Page 85 of Montana Freedom

Phillips was talking in a different channel on his headset. I could see his mouth moving but not much more through the noise.

“It still narrows it down,” Jude said. “There’s not much out here. And I don’t think they’re camping.”

Dropping my face into my hands, I thought through everything. Any detail I might have missed—anything we could use to find out where he was. Some misstep.

“Jones brought his van back,” I said.

Harlan looked at me. “What?”

“When Jones came back before we confronted him, he came back in his van. So Emma would have known.”

Phillips cut in. “We’ve pulled the plate from the traffic cameras in Polson and are trying to track it that way. But 90 doesn’t have many. Plus, it’s a rental. Fake name.”

“Rented from where?”

“Billings.”

Okay, so this hasn’t been a spur-of-the-moment decision. They’d had a plan all along, to rent a van that far away to cover their tracks.

The communication between Jones and Simon was already a dead end. Burner phones and things he’d already destroyed. He’d known if he was caught, Simon would do far worse things to him than the FBI. “Anything on the fake name?”

“Nothing yet. Just an old alias, loosely connected to one of the shells Simon used to hide his dealings. Clearly, he doesn’t care if we know about this one.”

Something was nagging in my brain. There was a piece I was missing, and I didn’t know what it was. I felt like Emma, sitting in that cabin for six months trying to figure it out, only to realize she didn’t have enough information.

But she had more information now, and she knew how to use it. They’d set her up at that little computer shop because of her knowledge. That wasn’t a lie. And—

I looked at Phillips. “Jones said she was using the computer in the store when he left her. Do you think he was lying?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea. Why?”

“Emma hasn’t been on a computer since she came to Resting Warrior. There was no need, and we didn’t want to risk them finding her. If she was passing time on a computer while waiting for Simon, I don’t think she was shopping for shoes.”

Blinking once, he nodded. “I’ll tell them, see what they can do.”

It wasn’t much. It wasn’t anything, really. I was grasping at straws, and how I wished Emma’s wall of clues hadn’t been so blank and I could look at it now to keep my mind busy trying to figure out the puzzle so I could save her life.

Phillips looked up at me suddenly. He was still on the other channel, but his eyes were wide in shock. “What?”

He held up a hand, still listening to the open channel he had with the field office. Finally, he clicked over. “Good call, Daniel. It’s a long shot, but it makes sense. Emma tried to hack the old site she’d used to access Simon’s records when he first caught her.

“The site is wiped, but it still has some things attached to it—things Emma wouldn’t have been able to see if she wasn’t looking. The second she accessed the site, the server sent a ping.”

For the first time since I saw the tracker was in motion, I felt a spark of hope. “Where?”

The smile on Phillips’s face was one of satisfaction and anticipation. “Thirty miles from where the tracker went dark.”

“Holy shit,” Noah said. “What do we know?”

“They need ten minutes to get more information. Any photos we might have, an idea of what we’re up against.”

We had the time. As much as I wished we were, we weren’t ten minutes away. But this was good.

“Thank you,” I told him. “Truly.”

“It was your idea.”

I nodded. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

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