“Anything from Travis?”
“No.” Brantley lifted his head, met Reese’s gaze. “You?”
“No. I shot him a text to check in but haven’t heard back yet.”
“Anything from your brother?”
Reese shook his head, bit off a corner of his toast, chewed.
They ate in silence for a minute or two before Brantley asked, “What time do you have to be at work?”
“Nine,” he said, glancing at the clock. “I doubt anyone else is there, but I’ll check in, make sure nothing pressing needs my attention. Then I figured I’d head over to Travis’s. See how I can help out.”
Brantley opened his mouth to say something, but his phone chimed, snagging his attention.
“It’s JJ,” he said, staring at the phone, his shoulders squaring as he sat up straight. “She’s got somethin’ on that blonde.”
Feeling a sense of hope, Reese chased his toast with coffee, wiped his mouth. “She say what?”
“She’s on her way here now.”
Reese nodded, took a few more bites of his eggs, then more coffee. A minute later, he’d cleared his plate.
“I better head home. Shower. You’ll call me when you know somethin’?”
“Yep,” Brantley said around a mouthful of bacon.
And that was how Reese kicked off the first day of what he figured was going to be an altered reality.
Interesting that he wasn’t put off in the least.
Chapter Eleven
“You look better than you did last night,” JJ noted upon her arrival at his house shortly after Reese left.
Brantley ran a hand over the scruff on his jaw, offered a pleasant smile. “I feel better than I did last night.”
Her head canted to one side, then the other as she seemingly studied him. “I’d go so far as to say you look … happy.” Her tone shifted to rampant curiosity. “Why do you look happy, Brantley?”
“It’s a new day,” he said, motioning toward the back door so he could lead the way to the barn.
“It is.” Her gaze dropped to his gesturing hand, then back to his face. “You’ll tell me eventually.”
“Right now, I’m hopin’ you’ll be tellin’ me somethin’.” He urged her toward the door with a hand on her back. “Somethin’ about this blonde.”
JJ’s expression instantly sobered and he understood her reasons. As it was, the headache had caused Brantley to lose precious hours he could’ve spent looking for Kate. Now that he was fully functioning again, there was no time to reflect on anything other than the missing girl who had been gone for roughly twenty hours.
“Anything from Travis?” she inquired. “Did the kidnapper call?”
“No. He called me a few minutes ago. Still nothing from the sheriff, either.”
“Fuck,” JJ hissed. “We have got to find this little girl. What if we’re off here? What if this woman had nothing to do with it? What if it was a random kidnapping? Some pervert saw the perfect opportunity and pounced?”
“This wasn’t random, JJ,” he assured her because that was something he truly believed. “We need to keep tugging on this thread. See what unravels. What did you find?”
“Okay, well…” JJ stepped out of the way so he could slide the barn door back, revealing the doors leading inside. “You probably won’t like this, but since we had nothing to go on with the exception of a grainy image and no motive, I decided to do some digging.”
Brantley peered down at her as they crossed toward the row of monitors.
“On Travis.”
That pulled him up short, had him turning to face her fully.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it, but really, Brantley. I had to do something.”
He understood that. As it was, he felt entirely inept because they hadn’t uncovered anything on who might’ve taken Kate, where she was, or why someone would want to snatch her during a field trip to the state capitol. The only thing his gut was telling him was that this wasn’t random. Kate had not been taken by some creep who wanted to get his hands on a little girl. That was the only thing keeping him calm right now.
“And I didn’t exactly dig into Travis, per se. More like his resort.”
“Alluring Indulgence? What does that have to do with Kate’s disappearance?”
JJ stepped up to one of the monitors, tapped her fingers over the screen. “Well, I figured if this was some sort of retaliation against them, then it seemed pretty straightforward to think it would be someone from the resort. They are an invitation-only establishment and they cater to some well-known names. But it wasn’t the famous people I was looking into. I was able to hack their system—”
“I did not hear that, JJ.”
“Fine.” She forced a smile. “I was able to obtain the information I needed, and I started using the list of people who’d been to the resort and pulling up information on each of them.”
“Lookin’ for what?”
“Anomalies. People who’d experienced some sort of major life event recently. Brushes with the law, divorces, lost their job. That’s when I found this.”
