Page 83 of Soaring Free
Jack
Liam, is there anyone else we can pull in to helpwith this?
Liam
I have an entire network of people working on this right now, Jack. My plane will land in forty-six minutes or less. I already have the best people available in the world working on locating her. We will find her.
Ryan
I’m waiting at the airstrip for you and we’ll get to Savannah’s house as soon as possible.
Finn
What are we telling her girls?
Jack
Nothing. I’m at Dad’s right now, and the girls are all playing together, none the wiser. The plan is to keep them that way until it is absolutely necessary.
Vivian
Sav didn’t willingly leave like that. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t just leave her girls. She wouldn’t just leave us.
Jack
We know, sweetheart. We are going to find her.
“Why is this group chat called The Brigade?” I ask Walker as I pace the length of Savannah’s kitchen.
He hums and the corner of his mouth tips up. “You know how they call their sibling group The Cavalry, right?” I nod. “Well, a Cavalry is typically part of a larger military group, like a division or a brigade. So that group chat, until today, was The Cavalry plus me.”
“And now I’m part of The Brigade?”
“Yeah, man. You’re a part of it. And Savannah will love seeing your name in there. It’s an unwritten rule but Jack or Liam arethe ones who kind of take the lead on that stuff, so the fact that they added you, it’s a good thing.”
I pull my reading glasses off and rub my hand down my face as a frustrated sigh escapes me. “I can’t wait to be happy about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I cannot be happy about any-fucking-thing until I know Savannah is okay, Walker. What the hell happened? And if it’s not Shane, which obviously we all know it’s not possible for him to be simultaneously involved and also in critical condition, then where the fuck is she?”
Sheriff Eddie explained that when Shane was found on the floor in his office, the cleaning crew initially thought he had suffered a heart attack, but the tests at the hospital showed a much more nefarious reason for his collapse: someone poisoned him. His blood and urine tests came back positive for tetrahydrozoline, an ingredient in the over-the-counter eyedrops Visine. Shane is currently unconscious, ventilated, and in critical condition in the ICU, so whoever poisoned him must have used a shit ton of Visine. The timing of Shane’s apparent poisoning and collapse along with Savannah’s disappearance has all of us on high fucking alert.
I spoke to Pippa and she’s taking Gigi to Nashville for a shopping day with our mother, and hopefully by the time they return later this evening, all of this will be resolved. If not, my sister will keep Gigi overnight and we will go from there.
How does someone disappear in this day and age, especially when they had a tracking device, technically multiple devices, on their body?
“Do you think she’s still wearing the necklace?” Walker asks, as though reading my thoughts.
“I hope so. I’m sorry we kept it from you, just…” I shake my head, not wanting to admit to covertly tracking my girlfriend to a federal agent.
“I get it. I’m not worried about technicalities right now, and as far as I’m concerned, I don’t know anything about any of that. I’monly concerned with finding my sister-in-law and bringing her home to her family, and you.”
I clench my jaw to try and hold back the stinging in my eyes. I’m not a crier, but the thought of hernotcoming home? I can’t stomach that possibility. It’s not a possibility. She has to come home.
“I can only do so much if I don’t have all of the information, Liam,” Sophia snaps at him as her fingers fly across her keyboard. We’ve congregated at Ryan’s and his kitchen has become the headquarters for everything related to trying to find Savannah.
We know that Savannah was likely taken from her home sometime between 9:10 p.m. and 9:35 p.m. as her security cameras on her property, along with those at both next-door neighbors, were offline for those twenty-five minutes. Sophia already explained that whoever is behind this likely used a jammer of some sorts to knock out any surveillance, which is also why Savannah’s necklace is still offline. It also explains why the safety measures Liam added to her security system if anyone accessed it isn’t helpful right now. Instead of accessing her system, which would have launched the malware designed to feed information back to Liam’s servers, the person or people that took Savannah knocked out all electronics within a certain distance from wherever the jammer was located. The capability and knowledge to do that large of a jamming signal only reaffirms that we are not dealing with amateur hackers.
