DEREK MATHERS was sitting in his cubicle, trying to decide whether to call it a night or give Windermere a call, see if he could coax a smile out of her, when the phone beat him to it. Rung, loud, startling him, and he sat up quickly and grabbed for the phone, picked it up before he was fully composed. “Carla?”
“Uh, sorry.” A man’s voice. “This is Richardson, with the Marshals in Minneapolis. I get the wrong number?”
Mathers cleared his throat. “Shit, sorry,” he said. “This is Agent Derek Mathers, FBI. What do you need?”
“I’m trying to get ahold of Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere,” Richardson said. “They around?”
“Reno,” Mathers said. “Chasing leads. I’m covering this thing from home. What’s up?”
The guy paused. A long pause. “Okay,” he said. “I’m down at the halfway house, you know? We’re supposed to be watching that Romanian girl.”
Supposed to be, Mathers thought. That doesn’t sound good.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. And?”
“And, yeah.” Another beat. “We have a bit of a problem here, Agent Mathers. According to the staff inside, that girl isn’t in her bunk for lights-out. And she’s nowhere else in the building, either.”
Mathers sat up. “So where the hell is she?”
“That’s the thing,” Richardson said. “The girls inside seem to think she just took off.”
“Jesus,” Mathers said. “Jesus Christ.”
“You said it. What do you want us to do?”
Mathers leaned back and closed his eyes, already picturing Windermere’s reaction. “Find her,” he said. “Find her, for God’s sake.”