Page 34 of Shadow of the Moon

“That big fucker hit me. One time,” he complained. “That’s all it took. Not sure if you noticed or not but his fists were damn near twice the size of mine.”

Amberly snorted. “Okay…”

Devlin had his head down, reading a text. “Charley says a team has been dispatched to collect Zed’s daughter.”

“They need the bomb squad or something to dispose of the cell phone,” she told him quickly. “It has a small explosive device in it, like we thought. I have Zed’s. We need to look at it as soon as possible.”

“Well, pull over. This is as good of a place as any.”

Yeah, he was right. There was nothing around here, just scrub bushes and sand. There was also a dirt road on the right, so she turned there, then stopped after about a mile and parked at the side of the road, leaving the headlights on to illuminate the area in front of them. Reaching for the phone in the back seat, she climbed out of the car and walked into the scrub a bit. Devlin followed along behind, looking pale and ill. “Are you okay,” she asked, genuinely worried.

“I’ll be fine,” he murmured. “How are you going to get into it?”

Amberly snorted. “He gave me the code before he died.”

She keyed it in, opening the phone, and started searching through the history. “It looks like he’s been mostly in Sheridan, though there are several trips up to Billings, and it looks like two trips out to a wildlife preserve north-east of Bozeman. I bet that’s where Cole is, out there beyond roads and towns.”

“He has to be close enough for cell-phone service, though. How else could he carry his threats out?”

“True,” she murmured, scanning. “It looks like he stayed in the same place each time he went to Bozeman.”

“Give me the address,” Devlin said, pulling out his own phone. She read it off and he keyed it in. “Got it. Where else?”

She reeled off a couple of other addresses, then got into his contacts and text messages. Tension constricted her chest, because she knew that this phone could explode in her hands at any moment.

So, when a new text came in, making the phone beep, she might have let out a very un-CIA like scream. Devlin outright laughed at her, then gripped his head in his hands. “That was funny. I bet it’s Cole. Open it.”

It was Cole.

listen to me you son of a bitch, you’d better respond. Your daughter is dead. Are you next?

She realized then there were a line of unanswered texts. “It says his daughter is dead. Should I respond?”

“Yes, tell him… something…”

Amberly paged back through the old messages. Neither one of them were much for grammar. with the contacts. Give me a minute. Please dont kill my daughter.

Devlin was texting on his phone. “Charley says the daughter is safe but the phone exploded outside the house before the bomb squad could get there.”

Well, at least the daughter was safe.

Amberly paged through the messages, pulling out pertinent details and reading them off to Devlin. He was typing them into texts, she assumed to this mysterious Charley. Or maybe on a notes app. It was going in writing somewhere.

Zed?

yeah, she typed off.

She found the downloads section and starting looking through it, just in case… Nothing. She went to the camera app and starting looking through pics.

“Oh, get your camera! Video!” she told Devlin quickly.

A picture of a picture on a phone was never perfect, but she couldn’t afford to take the time or risk of connection to send it directly to his phone. She started flipping through pictures, pausing just long enough for it to still, then moving on. It looked like Zed had been the one to take the original pictures. Obviously, as soon as he’d gotten out of prison, he’d been sent on errands.

The phone rang in her hand and she gasped. It said Cole.

“We can’t answer it. Keep paging through pics.”

She did as told and kept flipping. Some of the places were familiar to her and others were not. Anxiety beat at her. “I think he’s going to blow it. He has to know something is up.”

---