by Katie Ruggle
Thankfully, her cell phone rang before her silence went on too long and made the other two suspicious. “Pax Bond Recovery,” she answered, dropping her eyes to the floor so her sisters’ impatient expressions didn’t make her lose her train of thought.
“Which of you Pax girls is this?” Barney Thompson’s distinctive voice made her make a face. Spilling all the details about Dash and his sinewy hands would’ve been better than having to talk to the slimy bail bondsman who held the deed to their family home. Thanks for that, Mom.
“This is Norah,” she answered. “What can we do for you, Mr. Thompson?”
“Norah…Norah… Oh, you’re the mousy blond one! POS’s kid. How’s he doing?”
“Fine,” she lied, not wanting to go into the gory details of the mess her dad, Dwayne “POS” Possin, was currently making of his life—especially not with Barney Thompson, of all people. The only reason they were giving Barney the time of day was that they still hadn’t found Jane, and he could make their lives miserable if she missed her first hearing. “What did you need?”
“All business, aren’t you?” he asked with a stiff laugh, and she scrunched her nose at her sisters, who were watching her with a mixture of sympathy and apprehension. Norah barely could deal with talking to people outside her family. Making nice with a scumball like Barney was not part of her skill set. “I have another job for you.”
Her relieved exhale was silent. Even though he sounded a bit peeved about her not indulging in his desire for small talk, at least he was willing to get down to business. “Who’s the skip?” she asked.
“Devon Leifsen.”
The name didn’t ring any bells, so she repeated it for her sisters to hear. Both of them gave her a blank head shake. “What did he do?”
“You mean, what is he accused of doing?” Barney corrected archly.
“Sure.” There was a snap in her voice that she couldn’t help. Barney was quickly wearing through her thin veneer of patience.
“With your mother’s…situation, I would think you’d be more of a stickler about the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing.” He paused, as if waiting for her to comment, but she held her silence until he finally answered sullenly. “He’s accused of being a hacker. This time, he was arrested for deactivating home security systems so his buddies could burglarize the places.”
Norah drew in a sharp breath as her gaze flew to Cara. Her sister had been kidnapped after their security system had been disabled. Maybe it was just a coincidence, since there were lots of hackers in the world, but Langston, Colorado wasn’t a huge place. Cara gave her a questioning look as Norah asked, “Is he local?”
“If you call Denver local, then yeah.” Barney sounded bored now that she hadn’t gotten defensive about his earlier bait. “Look, it’s all in the file I sent over. Find him fast, or you’re not going to like the consequences.”
Norah was already opening her email app and pulling up the business’ account. If there was a chance that this guy helped kidnap Cara, then she was going to relish her part in bringing him in.
“Hello?” Barney’s voice echoed faintly from her phone speaker, and Norah twitched her shoulders in irritation. He’d said himself that everything was in the file. Why hadn’t he ended the call already? “Hello? Did you hang up on me, you little—”
Returning to the phone app, she pressed the end button. A snort from Molly brought her gaze from her phone screen to her sister’s amused expression. “What?” Norah asked.
Cara sighed, but the corners of her mouth twitched in a way that meant she wasn’t really that exasperated. “Don’t hang up on clients, Norah.”
“It was Barney.” She turned back to her phone, still wanting to read the file.
“True,” Molly agreed, the laughter in her voice slipping away. “But as long as he may have the ability to evict us in the near future, it might be a good idea to say ‘bye’ at the end of phone conversations.”
Distracted by the contents of Devon Leifsen’s file, Norah just grunted an acknowledgement. “The skip is a hacker who’s been disarming residential security systems so his friends can burglarize homes.” She heard Cara’s sharp indrawn breath as Norah continued to scroll through the information.
“Is he local?” Cara asked, moving to peer over Norah’s shoulder.
“Denver,” she answered absently, her brain already half in research mode.
“Okay.” Molly’s hand clap yanked Norah’s attention away from her phone. “New plan. I need to act as backup for John when he picks up a skip, so you two are it for research until I get back. Norah, you’ll tackle the security footage of Mom, and Cara gets to start investigating the hacker.” When Norah drew in a breath of protest, Molly cut her off with a sharp shake of her head. “Cara gets first crack since she was the one kidnapped.”
The logic of that couldn’t be argued with, so Norah closed the file and stood. “Okay. I’m going to look at the store footage on my laptop.”
“I’ll start going over Leifsen’s file on mine.” Cara sounded unusually bloodthirsty. Normally, she was the peacemaker, but Norah could understand. She had huge amounts of rage for everyone involved in Cara’s kidnapping, and Norah hadn’t even been the one snatched out of their living room. “I could use your help when you’re done watching Mom steal stuff.”
“Gladly,” Norah said before heading upstairs, motivated to get through the store footage as quickly as possible. Helping to bring in a skip was always satisfying, but finding a guy who may have had a hand in stealing Cara away? That would be doubly sweet.
