Page 134 of The Last Close Call

“Why?”

“I think she’s in danger.”

“Danger? From what?”

She clutched her hands in her lap. “I don’t know exactly. I just know she’s in some kind of trouble.”

Rowan took a deep breath and blew it out, and Jack waited for her to explain.

“So... Joy’s been very upset. Paranoid. She’s been having trouble sleeping,” Rowan told him. “I mean, I get it. The WCR thing—everyone is jumpy. I’ve had insomnia, too. I feel like I’m in college again.”

Jack darted a look at her.

“This has been traumatic for her,” Rowan went on. “I thought it was the whole adoption thing—us dredging up her past and all that—but then we had this conversation when I was at her house working with her, and I realized it was more than that. She’s not just anxious, she’s really afraid. To the point where she’s having panic attacks.”

Jack glanced at her, not liking where this conversation was heading at all. “You’re saying she’s afraid for her safety?”

“Right. I mean, I thought maybe she was being irrational, and I tried to talk her out of it. I tried to tell her that he won’t know it was her—”

“ ‘He’ as in Anderson?”

“Yeah, I tried to reassure her that the police won’t reveal who tipped them off to his identity, in case she was worried about him coming after her.”

They reached a juncture of two highways, and Jack stopped. “Tell me where we’re going.”

“Sage Springs.” She picked up her phone and tapped open a map. “Take a left.”

“The town of Sage Springs? That’s forty-five minutes away.”

“I know.”

Jack hung a left.

“So, I told her right, didn’t I?” Rowan looked at him. In the greenish glow of the dashboard, he could see the stress on her face. “You guys keep that information under wraps, don’t you? The names of family members who give you identities and DNA samples?”

“We try. But sometimes it comes out, especially when a case goes to trial,” he said, knowing it wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear.

Rowan shook her head. “Well, I suspected that, but I tried to reassure her anyway. And I thought I understood what her anxiety was about. But today I realized I didn’t understand anything at all.”

He looked at her. “What happened today?”

TWENTY-NINE

Rowan stared ahead at the two-lane highway. Just saying everything out loud put a cramp in her stomach.

“This afternoon I was clearing up loose ends,” she said.

“Loose ends?”

“With the Will Anderson case.” She glanced at him. “Back when you gave me this, you made it clear everything was urgent, that you were on a ticking clock, that you needed answers ASAP. So, as soon as I had something, I pulled up and handed it over. But it wasn’t comprehensive yet.”

“How do you mean?”

Rowan looked at him. Even in the darkness, she could see the tension in his face, as though maybe he sensed what she was going to tell him.

“You wanted a lead, and I gave you a lead,” she said. “I gave you his birth mother. That was what I had, based on my strongest match. But there was another match—a weaker one—on another branch of his family tree, and I had already started down that path, making inquiries, when everything started falling into place around Joy Kendall and the Kendall family. Well, I finally heard back from someone on the paternal side of the family. It’s the Learys, by the way.”

“Who?”

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