown deepened.
He kept reading, looking up anything else he could find on Gary Lee Foster.
The man had no warrants. No priors. No criminal history at all.
“Gary is from Cooperstown?” Naomi asked from the back seat. “Arthur said he was from Ridgeway.”
“That’s correct.”
“Cooperstown is what? Thirty miles from here?”
“About that.” Micah’s mind already moved ahead. “I’ll head over and see what I can find out.”
He felt Naomi’s eyes on him, sensed the question forming before she even asked it.
She wanted to go.
But he couldn’t let that happen—not until he knew how dangerous this man and this situation might be.