* * *
Hours later, Norah decided that one circle of hell was watching store security footage nonstop. She wasn’t sure what terrible thing a person would have to do to get sentenced to an eternity of that, though. Her eyes were having trouble focusing, so she blinked rapidly and looked away, taking in the dimly lit details of her tiny room. It was officially a largish closet, but sharing a room made her anxious and unable to sleep, so she’d converted the small room into an improvised bedroom as a teenager.
It wasn’t a bad closet bedroom, as closet bedrooms went. Young Harry Potter would’ve considered Norah’s room to be an upgrade. Besides, she’d always been short and slight, so she didn’t need much more than her single bed—except when Warrant, their Great Pyrenees mix dog, took most of the space for his hundred-pound self. The closet even had a window set in the wall opposite the door, which showed the fading light of evening. Norah stared outside, still blinking to get her distance vision back after spending half the day staring at her computer screen. It was just light out enough to emphasize the darkness of the shadows. Usually, she appreciated living on the edge of a national forest, but this time of day, when the trees stood stark and spooky against the indigo sky, and her imagination inserted monsters into every creeping shadow, a part of her wished for the ambient light of a big, never-sleeping city.
Her stomach growled, making her jump and then laugh at her momentary startle. It was pretty sad to be scared by her own body’s noises, and it definitely meant that she needed a break. Standing, she stretched out the kinks and then headed downstairs to the kitchen. Sitting at the small table that worked as a desk, Cara looked up from her laptop and blinked. Norah had to smile at her sister’s cloudy expression, sure that it’d matched hers from just a few minutes ago. The transition from research mode to reality wasn’t an easy one.
Cara smiled back before transitioning to a yawn as she glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Whoa, where’d the day go?”
That wasn’t really a question that Norah could answer, so she just shrugged and stuck her head into the fridge. Felicity’s insistence on all of them eating healthily made it harder to find a quick meal, but there were eggs and cheese and veggies, and Norah could make something sort of speedily with that.
“Molly isn’t home yet?” she asked, her brain instantly filled with terr
ible scenarios of what might’ve befallen Molly and John.
“She spending the night at John’s. The skip pick-up went off as planned, but I’m assuming they have a lot of adrenaline to work out now.” Cara smirked.
“Oh.” Norah wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she stayed quiet and opened the egg carton.
“What’d you find in the footage?” Cara asked, her tone carefully diffident. When Norah glanced over, her sister was studying a sticky note with more intensity than it deserved.
“Mom stealing things,” Norah said baldly, feeling guilty when she saw Cara wince before her sister quickly smoothed it away. “Want an omelet?”
“Sure. It really was her, then?”
“Yeah.” Picking up an egg, she held the cool, smooth oval in her hand as she studied Cara. Even as Jane had proved to her daughters over and over that she wasn’t a reliable person, it still came as a shock every time she did something like this. Norah wasn’t sure if they’d ever get used to their mother’s disregard for the law and her own children. “She took a bunch of those travel toiletries and a few smaller electronics and then left in a red Honda Accord with a Colorado license plate. I think the last letter was an L, but I’m not a hundred percent sure about that. She left the parking lot and headed west on the frontage road in front of the store, but she could’ve gone anywhere from there.”
By the time she’d finished summarizing what she’d found after staring at security footage for hours, Cara’s expression had returned to her usual calm. “You let Fifi and Charlie know?”
“Yes.” Norah cracked the egg she held into a bowl and then added three more. “I wish I could’ve gotten the entire license plate number.”
“You gave them a lot to work with,” Cara assured her. “With that and a place to start, they’re going to track her down in no time.”
I hope so. We don’t have much time to spare. Jane’s first court appearance was coming up fast. She didn’t say that out loud, though. Cara knew as well as she did that they were down to the wire. Instead, she changed the subject. “How’s your research going?”
“Eh.” Cara wiggled her hand from side to side in a so-so gesture. “Okay. I’m still not sure if he’s the one who helped Abbott kidnap me, but even if he isn’t, Devon Leifsen is a dirty piece of work.”
“Want some help?”
“After omelets? Sure.”
The gentle reminder made Norah realize she’d stopped beating the eggs as they’d talked, so she refocused on the meal prep. “After omelets.”
* * *
With her belly full and her brain already occupied with Devon Leifsen’s file, Norah settled back on her bed with her laptop warming her thighs. Probably hoping for leftovers, Warrant had chosen to stay downstairs with Cara as she did meal clean-up. Although Norah appreciated having the space to stretch her legs out, she missed the furry beast’s warmth next to her.
She read through Leifsen’s entire file, letting the information settle into her brain. He had a few possible connections in Langston, although his home base and main associates were in Denver. He was young—only twenty-three—but he’d managed to rack up a solid list of suspected offenses in the five years since he’d been a legal adult. Norah was pretty sure that his sealed juvie file would be interesting reading, as well.
Like Barney had said, he’d been arrested most recently for his part in three Denver burglaries. One of his accomplices had given him up as part of a plea deal. Before that, he’d been accused of numerous crimes, from bank fraud to planting cameras in the dressing area of a local beauty pageant. Norah’s nose wrinkled at that last one.
Not only is he a thief—he’s a sexual predator, too. Gross.
