can do this!
Her last remaining piece of hope she spent on one last call to Carmen.
“Please call me back, Carmen. I’m worried about you. I just need to know where you went and who you talked to. If you can hear this—”
“Hello?” a male voice answered, interrupting the message she was leaving.
“Who is this?” she asked. Her heart leapt to her throat.
“Who is this?” he asked. The voice sounded familiar.
“Martin? Is that you?”
“Kiley. So you’re back from vacation then? You sure left a shitstorm here. When are you coming back to the office?”
The coldness returned, freezing her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Her stomach lurched again, this time nearly making her heave. She didn’t have any answers for him. She. Had. Questions.
Sucking it up, she forged ahead, “How did you get Carmen’s cell phone? And does Newman know about this?”
“I’m at her place now. I’m with Fred and Doris. Well, I was here already, but they’ve just arrived. Say, we’re real worried about—”
“You broke into Carmen’s house?”
“She left the back door open. It wasn’t hard. Kiley, are you back from Florida? There are so many people who want to talk to you.”
“No. But I’m coming.”
“That’s good. I think that’s really good. Fred’s calling the police. He’s found something—”
The line went dead.
Again, she stared at the keypad, once again cut off from—from a friend. An ally? Or did Martin have something to do with Carmen’s disappearance since he hadn’t reported in? Maybe he’d taken Carmen’s notes.
She was running out of people to trust. Martin knew about her being in Florida, like Carmen said. Everyone knew.
Kiley remembered what Jason had told her, “Stay busy. Stay with people in our community.” Maybe it was time to include Aimee, Martel, and Andy in what was going on in Portland, fully brief them before she returned there. Her editor had been right. Someone needed to know where she was and what she was doing. Someone who could do something about it. By default, that would be Andy and the girls.
But first, she dialed the number Newman had given her for Chief of Police Rayburn and left her message.
“This is Kiley Worthington, investigative reporter for the Columbia Passage. My editor has told me you want to speak to me. I will be flying back to Portland tomorrow, and I’d be happy to answer any of your questions when I get there. I’ll check in with you when I land. Thank you, and I hope we can work together to help clean up a couple of things I’ve uncovered in the course of my investigation. I’ll explain everything when I see you tomorrow or whenever. Thanks. Bye.”
She quickly made online reservations for a direct flight from Tampa to Portland, paying an enormous amount for the ticket. She’d call her landlady tonight and see if she could get an extension on her stay or some sort of early cancellation discount. If that didn’t work out, she figured she could always stay with either Martel or Aimee when, and not if, she returned to the gulf. She’d ask them later on this afternoon.
By tomorrow, she’d be in Portland, and she’d start facing her fears head-on. She’d share her notes with the police, hopefully retaining the anonymity of her sources, and help them find those ten girls and wherever Carmen was holed up. She knew those notes held the answers they needed to complete the mission. Maybe Carmen was just in hiding, keeping herself safely stowed away from harm. She hoped that was the case, though unlikely.
Part of her was excited for this new adventure. The rest of her was filled with the physical pain of missing Jason, almost like an addiction. But it didn’t stem from fear. It came from somewhere else. He’d instilled in her the confidence to quit running and start crashing through the waves like one of those rubber boats he talked about. With Jason on her side, the odds were in her favor.
You got this, remember?
She knew he’d be proud of how she was handling things.
Chapter 11
The entire team took the State Department passenger plane to JFK Airport, but from there they were split into three groups of roughly twenty men. Jason was glad he was traveling with Damon, T.J., Coop, and Kyle. Sven was also to be on their hop to Gran Canaria. Each airline took a slightly different route, but they all had only one stopover. Flight times ranged from seventeen to nineteen hours in length. This was the grueling part