If something happened to Jack?—
“There’s no answer.” Sawyer engages the anchor, then rushes back toward me to cup my face in his hands. “Breathe, Anastasia.”
“What if he killed him, Sawyer? What if he hurts Jack because of me? What if he kills him? What if he goes after my mom?”
Images of Violet’s body flash through my mind.
The way she’d been broken. The emptiness in eyes that once held so much life.
“Breathe, Anastasia.” Sawyer grips my face in his hands and focuses my attention on him. It’s only once the noise of my fear begins to fade that I realize I’m sitting on the floor.
“What if he killed him?” I ask again, almost afraid to speak the words.
Sawyer’s jaw tightens. “Then it’s not your fault. That is on him. Not you.” He brushes his thumb over my cheek.
“Sawyer. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep running. Especially not if he’s going to start targeting other people.”
“I know.” He pulls me into his arms and holds me close. Overhead, the sky is bright. But I know that the storm is just beginning.
Chapter 23
Sawyer
“Hey, Tucker, tell me you’ve got something for me.” I press the satellite phone up to my ear as I log onto my laptop, using a satellite internet connection.
“I just sent you everything I could pull.” Tucker’s computer genius rivals mine, so asking him to check all surveillance footage available in the area surrounding my shop the morning of the explosion made sense. Especially since the FBI found nothing.
There has to be something. Somewhere. This guy isn’t a ghost.
He’s a living, breathing person.
Which means he can be caught.
He can bleed.
If I can find him.
“There wasn’t much, but I did manage to catch something mildly suspicious on the doorbell camera of someone who lives about a block from you.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s the first file,” he says.
I open the encrypted email, then work my magic to get into it. As soon as I gain access, I double-click on the first movie file available.
A grainy doorbell camera view fills my screen. There’s nothing there at first, but a second after the video starts, a man comes into view. He’s wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt similar to the surveillance photo Jack pulled from the place where the burner phone was bought.
“That’s him. Any hits on facial recognition?” Hope surges through me. Got you.
“Unfortunately, no. Not even a partial match from the DMV database.”
“How is that possible?”
“Guy never had an ID,” Tucker says. “There should be plenty to get at least a partial match, but nothing. I’m sending it over to Captain Leopold so his guys can canvas the area.”
“Thanks.” Sighing, I lean back and stare at the image on my computer screen. “Were you able to find out anything about the night Violet Hayes was murdered?”
“I dug through her social media records, but with how long ago it was, there was a limitation to what I could get my hands on. Phone records were a dead end, and doorbell cameras weren’t available back then.”
