Page 75 of Protecting Peyton

“Nope, but Peyton does.”

Walking down to my office, I dialed her. It went to voicemail. “Hey. Call me.”

I tried again, and it went to voicemail a second time, so instead of leaving another message, I called Terry like I had earlier.

“She’s not here,” he told me. “She left a while ago.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

He conferred with Constance and came back with, “She went to get her bike. She said she’d be gone a while.”

“Thanks, man.”Gone a while? Crap.

“Hold on,” Terry added before I could hang up. “Constance wants a word.”

“Sure.”

“I wanted to thank you,” Constance said, “for the flowers.”

“What flowers?” I feigned surprise.

“Don’t pull that on me, March. I’m a trained investigator. You used the same florist as last time, and she admitted it was you.”

I shrugged, even though she couldn’t see it. “You deserved them for going above and beyond, spending your night running down my fingerprints.”

“It’s all part of the job, but thank you anyway. They made my day.”

“You’re welcome. Now I gotta go.”

She hung up after one more thanks.

With a feeling of foreboding, I rushed back to Jordy’s office. “I need you to locate her for me.” Drivers in this town weren’t the best, and I didn’t like the idea of her biking very far.

“I tried that. It was a cell phone, not a land line, and it doesn’t have GPS. I checked.”

“Not the lady who found the bike, Peyton.”

“You should have said so,” our tech guru mumbled at his screen. After a few seconds of keyboard clacking, a map showed up on one of his screens. “She’s the orange dot.” Naturally, he didn’t have to ask me for her phone number.

The dot wasn’t anywhere near her work, and it was moving east. That was not good, because farther east did not translate to a nicer part of town.

“Where’s she going?” I demanded.

“Calm down, Romeo. How would I know?”

What’s with the Romeo reference? Did I haveI kissed Peyton once and want to do it againtattooed on my forehead?

“She doesn’t have a car, and Terry said you could track rideshares.”

“He wasn’t supposed to mention that.” He returned to torturing his keyboard with rapid keystrokes.

I shifted back and forth, waiting for the answer, but careful to not complain. I’d seen Jordy stop work once when his brother Duke pushed him too hard.

A minute later, Jordy sat back. The map scrolled and another dot appeared, with an address in text at the bottom. “That’s her destination.”

“Thanks, man. I mean it.”

“A bottle of Macallan?—”