Page 106 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name

He’d waited for a response. But all he got was that soft chuckle. Then the line had gone dead.

* * *

Ryan had sat there in the dark for a full half hour, his mind cycling through every possible option. Weighing the risks. Calculating the fallout.

The most logical course of action—the one he’d been trained to take—was to call the FBI immediately. Then his boss, Marshal Leacham.

But logic didn’t mean shit when someone had a buzz saw to your wife’s head.

The man’s voice echoed in his skull, low and calm, like he was discussing the weather.Involve anyone else and she’s dead.

His gut reaction had been to trace the call, pinpoint a location, and go there himself. Hunt the bastard down and put him in the ground.

But he only had until midday tomorrow.

And Kylie could be anywhere.

He pressed his fists against his eyes, forcing his mind to focus. The voice on the phone had given him almost nothing—just scraps of information that weren’t nearly enough. Ex-military. Special Ops. A Northeastern accent. White. Older, maybe fifties or sixties.

That narrowed it down to about a hundred thousand people.

Useless.

He exhaled hard through his nose, and for a moment, he saw Kylie at sixteen again. Long red hair. Sweet smile. Sitting in the bleachers, pretending not to watch him play football. She was too cool for cheerleading; she ran with the kids who smoked under the bleachers and skipped school to hang out at Cashmore’s Clearing. He never understood why she turned those beautiful green eyes his way, but when she did, he’d felt like the goddamn king of the world.

They started skipping school together after that. Then whole weekends at his dad’s hunting cabin in the mountains. She’d gotten his name tattooed high on her thigh, where her parents couldn’t see it.

That tattoo was still there.

It would probably be what they used to ID her body.

Ryan shot to his feet, yanked on his jeans, and was out the door before he’d fully decided where he was going.

By the time he made it downtown, his pulse was pounding in his throat.

In his office, he ran the name through every database he had access to.Julia Mikkelsen.Eleven years and one month ago, she’d vanished into thin air. The last trace of her was buried in a sprawling federal indictment against over a dozen Chicago members ofLa Mano Negra.

One of those members? Her fiancé, Daniel Castaño.

Then, just like that, her name disappeared. Became a number. Became nothing.

He hadn’t been bullshitting the man on the phone. Only four government officials and God knew what had happened to Mikkelsen after that.

And if there was one thing the USMS was better at than tracking people, it was hiding them.

But he’d found something. A thread to pull.

One of those four officials. A WITSEC inspector by the name ofInez Sharrow.

His only lead. Which meant she was his only option.

He spent nearly an hour picking apart every angle of the story he’d use, searching for weak spots. But there were too many. He could never plug them all.

In the end, he realized what he should have known from the start—he was going to have to white-knuckle this thing.

He braced his elbow on his desk, exhaled, and tapped out Sharrow’s number.

No more stalling.