Page 12 of Travis
The tape was broken.
Someone had been in my apartment. Someone had opened my closet. The closet where I kept a fireproof lockbox with hard copies of my Kindt research. The printed timelines, route maps, the analytical framework I didn’t trust to digital storage alone.
The box was still there. I checked. It didn’t look disturbed. But whoever had been here was careful enough to close the closet and careful enough to close the kitchen drawer to almost the right position, and they’d had no way of knowing about the tape.
I’d accessed Kindt’s communication node from an FBI terminal two days ago. Now someone had been in my apartment, going through the closet where I kept my research on the same network.
I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
I thought about calling Pratt. But I could already play the conversation forward in my head.
Someone broke into my apartment.
How do you know?
Things were moved. A piece of tape I placed on my closet door was broken.
A piece of tape. Right. And you think this is connected to...? Let me guess. The Kindt case. The case you’ve been independently investigating without authorization. And you want us to take all this seriously based on a piece of tape? You probably need to turn in your badge and see about getting yourself checked into a looney bin.
I set the phone down.
And even if he believed me, even if he took it seriously and opened a case and assigned an agent, that would take weeks.
I couldn’t stay here, not knowing someone had been in here. What if they came back? I needed help. I needed someone to treat my intel as credible.
Travis was on my mind before I consciously put him there. The security tell had pulled him out of whatever locked drawer I kept him in and set him right in front of me.
He was former CIA. Had worked with my sister. He’d been part of the joint operation targeting Kindt’s pipeline, the one that killed Naomi.
He had the tech skills to do things with my data that I couldn’t do alone. And he had a personal stake in Kindt that went deeper than anyone else alive, because he’d been standing right there when Kindt’s operation took Naomi from both of us.
I’d tried calling him before. Three times in the past four months, as my model had started producing results that felt real enough to share. I’d never left detailed messages, just a request to call me back.
He never had.
I called now. The phone rang four times and went to a voicemail that was just a tone, no greeting, no name. I hung up.
Same result. Same silence. Same Travis, who’d dropped off the face of the earth after Naomi’s funeral and apparently had no intention of being found.
Except I was out of options. The FBI wouldn’t act on my data. Someone had been in my apartment. And the one person who might actually listen was in Montana not answering his phone.
So, damn it, I’d make him answer the door instead.
I called my mother.
She picked up on the third ring with the voice she used when she wasn’t sure the call was worth her time. “Sera. Hi.”
“Hi, Mom. I need Travis Hale’s address.”
A pause. “Travis? Naomi’s Travis?”
There it was. Two words and I was twelve years old again, asking to borrow something that belonged to my sister.
“Yes.”
“Why on earth would you need that?”
“It’s related to work. The trafficking case.”
