Page 69 of Don't Back Down

He couldn’t concentrate on work and hadn’t been sleeping. He’d popped a couple of uppers before coming to work, and now it felt like he was coming out of his skin. He’d just refilled his coffee when the burner phone in his desk began to ring. He jumped up and closed the office door, then unlocked the drawer and grabbed the phone.

“What?”

“It’s me, Dewey. We can’t find a trace of Lindy Sheets anywhere. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth.”

Boss frowned. She was a loose end, but she was smart. She’d read between the lines of their last phone conversation and done a runner.

“Where’s her car?” he asked.

“Still at her old residence,” Dewey said. “Just sitting there in the parking lot with the doors locked and the key in the ignition, waiting for someone to heist it. Her clothes are gone, but all of her shit is still in her old apartment. She don’t wanna be found.”

Boss sighed. “Fine. Whatever. As long as the feds don’t have her stashed somewhere, we’re good.”

“So do you want me to keep looking?” Dewey asked.

“No. We have business to attend to and orders to fill. Get back to regular business. I’ll be in touch.”

“Yes, sir,” Dewey said.

The line went dead in Boss’s ear. He put the phone in his desk, locked the drawer, and then went back to work. It was just as well she’d skipped out, and she knew better than to talk. But her absence did leave a hole in his organization. He needed to replace her, and soon.

***

Liz was meeting Michael for lunch. It was their first date since the debacle at the tiny cabins, but she wasn’t having sex with him today, no matter what he was expecting. She was getting ready to leave and went to tell her mother goodbye. To her surprise, she found her mother in her bedroom, packing.

“Mom! What are you doing?” Liz asked.

“I’m flying to Philadelphia to stay with Penny for a while. I’m so unnerved by all that’s been happening here that I just can’t bear to stay a moment longer,” she said.

“So you’re abandoning Dad and me just like that?” Liz asked.

“Oh, you know your dad. He’s always busy, and you have Michael. I just need to get away for a bit.”

“I might have liked to go to Philadelphia, too. The least you could have done was invite me,” Liz muttered.

Patricia paused. “Well, do you? Want to go, I mean?”

Liz shrugged. “No.”

Patricia beamed. “See? All that angst for nothing. I love you to bits, but you’re so dramatic,” she said, and fastened the latch on her suitcase and put it on the floor by the other two.

“Three bags?” Liz asked.

Patricia frowned. “Stop being so critical,” she said, then kissed Liz on both cheeks. “I’ll call when I arrive. Love you, darling. Take care.” She waved absently as she picked up the house phone and called down to the front desk. “Yes, this is Mrs. Caldwell. Please send someone up to the penthouse for my luggage, and make sure the car is waiting. I have a flight to catch in Bowling Green.”

Liz rolled her eyes and walked out of the room. She rode the elevator down, picked up her car, and took off toward the Hotel Devon while Patricia Caldwell was leaving Jubilee.

***

Rusty was in the living room with her feet turned toward the fire and her laptop in her lap. The house was mostly quiet, although she could hear the murmur of Cameron’s voice coming from his office.

She was looking at the file the feds had collected on Jack Barton, and specifically the women who’d gone missing after staying in tiny cabins or one of the hotels in Jubilee. She was trying to establish if there was a matching timeline from when they disappeared to the next time their credit cards were used. As best she could tell, the timeline for the next use of the cards was always less than five days after their “departure” from Jubilee, and each card was only used once. After that, the trails went cold, and the women disappeared.

Once she had that spreadsheet finalized, she began entering the dates that Emily Payne had gone AWOL, then compared them to the last time the missing women’s credit cards had been used.

As soon as she was finished, she leaned back and began studying the spreadsheet as a whole, and what she saw made her skin crawl. Emily’s absences coincided every time with the use of a missing woman’s credit card.

“Holy shit,” she muttered, then looked up as Cameron entered the room.

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