Page 18 of Crossfire

Who tried to kill me, and why?

Waiting for the bus to arrive, I closed my messaging app and prepared to search for answers.

8

IVY

Don’t do this, Ivy.

Detective Mitchell was looking into the guy; he and his team were far more skilled than I was at trying to uncover his identity.

And yet…I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t even wait until I got home.

Call it morbid curiosity, call it a desperate need for answers, but I had to know why.

When you spend time building up a relationship with someone and they manipulate you and trick you with the intent of ending your life, it’s not as easy to let it go as you would think.

I opened my favorite browser on my phone and typed my first prompt into the search.

How to find the identity of a person using a phone number

Maybe you should have done this BEFORE almost getting murdered, Ivy.

Seriously, as someone with a bachelor’s degree inDatelineand48 Hoursepisodes, I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for this crap.

After perusing through several results, I clicked on one that looked legitimate and typed in the phone number “Bob” had been using to text me.

When the reverse lookup came back empty, though, frustration bubbled up inside me. I tried several other sites, including combinations of Bob and Robert with the number.

Damn it. Nothing.

On a whim, I typed in my phone number.

Like a serial killer’s wet dream, the very first site revealed my name and, even more unsettlingly, my address.

But with Bob’s, nada.

Search:Why wouldn’t a person’s information come up with a reverse phone number search?

Answer, after reading several posts:Likely a burner phone.

Search:How can you track the identity of someone who purchased a burner phone?

Answer:Virtually impossible.

Clenching my jaw, I opened Instagram and went to the direct messages where Bob and I had first started talking. When he had first reached out to me, I had done a cursory look, but once he and I got deeper into conversations about my father, I had let my guard down like a naive schoolgirl.

Today, I clicked on his profile and began to search that information online much deeper. The link, the profile picture, the name, everything. But it was like he was a ghost.

If I didn’t have the text messages proving otherwise, I’d almost accuse myself of having hallucinated the entire thing.

Speaking of text messages…

What would happen if…

No, that won’t work.I’d literally beaten the crap out of him, and while he’d still been alive when I ran away, it wasn’t that long after that the bomb went off. Had Bob been killed in the blast? Or had he set it off as he fled the scene of his crime?

And even if Bob was still alive, it’s not like he would suddenly grow a conscience and come clean about why he’d done this. Plus, contacting the guy that tried to kill me couldn’t be safe.

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