The Unseen Enemy Series

Chapter 84

Late the next day, Dallas sat in his office. In front of him were two files. Both of them disturbed him, for completely different reasons.

The first file contained the police and medical reports about what had happened to Jennifer Marie Sawyer. Dallas had read the details about Jenny’s attack with a knot in his stomach, and by the time he’d finished, he was f*****g livid.

It was with savage glee that he found out that three of the men involved were now dead – one in a prison fight, one in some drugs mess, the last one shot by a cop during an armed robbery – and the last guy was currently in jail. It seemed that after years of assault and battery and rape, he’d finally graduated to murder and the state had seen fit to stick his ass in prison for a nice, long stretch.

Dallas didn’t think he’d breathe free air for at least another fifteen years.

He felt deeply uncomfortable knowing all this about Jenny: like what he knew about Olivia, he’d have preferred for her to have shared these details with him by choice. But he was wearing his professional hat right now not his personal one, and as hard as it was, he had to treat Olivia, Jenny and Kat as simply a part of an investigation.

Yeah, right, man. You’ve been crossing personal lines all over the f*****g place since this whole thing began, and you know it.

As bad as Jenny’s file was, though, it was the second one that really threw him for a loop. It was Katherine Lawrence’s file – Kat’s – and it was completely f*****g empty. He’d been digging for information about her life for almost twelve hours, and it seemed that Kat simply did not exist.

She didn’t have a bank account, didn’t work legally at the hair salon, so she didn’t pay taxes. She didn’t have a registered cell phone, no registered address. He knew her middle name was Joanna – the same as his mother’s – and she’d told Jim that she was originally from Oregon. But a thorough search through the birth records showed that no Katherine Joanna Lawrence who matched Kat’s physical description had been born in that state in the past thirty-five years. Dallas had then gone through the driver’s license photos of every single woman with that name from Oregon, and none of them was Kat.

So either she doesn’t even have a driver’s license… or that’s not her name.

Kat changed her appearance so often, it made Dallas’ head spin. She was cagey about any details to do with her life. She had no job history, no taxes filed under that name, no social insurance number that he could find. No social media at all: no f*******:, t****k, or i********: accounts. It was like she’d just popped up out of the ground a year or so ago, taken up work at the salon for cash-in-hand, and conjured up a whole life out of thin air. She was totally off-the-grid, and Dallas had only ever come across that kind of thing once before… when a woman was hiding from her ex-husband, a psycho monster who had tried to strangle her with piano-wire.

What’s your real story, Kat? If that’s even your name…

There was a knock at the door, and he glanced up. “Come on in.”

The door opened, and Marnie Lyons stood there holding a file. “Hey, Dallas. I got that information about Abraham Castell that you requested.”

He immediately refocused. “Tell me.”

“No way the man was at work on Friday night,” she said.

“Where was he?”

“No clue. I went through his cell history, and he had it off all that night.”

Dallas frowned. “So no way to get any sense of his location.”

“None.”

“Dammit.”

“I know. You want me to keep digging?”

“Damn right I do,” he said. “Go back into his life for the past nine months, OK? Work schedule, credit card receipts, bank account activity, internet presence, the works.”

“You got it, boss,” Marnie said. She set the file on Dallas’ desk and left the room.

He sat and thought for a few more minutes, then he got to his feet. He picked up Jenny’s and Kat’s files, and he looked down at them.

Too far over the lines, Foreman. Way too f*****g far. Shut this down. Now.

Dallas walked down the hall and punched in the code to what was fondly known around the office as the Scorched Earth Room. Dallas usually just shredded sensitive documents, but this time, he felt the need to symbolically destroy every single piece of physical evidence of what he’d been up to.

He opened the furnace door, recoiled a bit from the blazing heat. He threw in Jenny’s file, watched the papers and photos burn and turn to ash. He held Kat’s empty file in his hand, and on the way back to his office, he slid it into the supplies cabinet. Somebody could reuse it.

He sat again, took a deep breath. Nobody ever had to know any of what he’d found. He’d tell Olivia that nothing had turned up on her friends – and in Emma’s case, that was actually totally true – and leave it at that.

It’s a white lie, man, but you’ve got no choice here. Just let it all go.