He left.
She looked at the half-finished flower on the page, and at the door he'd just walked out of. Down the hall, she could hear the low rumble of his voice and the answering voices of Irish and Savage, who’d come down to meet him. Then the silence as they left the building and headed towards the garage. Her heart beat faster in her chest with anxiety. What news could they have found out? Then she thought about Rampage and how he would protect her, no matter the news.
She looked back at her page.
She picked up the pencil.
She colored.
She wanted to have an especially beautiful picture for her Daddy to hang up on the fridge.
CHAPTER 13
RAMPAGE
Lucky had printed everything out.
That was the thing about Lucky, he was meticulous in a way that looked like chaos from the outside. His desk was a disaster of coffee cups and Post-it notes in four different colors, and underneath all of it was a system that Rampage had learned, over years, to trust completely.
The garage table had been cleared. Papers spread across it in overlapping rows, printouts, screenshots, a hand-drawn map that Lucky had done himself because he thought visually and didn't trust digital maps to show him what he needed to see.
Savage stood at one end with his arms crossed. Lucky stood at the other, pointing at things with a pen.
"Delling's not the top," Lucky said. "Not even close. He's a collector. Finds targets, confirms viability, handles the initial approach. Once the target is secured, she goes up the chain."
"To where?" Rampage asked.
"That's where it gets bigger." Irish took over and tapped the map. "Denver is the processing point. We've got two confirmed disappearances there, but the network extends east. The federal contact Phantom looped in thinks they're looking at a corridorfrom Colorado to Kansas to somewhere in the Midwest. Could be further."
Rampage looked at the map. The hand-drawn lines connecting cities. The circled points.
"How many collectors?" Savage asked.
"Minimum four that they've identified. Delling is the only one in this region." Lucky paused. "Which means Emily wasn't the only woman he'd been watching. She was just the first one he moved on."
The garage was quiet for a moment.
"The other women," Rampage said. "The two missing from Denver. Were they his?"
"One confirmed. The other possibly. The feds are running DNA from his property." Lucky set the pen down. "Here's the part you're not going to like."
"Tell me."
"Delling made contact with Emily over two months ago. Not just through the listing but through a neighborhood Facebook group she's a member of. Small interactions. Commenting on things she posted. Building familiarity." He met Rampage's eyes. "He was warming her up. The listing was the endgame, not the start."
Two months.
Emily had been in someone's crosshairs for two months and had no idea. Had been building what felt like an ordinary neighborhood digital community, the kind of low-level social contact everyone had, and underneath it a man had been watching, calculating, deciding she was worth the patience. How much information had he ascertained from her in those two months? How many innocent looking questions did she answer that gave him insight into her, confirming her value as a target?
Rampage's jaw was doing the thing Irish had mentioned. He was aware of it and was choosing not to address it.
"The federal contact," he said. "What do they need from us?"
"Documentation of the tampering, Emily's account of the interactions, and anything she can pull from her Facebook messages with Delling. They want a voluntary statement, not a deposition. Can be done here." Lucky hesitated. "And they want it soon. Delling's gone dark. The last ping on his phone was forty-eight hours ago. If he knows we're looking, he's running."
"He's running," Savage said. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah." Irish leaned against the table. "He's running."
