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“What? No, I haven’t…” he paused for a few seconds before he continued, his voice now calmer than before. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, so you don’t know. We fucked up, that’s what I’m talking about.” I took a deep breath and said, while trying desperately not to fall apart. “They’re dead, Garrett.”
“What? How?”
“They’ve been murdered.”
Silence… then.
“How do you know?” he asked, and I could hear the guilt and pain in his voice. It was the same way I felt.
“Lock. He has their cases. Also, there’s more, Garrett. Lock has pictures of almost every woman we’ve helped. Right now, they’re just missing, but who knows, there could be more out there dead. How could we have missed this? How?”
“Fuck… I don’t know, Phoebe. I didn’t get any warnings. I didn’t know.”
“Look,” I ran my hand over my head and closed my eyes. I felt Lock’s hands on my shoulders, and they began massaging me again. “I need you to bring your laptop, pictures, everything we have on the women we’ve helped. I can’t remember all their names, but there’s about twenty pictures in front of me. Five of them we already know their fate. We need to find the others.”
Garrett didn’t reply for what felt like forever before he sighed and agreed, “Alright, I’m on my way.”
With that, he hung up.
I leaned back against Lock’s hard chest, welcoming his strength as he wrapped his arms around my waist. He whispered in my ear, “You’re doing fine. Just continue to take deep breaths. We’re going to figure all this out, trust me.”
I wanted to trust him, really, I did, but I had a bad feeling things were about to get worse before they got better.
“SOMETIMES THERE ARE NO SECOND CHANCES, NO TIMEOUTS, NO NEXT TIME. SOMETIMES IT’S NOW OR NEVER” - UNKNOWN
CHAPTER14
LOCK
It didn’t take long for Garrett Tyler to make his way to my house. Phoebe had been pacing back and forth, her anxiety ratcheted up a hundred-fold.
But all of this shit was necessary. The fact that she knew every woman we had on our missing person’s case list was fucking wild. Admittedly, these cases were insane and so farfetched and unbelievable it’s unreal. Each of the cases mentioned that these women disappeared without a trace. There’s no security footage of them leaving, no paper trails, nothing. These women just disappeared without a trace. Yeah, I wasn’t buying that shit. No fucking way. However, we couldn’t discount the crazy theories either.Hopefully we’ll get the answers we need and we can solve these cases.
Tyler gave Phoebe hard eyes before he sat down at my table. I felt the tension in her body return, guilt written all over her face.
I spoke up, bringing his hard eyes to me.
“Listen, Tyler, we don’t have a lot of time. Phoebe gave us little information about your involvement inOperation Freedom. We need you to fill in as much as possible. And before you go into survival mode, understand, I don’t give a rat’s ass what all you do to keep these women safe. If you’re breaking the law, we’ll deal with that shit later. Right now, the most important thing is finding these women and getting them to safety.”
Tyler studied me for a long time before he blew out a breath, resolve settling on his face.
“We aren’t breaking any laws. Not per se. Once we get these women to safety, I monitor any and every database out there, making sure these women stay hidden. If their significant others try to search for them, I merely send them elsewhere. Or I provide false information to send them in multiple directions. Most of the time, this frustrates them, and they give up. There are some that don’t, and I keep leading them down rabbit holes after rabbit holes.”
Danny grunted.
“Yeah, thanks for that.”
Tyler merely shrugged.
“We don’t know who to trust,” he countered.
“Yeah, we’re the police.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Tyler bit back. “Look at the husbands and boyfriends of these women. They have more power than any of us know. Who’s to say they wouldn’t use your team to get the information they need to find their wives and girlfriends? And if you locate the information, who’s to say you would be able to keep it hidden from prying eyes? Your chief or captain could ask for the file, you give it to him, and he gives it to his buddy or whomever. Bottom line, we couldn’t trust anyone, and I still don’t think we can, but I’m here.”
We all fell silent, knowing what he said had some truth to it. We wouldn’t know what our chief or captain would want with the file, but we would give it to them along with our notes. He was also right about the power some of these men possessed. For example, two of these women were married to sons of very wealthy and established men. One of them was the golf buddy of the mayor, who charged our chief with solving the missing person’s case of his son’s wife.
