for the article about women taken from prison for trafficking, then Dina suddenly disappeared. What were you working on when Zoey disappeared?”
“I had gotten a few phone interviews. Landed the possible job with World Tour.”
“Was that it?”
“I mean, I was looking into possible story ideas for writing an exposé. I figured I’d write it on my own, without the backing of a newsgroup or editor. Freelance. At my last real job for a newsgroup, I was working on the prison trafficking article that ended up exposing the man behind the ring.”
“Right. Malcom Fox. His organization was doing what every savvy drug trafficking organization is doing these days—diversifying to include human trafficking, both labor and sex. But again, linking the people behind the trafficking has always been the hard part. Let’s hope Reggie can come up with a link.”
“Do you really think any of this has to do with what happened before?”
“We can’t ignore the possibility.” Liam struggled to wrap his mind around the likelihood. But if there was a connection, they needed to find it—and fast.
He had to figure this out, even if he couldn’t figure his own life out. Sheriff Taggart had told him there was a reason for everything. Before her untimely death, his mother had often said that everything happened for a reason. When she died, Liam closed himself off from the pain. He thought that if everything happened for a reason, then considering all he’d been through, he had no hope of figuring life out. So he never tried.
But Rae—she made him want to try.
He waited for her gaze to find him again.
There. Her blue-green eyes focused on him. He swallowed against the tightness in his throat. Liam had thought he hadn’t wanted to see this woman again, but she was here now in his home, and he knew this moment was meant to be—proof that things happened for a reason, after all. Their interactions in this life weren’t over.
Could they resurrect what they’d shared before?
Rae covered her face, then quickly dropped her hands. “What can we do about any of it tonight?”
“Snowmobiles.”
“Snowmobiles?”
Liam grinned. “Heath has six of them. We’re trying to gear up for opening in the winter.”
Rae arched a brow.
“That forest road where we saw Astor and his buddy go—I want to see if I can get up there from another angle instead of taking that road—because after we were there, someone tried to kill us.”
“The sheriff said the state was also looking into it.”
“Of course they are, but as far as what Astor was doing on the forest service road today, Taggart might have called a ranger about it. I’m doubtful the ranger will even go in and check it out. Even if they do, that doesn’t mean they’re going to look at things the way we are.” Funny that he was now trying to persuade her to cooperate in the investigation for which she’d asked for his help. “Sheriff Taggart knows we’re on this, and that frees me up to look deeper. Plus, I have you, Rae. Nobody is going to dig as deep as you will to find Zoey. Are you with me?”
“Did you have any doubt?” Her eyes brightened with hope.
That Liam had put that sparkle there both thrilled him and scared him to death. He didn’t want to let her down. But he had hope too. Maybe they made a good team, after all. But this was far from over.
“When are we going to do this?” She studied him. “Wait. You’re not saying we’re snowmobiling tonight, are you?”
He nodded. “Evelyn is snowshoeing tonight. People ski at night, and they snowmobile too. We just have to take precautions. Be careful.”
“Won’t we tip someone off? Won’t they hear us?”
He stuck his finger on the map. “That’s a popular snowmobile spot. It’s a few miles up from the forest service road.”
“Well, that’s probably where these guys were going.”
“Maybe. But I think if they had planned to snowmobile for fun, they would have taken a different road. We can get to that road from this snowmobiling spot without raising too much suspicion. We’re just out having fun.”
She snorted a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“We’re going to pretend we’re having fun as we approach a potential danger zone. For some reason that made me think about my father and the lengths he went to in order to get into war zones.”
Rae studied the map, then continued. “He loved us, we knew that, but even when he was back home, his mind was always somewhere else. In