“You mean the evidence that was blown up in the explosion?”
Trey chuckled. “Yes.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Well, the good news is, Sheriff Endsley’s on the scene. Brantley’s leadin’ the charge here. He wanted me to call, check in.”
“He said that?”
“Not in so many words, no, but I got the gist of it.”
“Is he pissed?”
“I think he would be if it weren’t for the fact it was the smart thing to do,” Trey answered. “That and JJ’s house blowin’ up and all that shit. How is she, by the way?”
“Holdin’ it together.” He gave Trey a high-level rundown of the doctor visit.
“Well, you keep her off her feet and let us worry about the rest. Cool?”
“For now.”
“Good. We’ll keep in touch.”
Before he could ask more questions, try to dig for details, Trey disconnected.
Baz had come here to keep a low profile until they could figure out what happened at JJ’s. Now that the crime scene was destroyed, did they have to stay hidden? Or would they be better off at HQ? Somewhere they had access to the equipment needed to track down Dante and whoever was responsible for this mess.
He considered calling Brantley, asking him, but decided against it. For now they would stay put, see what they could do from this end. JJ needed a quiet place to rest. And once she was feeling better, she would need some time to pull herself together. Not to mention, Baz wasn’t keen on spending the day tiptoeing around the office to appease the masses.
When he heard the shower shut off, Baz headed back down the hall to the bedroom. He waited patiently for JJ to emerge from the bathroom. She was wearing a robe, her hair wet and hanging down her back.
“Here,” he said, hurriedly pulling back the blankets on the bed. “Rest for a little while.”
She didn’t argue and he knew that meant she was in pain. Otherwise JJ would’ve told him to get bent so she could take care of business.
“I’ll come back to check on you in an hour.”
He left JJ curled up on her side, still wrapped in the robe, blankets pulled up to her neck.
Baz returned to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the bar with the iPad.
His first goal was to call the local hospitals, see if Dante’d been brought in. If that didn’t work, he would retrace Dante’s steps for the past few days, find out what had prompted him to contact JJ the way he had, figure out where he’d gone. And yes, that was him holding out hope that Dante wasn’t stuck in some dungeon, bleeding out from a missing finger.
He called every hospital and emergency clinic within a fifteen-mile radius of Coyote Ridge. And that was saying something considering with the last economic boom, those freaking twenty-four-hour jobs had popped up on every street corner. Unfortunately, none of them had seen a man missing a finger. At least not in the past day or so.
Refreshing his coffee, Baz considered options for tracking Dante. He figured digitally was a good start, since he was stuck here, and the rest of the team was dealing with JJ’s house.
Christ. How the hell was he supposed to tell her about that? That everything she’d had was now gone?
While he pondered how to do that, he ventured back down the hall, peeked in on her. She was exactly as he’d left her.
With her still resting, Baz had time to do something that would lead to him giving JJ some hopeful news when she joined him. It first required him to reach out to Charlie for a bit of information to help with the search. She graciously gave him Dante’s phone number and a message from Brantley that basically said they would talk later. Luckily for him, Charlie was much nicer in relaying it than he figured Brantley would’ve been.
Turned out, finding Dante was next to impossible. His phone was turned off, or—if it was the one they’d found this morning—it had been destroyed if it was still in JJ’s house. Regardless, the last cell tower it had pinged happened to be the one closest to JJ’s house, which was no surprise. He decided to look at the other towers it had pinged in the past forty-eight hours, but that proved futile. The other few Dante’d been tracked by were close to downtown Austin and the route to Coyote Ridge. Which told him absolutely nothing.
When he heard footsteps in the hall, Baz paused his research and went to start another pot of coffee.
JJ appeared, looking a little better than she had. Her hair was still damp, but she was wearing a pair of light gray sweatpants, a plain black long-sleeve T-shirt that swallowed her up, and on her feet were a pair of thick wool socks.