Most of the charges against him had been dropped immediately, and he’d never been convicted of anything. He’d never been married, and there were no known girlfriends or boyfriends—past or present—listed. His address matched his parents’ house in Golden, and they’d been the ones to bond him out before he skipped bail.
After scanning through the last page of his file, she started searching online for information, starting with his parents, Karen and Bryon Leifsen. They owned several auto body shops along the Front Range, and the couple’s names popped up quite a bit in the Golden social scene. Karen had a few speeding tickets, but otherwise the pair seemed to be generally law-abiding—or at least were good at not getting caught.
A light knock on her bedroom door made Norah jump, her laptop bouncing with the sudden movement. “Come in,” she called, and Cara stuck her head in.
“I’m heading to bed,” Cara said, as Norah’s heartrate gradually slowed. “Find anything?”
“Not really.” She’d taken in a lot of information, but she wasn’t at the point to start processing it yet, so it was just a bunch of facts about Devon Leifsen floating around her brain at this point.
“Goodnight. Don’t stay up too late.” Cara always told her this, even though she knew Norah probably wouldn’t take the advice.
“I won’t,” she responded as usual, knowing that she’d probably still be digging deeper into the rabbit hole in the wee hours of the night.
Once Cara withdrew and softly closed her bedroom door, Norah moved on to searching for information on Devon’s few friends mentioned in the file. One of them, a Chloe Ballister, was in a Denver modern rock band that played at a bar in Langston on a semi-regular basis.
“Of course it was at Dutch’s,” Norah muttered as she made a note of it. “Everything seems to come back to that place.”
A faint beep drew her eyes back to her laptop. A black text box with a flashing cursor opened in the corner of the screen, and she blinked at it as her heart accelerated. As letters appeared—letters that were not typed by her hand—she could only stare in horror.
Hi Norah!
Someone had gained access to her computer. Her brain couldn’t wrap around this fact. Despite her layers and layers of top-notch security, someone had managed to hack into her heavily protected system. Her hand hovered over the touch pad, unsure if she should engage or do her best to kick out this interloper. They didn’t seem to be attempting to access her data, however, and the cheery greeting—including an exclamation mark—threw her off guard.
Who is this? she typed, even as a large part of her scolded her for her curiosity.
Devon. Nice to meet you.
Her heart was thundering now. Devon? Devon Leifsen? She balled her hands into fists, taking reassurance in the bite of her short nails into her palms. Could it be a prank? Someone pretending to be Devon? The only people who knew she was investigating Devon were Molly and Cara, and neither of them would do something so cruel and pointless. Barney knew, but Norah was willing to bet her laptop that he didn’t have the know-how to hack her computer. In fact, she was reasonably sure he had to have help sending an email.
What are you doing? Her shaking fingers made it hard to type accurately.
Chatting with you! She’d never seen such a sinister smiley face.
No, why did you hack my laptop? The voice in her head was now screaming to shut him down, but she had to know why the skip she was researching had hacked her computer and was sending determinedly cheerful messages. All the happy exclamation points made his comments feel creepily wrong. A threat would’ve felt less menacing.
Because I wanted to introduce myself to the beautiful woman who’s investigating me. *waves* Hi pretty bounty hunter!
Norah’s gaze flew to the dark window for a terrified second before she looked back at the small, circular lens at the top of her laptop screen. He’s not watching you, her brain tried to reassure her. He’s just trying to scare you.
It was working. She was full-on terrified. With trembling fingers, she closed the text box and then shut down her laptop. As soon as the screen went black, she closed the computer and kept her hands pressed against the top, as if to keep Devon from r
emotely opening it, as impossible as that would be. Her gaze darted around her shadowed room, dark without the light from her laptop screen, and landed on the black window again.
Forcing herself to put the computer aside and slide off the bed, she moved to the window, her heart hitting her ribs so hard it felt as if it’d break out of her chest. The darkness of the room spooked her, but she couldn’t turn on a light, not if he was watching her.
He’s not out there, she tried to convince herself as she drew closer to the glass pane. He’s holed up somewhere miles away, messing with your head from the safety of a friend’s couch.
Even despite the logic of that, and the high likelihood that he was nowhere near her house, the shadows took on a menacing quality. Someone could easily be lurking in the darkness, staring up at her, taking delight in her unsettled fear.
Her breaths came quickly, fogging the glass, and she couldn’t drag her gaze away from the thousand and one possible hiding places right outside her home. Wait—was that a flash of light? She blinked rapidly, but that just made it harder to tell if she’d imagined the glow or not. Her stomach twisted as his typed words ran on repeat in her mind. He could be just a few steps away from her house. If he picked the lock, disabled the alarm, and crept up the stairs, he could be outside her tiny bedroom in mere minutes.
At the thought, her gaze flew to her closed door. Is that creak just the house settling, or did someone take a stealthy step? She went completely still, listening. It felt like the house held its breath along with her. All she could hear was the rapid pattering of her heartbeat in her ears, telling her to run.
But she was trapped in her closet of a bedroom. There was no escape.
