Page 66 of Where They Belong

“What about John’s family?” Mason queried.

“I’ve put a call into the Denver PD,” Nick said. “They’ll pick up John’s family, if they haven’t already, and get them to a safe house until this is over.”

Colt nodded and then, to Mason, said, “It’s your call, Mase. You don’t have to do this, but in my professional opinion, I agree with Nick.”

Mason sighed. He took his hat off and tugged at his hair. He didn’t want John back on the ranch. Him being there was going to be awkward, and the rest of the staff would pick up that something wasn’t right. But when he thought rationally about it—or tried to, anyway—he knew Nick and Colt were right. The threat still existed. More so now. Someone wanted him gone—permanently gone—and they had no idea who it was.

“Yeah.” He put his hat back on and nodded. “Okay.”

Two days had passed in relative silence. John hadn’t received any new instructions from his puppeteers, which Colt could only hope meant they didn’t know he’d been arrested and was essentially now a double agent.

“You’re edgy.” Wes sat down on the bale of hay Colt was using for a bench, his knee bouncing a steady rhythm.

“I feel like this is the calm before the storm.” Colt kept his voice low so Mason wouldn’t overhear. He slanted a glance at his brother and returned to what he’d been watching: Mason tending to Lancelot’s eye injury with Selma.

“Where’s John?”

“Checking fence lines with Levi, Thad, and Brett,” Colt said. “Levi’s not letting him out of his sight.”

“Good.” Wes shifted and pulled his laptop onto his thighs. Colt hadn’t noticed he’d brought it with him, too focused on Mason and the flex and pull of his muscles as he worked. “John got a new message.”

That got his full attention. His knee bouncing stopped. “What is it?”

He shifted toward his brother while keeping one eye on Mason.

Wes opened his laptop and called up an email tracking program that he’d created himself. He’d cloned John’s email account when they’d returned from town the other day so he could intercept anything the masterminds behind the threats sent to John.

“Haven’t read it yet,” Wes replied as he tapped away on the keyboard with nimble fingers. “I was on my way to tell you about the library when the new email pinged my phone.”

“Right.” Nick had tracked the IP address where the messages were coming from to the library, but that was as far as he could get. “What did you learn about that?”

“They didn’t have any security cameras in the library, which we already knew, so we have no footage of our suspect, but here’s where it gets interesting,” Wes said with a note of excitement in his voice and a glint in his gray-blue eyes. Colt couldn’t help a small grin from tugging at his mouth. Wes looked like a rough and tough cowboy, but his brother was a nerd at his core. He loved the digital chase and digging deep into complex code. “There are no records of the library computers being used at the times the messages were sent.”

Colt frowned. “How is that possible? If they’re coming from the library, they had to have used the library computers.”

“Not all the computers at the library are public though,” Wes said. “The staff has one too.”

Colt raised his eyebrows, his voice louder than intended. “You think the—”

Mason shot him a questioning look, and Colt smiled and shook his head. He waited until Mason returned to his equine care.

To his brother, he said quietly, “You think the librarian is behind this?”

While it was true that looks could be deceiving and anyone was capable of murder, given the right—or rather, the wrong—circumstances, but something like this? This was personal. This was meditated. It wasn’t some average law-abiding citizen pushed to the brink. That role currently belonged to John. What on earth would a librarian gain from this?

“No, I don’t. Could you imagine?” Wes’s chuckle was a deep rumble. “Nick checked her out. None of the staff computers were used. Nothing was in her cell phone records, and she doesn’t own a laptop.”

“So how is someone using the library’s IP without being in the library?” Colt lowered his brows in thought.

“Anyone standing outside the library or sitting in a car in front of it could jump onto their Wi-Fi,” Wes answered. “It’s an open network and strong enough to pick up about fifteen feet from the front doors.”

“Shit,” Colt whispered. It could be anyone. How were they going to pinpoint who?

“Yep.” Wes turned back to his laptop and tapped the trackpad to wake it up. “Needle in a haystack.”

Colt sighed, and his gaze fell to Wes’s computer screen. He couldn’t make out much of what he saw there. All kinds of code that were Greek to him but made perfect sense to Wes. He never ceased to marvel at Wes’s proficiency with it. A section of text with highlighted dates and times caught his eye.

“Hold up.” Colt pointed at the screen. “That’s the day Mason and I ran into the Bristows. They approached from the direction of the library.”

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