Page 5 of Red Dragon’s Heart

Something no self-respecting dragon would waste his life doing.

Zakerek skimmed the texts for interesting words like ‘danger,’ ‘mayhem,’ and ‘dying,’ but everything seemed to be happy and peaceful to a nauseating degree. So he stopped reading because domestic bliss was boring as fuck, and if nobody was in danger or dying, what did they need him for?

Their lives were going on just fine without him. He’d never really been one of them—and he liked it that way. If you didn’t let anyone get close to you, you didn’t get disappointed when they eventually fucked you over.

He tried to focus on his ongoing surveillance of the café’s network, and his other research—namely scouring the dark web for signs that Madeleine Fox was trying to sell the data she’d stolen.

He did that to keep his other lines of investigation going, in case this stakeout was a bust—but he knew inside she’d show. He could feel it.

Fox had only kept one tie to her old life. She had a younger brother, Troy, who had some kind of life-threatening human illness. Zakerek had briefly considered threatening Troy to get to Madeleine, although he’d never really hurt the guy. Probably.

He was sure that Eric Chisholm had considered the same thing.

The problem was, you couldn’t force someone to do something by threatening their loved ones unless they actually knew about the threat—which meant you had to know how to get in touch with them.

Fox obviously realized that too. She was too smart to let the brother know where she was, or even to communicate with him electronically, which could be traced. But ever since she’d disappeared, snail mail post cards had been arriving at his apartment twice a month, like clockwork, with not-very-cleverly coded messages telling him she was okay.

They were from all over the country, with scenes and postmarks from various cities. Zakerek knew for a fact that Chisholm had boots on the ground from coast to coast tracking down those leads, and analysts looking for patterns to try to figure out where she’d go next.

Zakerek had let them do the leg work, tracking their progress by monitoring their communications systems. Instead of chasing around the country, he’d analyzed Chisholm’s photos of the post cards themselves—and that had led to his breakthrough.

Fox hadn’t gone anywhere.

It turned out the post cards came from an internet company: for a small fee, you could order a card from their list of destinations. Choose the photo, type in your message, and one of their regional agents printed out the card and mailed it at the post office, so it had the right postmark. You could be in Boise, Idaho and pretend you were vacationing in the fucking Bahamas.

He’d tried to trace Fox by the method of payment—but she used prepaid cash cards, not credit, so he’d thought at first that was a bust. Then he’d thought to track where the cash cards had been sold—and found out they tracked back to Seattle.

And so did the IP address that Madeleine’s post cards had been ordered from. This one. She ordered the damn things from this internet café.

The last one had been sent fifteen days ago exactly. He’d staked out the place a few days early, just in case, and set up his monitoring software to trace the activity on all the café’s computers.

As soon as she came in and ordered the post card, he’d have her.

Today.

After what seemed like an eternity, the place started emptying out for the dinner hour, but Zakerek knew business would pick up again later when the gamers came in.

The shift changed at seven, which was good because then Goth Tech Girl would leave, and he could concentrate.

He was checking through Seattle news reports when he got an alert on his computer. Someone in the café had logged on to the postcard site.

He frowned. That didn’t make sense. No one had come in for the last hour, except to grab coffee and leave again.

He changed screens, praying that she wasn’t hacking the café’s signal from some outside location—or if she was, that he could backtrack it before she logged off again.

Nope, it said Terminal Number 29. That was over in the opposite corner of the room. He looked over—and froze in shock.

Chrystal was sitting at Number 29.

He felt his mouth drop open. Madeleine Fox was Goth Tech Girl?

He switched to his screen clone mode and watched her set up the post card—she was pretending to be in Bowling Green, Ohio today. She filled in Troy Fox’s address, checked out and paid.

The whole time Zakerek kept looking back and forth from the photo of Madeleine Fox, to ‘Chrystal,’ sitting at the computer.

It seemed impossible that they were the same woman, but they had to be. No way would she ask someone else to send those messages for her.

Zakerek cursed himself. He’d wasted three days lurking in this damned place, and she’d been in front of him the whole time.