down to a five-mile radius of where she lived and worked. The number shrank to five. He called each one looking for a Jane Doe, relieved when he didn’t find her.
Next he reached out to the city morgue, which was not a call he wanted to make.
Relief flooded him at receiving the word that no Jane Does had been received in the past week.
Having exhausted obvious answers, he had to consider other possibilities. The first one that popped into his mind said she could be on the run. But from what?
This was Samantha he was thinking about. Nothing in her background suggested she had criminal inclinations. He’d known her personally for more than half his life. Wouldn’t there have been signs along the way? Lies told here and there?
Of course, the tight-knit group of twelve-year-olds had disbanded after Shane’s disappearance, but they’d all gone to the same high school, traveled in loosely the same circles. Didn’t he know her?
She came from a large middle-class family, the youngest of four kids. Her dad had been in sales, so she’d moved around most of her young life. He’d cashed out their life savings and rented space on the town square to open a hardware store after her mother had died. Samantha had settled in Mason Ridge in fifth grade, just a year before the tragedy. She’d been a good student. She’d played volleyball at Mason Ridge High School well enough to earn a scholarship to a small university in Arkansas. And that had been when he’d lost touch with her.
Her brothers had spread out, going to different colleges and then settling in separate cities. Last Dylan had heard, they had families of their own. The trouble came with her mom’s side. Several uncles had rap sheets longer than the menu at Chili’s. But Samantha never spoke about them, and Dylan figured the family had cut ties long ago.
He tried her cell. The call went straight to voice mail.
The idea one of her distant relatives could’ve gotten her into trouble didn’t sit well. No way would she get involved with them.
Dylan made a phone call to a technical-guru friend he’d used from time to time to hack into databases and phones. If a device had a firewall, Jorge could sneak past it unseen and get out with the same ability. He was the freakin’ Houdini of hackers.
Jorge picked up on the second ring. Not surprising for a man who was at his computer 24/7. “What can I do you for?”
“I got a missing person. Need to find out who she was speaking to in the days surrounding her disappearance.”
“Give me the details.” His voice was all business.
Dylan relayed information like her phone number slowly into the receiver.
Jorge repeated the digits.
Dylan confirmed.
“Got it. Hold on a sec.” The sound of fingers tapping across a keyboard came through the line.
“I can’t get a location for you, but I can see who she’s been talking to. I see your number on here. You have a relationship with this girl?” Jorge asked.
“She’s a friend.”
“I heard about all that mess going on in your neck of the woods. Glad they caught the dude. Gives a whole new meaning to being burned, though.” His jokes were crass but Dylan got it. While women sat down with glasses of wine and talked about emotions until they felt better, men joked. Dylan wasn’t arguing one style over the other. It was just a guy’s way of trying to get his arms around the stuff he didn’t have a good handle on. “I’ll send you an email with a list of the numbers, but there’s something weird. She received several calls from a burn phone in the days prior to her vanishing act.”
“None after?” Why would someone call her using a pay-as-you-go phone? Dylan didn’t like any of this news. It took him down the path he didn’t want to be true.
“Nope.”
“What’s the number?” Dylan searched for a pen and paper.
“I’ll send it in the report. Won’t do you any good calling it, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“The line’s been disabled.”
“Which means you can’t trace it?”
“Nope. Did your friend get herself into some kind of trouble?”
“Looks like it,” Dylan said. Several more scenarios ran through his mind. None he liked. He thanked Jorge and closed the call.
Dylan spent the rest of the morning tracking down Samantha’s landlord in Dallas, who agreed to check out her place. Her car was gone from the parking garage of her condo. A few drawers had been left open in her bedroom, and her bathroom counter was empty. Experience had taught Dylan that women didn’t go anywhere without their makeup bags.
Mail sat on the counter untouched. Other than a few necessary supplies, very little was missing from her condo. When she’d decided to take off, she hadn’t brought much with her. A quick escape suggested someone on the run, just as he feared she might be. But again the question came up. Running from what? Or whom?
Was she dating someone? Dylan should’ve asked that question first. A woman’s biggest threat in life was a man close to her—a boyfriend or spouse. Dylan’s fists curled and released at the thought of any man hurting a woman. The notion hit him even harder now that he had a daughter. Let any guy try to hurt his Bel...
Anger roared through him like buckshot, exploding in every direction. He didn’t need to go there about his child. Samantha deserved his focus.
The next trick would be to locate her. He kept his hunt inside Texas, figuring she’d stick with what she knew. Austin was her favorite city, or at least it used to be. He’d lost touch with her after high school. Taking a chance on his hunch, he decided to start his search in the live-music capital of the world, guessing she’d go somewhere familiar.
Once he narrowed the hunt there, finding her would be easy. Apartments had managers who followed rules, so an offer of cash to pay up a few months’ rent would draw too much unwanted attention. She would most likely rent a house something near campus, so she could easily get around by throwing on a hoodie and shorts to blend in with students.
A quick internet search revealed there were 387 houses for rent in the city of Austin. Twenty-three when narrowed down to places on or near campus. Dylan put his resources to work finding out which ones had been pulled from the market the day Samantha disappeared. Two. With a fifty-fifty chance of success, Dylan gambled on the house nearest campus and checked the tenant. No dice. The place had been rented by four people. He hit the jackpot on the second.
He made a quick call to Ms. Anderson to let her know he had to leave town, and then located his duffel. The hope of being home by Maribel’s bedtime fizzled as he stuffed a pair of jeans in the bag. He packed a sandwich to eat on the drive—roughly four hours one way, depending on traffic on I-35—left a note for Ms. Anderson to read Goodnight Moon to his daughter after tucking her into bed and locked the door behind him.
* * *
DYLAN LEANED AGAINST a tree six houses down from Samantha’s. He’d driven his small sedan rather than his SUV
