Page 17 of Clay

“Did you find anything at Katie’s?” she asked, once he’d settled into the chair he’d occupied last night.

He nodded, a short, sharp dip of his head, before reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a piece of paper. He handed it to her, took a sip of his tea while she looked at it.

She raised her head. “It’s a packing list for a trip. So, yeah, I guess it’s important since it shows she meant to leave.” She cocked her head, studied him. “But you think there’s more to it.”

He nodded again. “That’s a list for a go-bag, Ms. Foster.”

She snorted at his formality. “I think after last night we’re past being all formal.” Then she got serious again. “What’s a go-bag? I know what I think it means.” To her, the paper in her hand was nothing more than a list to make sure Katie hadn’t forgotten anything. It was a very Katie thing to do.

“Really look at it,” he said. “It’s not just toiletries and climate-appropriate clothes. It’s money. It’s meds. It’s stuff she can’t just go grab at the neighborhood drug store. This is a list for someone who’s going into hiding for a long time, not someone who’s going on a trip.”

Scrunching her brow, she scrutinized the paper, covered in the neat, precise handwriting Katie had used since their childhood. He was right.

“Does she have epilepsy?” Clay asked, his voice quiet. Respectful.

She looked up at him in confusion. “No, why?”

“She stockpiled Keppra. That’s an anti-seizure medication.”

Ivy wracked her brain. “She did say something about seeing a doctor for foot pain a while back, but that’s all.”

Clay was busy typing on his phone. “Peripheral neuropathy. It’s a nerve disease. Treatable when caught early enough.” He looked up. “Given her age, obviously it was caught early enough.”

Ivy frowned, not liking the fact Katie hadn’t mentioned anything. Then again, she hadn’t said squat about anyonebothering her either. When had her friend become so secretive? And when had she stopped pushing?

A good dose of guilt tempered her grumpiness. Somehow, some way, she’d made Katie feel less than safe with her. Had forced her friend to keep vital pieces of herself close.

“So now what?” she asked, blowing out a breath. “I have a client meeting at the café in an hour.”

Clay started to protest, but Ivy held up a hand before he could form the words. “I wasn’t going to go alone. You’re more than welcome to ride shotgun. Just don’t scare the bejesus out of my client.”

~

Clay didn’t like the fact that Ivy had received a call from the same area code. From someone who not only knew her name, but the make of her car. It stunk to high heaven.

On the good news front, the fact someone was likely looking for McAlister via Ivy, and that Katie had packed a go-bag, made the human trafficking and fatality options move further down on the list of possibilities. Not off it altogether, but further down.

Dev had discovered the name of the ex, Greg Hamilton, a deputy with the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Department, and with each successive hour it appeared that Katie McAlister had come to Las Vegas to hide. And then gone back into hiding when she’d been found, theoretically by Hamilton.

Besides the go-bag list there had been nothing in McAlister’s apartment that spoke of a struggle or of her going to a specific location. The pictures on the wall had been of her and Ivy, of her in the high desert, of her with some of her authors. There was no man she would have run to, as a protector.

There was also no computer at the house, telling him she’d taken her laptop with her. Everything about Katie McAlister’s life had been mobile and ready to go.

Dev had put a trace on her phone and was doing a deep dive into her IP address to see if she’d logged in anywhere that was using Wi-Fi.

They had officially pulled out the stops trying to find Katie McAllister.

But the back of Clay’s neck was itching, just like it did when something wasn’t right with a cargo load he’d positioned on an aircraft. Something was definitely out of balance, and it was his job to discover what it was.

With nothing else to do until they left to drop off the painting, he searched for Hamilton on social media, knowing Dev had done the same as soon as he’d learned the man’s name. But Clay wanted to see Katie McAlister’s boyfriend for himself.

Hamilton was handsome and looked and acted like the high school football hero who’d never left home. His photo gallery showed him with a bevy of pretty girls, Katie McAllister being one of them. In the pictures her smile looked strained, as if she was trying to keep it together. There were also a slew of photos of a younger Hamilton in uniform. He'd been a Marine, back in the day. Which didn't mean anything now but might factor into any future actions they might take, if the man was indeed who Katie was running from.

He called Ivy over. “Did she ever show you pictures of him?”

She looked at the pictures, shook her head. “No, she didn’t like to talk about it much. But look at her face, you can tell that she’s not happy there.”

Clay pondered the photo for another moment. “It doesn’t just look like unhappiness to me. That looks like abuse.” He should know. His old man had been free enough with his hands back in the day. And while Katie didn't have visible bruising, there was something about her expression that looked all too familiar.

---