Page 10 of Outlaw Ridge: Jesse
Abilene’s lips parted, but it took a second for her to speak. When she did, her voice was barely above a whisper. “Yes, I’m sure this is what I was supposed to tell you.Lauren, we have unfinished business.”
The words slammed into Lauren like a physical blow. Her breath caught, her pulse started hammering in her ears.
No.Not again. Not after all these years.
She gripped the foot of the bed to steady herself, but the room still seemed to tilt. The past wasn’t just knocking at her door. It was breaking it down.
Jesse shifted closer, his presence solid, grounding. “Lauren,” he said, his voice as cautious as the look he was giving her. “You know, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
She nodded and forced herself to meet his gaze. Yes, she did know that. But she also knew it might not be enough to stop what had already been set into motion.
Someone was coming for her.
Again.
Chapter Five
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Jesse sat in Lauren’s office and worked on his laptop. And he was getting exactly nowhere. The second message that Abilene had given Lauren was cycling over and over again in his head, and it was whirling around with the first one.
Lauren, we have unfinished business. And Lauren, you should have saved me, too.
On the surface, it appeared the messages had come from one of the other girls who’d been abducted with Lauren. Maybe someone who’d gone through hell, had escaped and now held a serious grudge against Lauren. Since he didn’t have names or even any kind of descriptions about those abductees, it was like searching for the proverbial needle in a big-assed haystack.
To narrow down his search as much as possible, Jesse had focused on young females in their late teens or early twenties who escaped from some form of captivity in the past sixteen years.
He’d already found 308 of them.
And those were only the ones who’d come forward to tell what part of their story they could. It was entirely possible there were more who had quietly rejoined society and kept quiet so their abductor or captor wouldn’t find them.
So far, none of those 308 had connections to Lauren, Outlaw Ridge or their one suspect, Dr. Ethan Graves. But Jesse wouldkeep digging. Keep digging into the other moving parts of the investigation as well.
Jesse rolled his shoulders again to work out the tension that had settled deep during the drive back from the hospital two hours ago. More tension had built when Hallie had informed them she had contacted Dr. Ethan Graves and that he would soon be coming in so that Lauren and he could talk to him.
Jesse very much wanted to hear what the doctor had to say, but he knew this wouldn’t be a piece of cake for Lauren. Then again, none of this was. The wounds of the past had been reopened. Man, had it. And not only did they have a sixteen-year-old cold case to solve but a new one involving Abilene Joyce and the other missing woman, Nicky Holden.
He had struck out on those, too. There’d been no sightings of Nicky, no reports of a dead, unidentified Jane Doe that would match her description so the hunt was on to find her. Added to that, they hadn’t found either woman’s vehicle and had no idea how the two had gotten to Outlaw Ridge.
Abilene’s doctors were on their own hunt, to try to stabilize the woman enough so they could try to help her recall what’d happened to her. It was possible that her abductor had kept anything about himself concealed, the way it’d happened with Lauren. Still, Abilene might be able to recall some small detail that would help them identify who was behind this.
Either a former victim. The original abductor.
Or a copycat.
Yeah, there were a lot of moving pieces to this investigation.
When he sighed, Lauren looked up from her own laptop, and she didn’t have to tell him that she was just as frustrated and concerned as he was. He could see it in her eyes, and she was no doubt replaying the second message right along with the first one.
“You know, maybe the messages are just bullshit,” he threw out there.
Obviously, that surprised her because she lifted an eyebrow. “How so?”
“A distraction,” Jesse went on. “Maybe Abilene and Nicky have nothing to do with what happened sixteen years ago. This could be the work of some copycat asshole who wants to cover his tracks.”
Lauren didn’t dismiss that, and a few seconds later, she nodded. “Maybe. If so, then Nicky would be the primary target, and Abilene could have been taken to muddy the waters. And deliver that message.” She kept her gaze on him. “But you’ve found no link to Nicky and Graves. Because if you had, you would have led with that.”
“I would have,” he admitted. “But I’ve put a bug in the ear of the lead Austin investigator on Nicky’s case, and she’s going to ask Nicky’s family about any possible therapy she might have had. In the meantime, I’ll keep going through all of Nicky’s social media accounts to see if she mentions a link with Graves.”
