Page 52 of Knight's Fall

“Have a seat,” Cole told him, but Wings shook his head.

“Just tell me.”

Cole and Jay looked over at BB, who nodded once before tapping his keyboard. A sketch appeared on one of the large screens, and Wings’ eyes narrowed.

“That’s him. That’s the customer. Did you get his name?”

“We don’t know his name,” Isobel spoke up. “No one does. The guy’s a ghost.”

“What do you mean? Who did the sketch?”

“The sketch artist the Sheriff’s Department uses. They’re filling out a report on Courtlyn. I gave them all the information they needed for that, and I convinced them to wait to talk to you until later.”

Wings stiffened. “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet.” When his colleagues exchanged knowing looks, he lost his cool. “Just say it, dammit! Stop trying to spare my feelings or some such shit. Courtlyn’s considered a critical missing now, right? You filed a report because we have proof of foul play, right? Tell me what it is! Stop screwing around.”

“Stop yelling at us and just listen. Yes, they’ve classified her as a critical missing,” Isobel explained. “We went to the diner and questioned the waitresses, the owner and the part-time cook, who didn’t know anything since he and Courtlyn never work the same shifts. They verified what Olivia told us about the strange customer, Malcolm. He’s always coming in when the diner is slow. He always requests Courtlyn. He even waits until Courtlyn is available, and he never orders anything without getting her recommendation. We asked about the waitress who’s been bullying Courtlyn. She hasn’t been to work since before Courtlyn went missing. The owner has decided she’s not coming back and is taking applications for her replacement. We went by the woman’s house. Her boyfriend was there. He’s a real piece of work. We had to get firm with him, and he finally admitted he hadn’t seen Sissy either, but he didn’t really care. He hadn’t even reported her missing.”

“So you think she’s involved?”

Isobel shook her head. “I think she’s a victim too. Syd is checking with area hospitals and morgues to see if we can find her. I asked the Sheriff’s Department to send their sketch artist to put together the composite.”

“So we still have nothing.” Wings ran a hand through his hair to try and squelch the urge to put that hand through a wall.

“Actually, we do have more, but I think you should sit for this.”

Wings’ eyes snapped up to meet Jay’s, and this time, he did as his friend asked. He tried to detach himself from the situation, so he could listen to the intel as he would any other case. But his heart pounded in his chest and echoed in his ears. His stomach churned as it did right before something went wrong with a mission. And he wanted to cry.

He never cried. He withdrew. He got angry. He sulked. But he never cried. The thought of Courtlyn being ripped away from him just when he found her had despair bubbling up inside him. He had no idea how to deal with it. The emotion was foreign to him. This connection to another person, one that felt like his life was ending because theirs was, was not anything he’d felt before. He wondered if he would survive it. He survived anything life threw at him, but this time, the loss felt overwhelming.

“Wings.”

He looked over at Cole, whose amber eyes darkened with what Wings saw was understanding. Cole had been right where he was now. When Sydney and her best friend Chloe had been taken by Syd's abusive ex-fiancé, whom they had learned was also involved in human trafficking and the drug trade, none of them knew if Sydney or Chloe were alive or dead. They held on to hope, but until they pinpointed the women's location, they could never be sure she was coming back to them.

“Don’t believe the worst until you know it’s true. Courtlyn deserves your faith that she is okay. She needs you to use every skill and tactic you have to find her and the truth. Don’t lose focus now, not when she needs you.”

Cole’s words pushed through his fog. Wings nodded. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes as he released it slowly. Then he scanned the room with his intense stare and nodded again to give the okay for them to continue.

Isobel resumed. “The Sheriff’s Department ran the composite through their criminal database, but I had Owen to do the same. There was a flag on the sketch through the FBI’s network. We couldn’t access the intel, so Gennessey called in a favor. Her friend sent this over to us.”

BB tapped on his keyboard and two more composites popped up on the screen. They were younger men Wings was sure he hadn’t seen before, but something about them was eerily familiar. He looked back at Isobel and waited for her to continue.

“The FBI flagged the composites as suspects in eight open cases throughout the country. In all those cases, there was no evidence of the suspects, just the occasional witness that identified a stranger appearing in the victims’ lives suddenly and disappearing just as suddenly as the crimes were committed. There was nothing tying the victims to each other. The MOs for the crimes were all different, but the link to the stranger started the FBI connecting the crimes.”

“What are the crimes?”

Isobel paused, and foreboding settled over the room. Wings could see on everyone’s faces that they knew what intel was coming.

“Murder. Contract killings, to be exact. The FBI believed this was a network of hired killers.”

Try as he might to prepare himself, Wings wasn’t ready to hear that news. If Courtlyn had been abducted by an assassin, that means she had an enemy somewhere that none of them knew about. If it was Malcolm or whoever he was, why wouldn’t Courtlyn have known him when they met at the diner? If it was that Sissy Reeser, where would she find the money to hire a contract killer?

“Wait,” he suddenly shouted. “You said the FBI believed, as in past tense. There’s a new theory?”

“It’s one we discovered,” Jay jumped in. “Owen ran the composite through our systems as well as some of the international databases. The facial recognition software didn’t come up with an ID, but it did note each composite’s similarities to each other.”

BB entered another command, and his computer added markings showing how certain facial details of the composites matched. In fact, there were enough matches for him to be certain that the composites were of the same person at different stages of life.

“How far back does this guy’s cases go?”

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