Exposing Ethan (Cassidy Kincaid Mystery Book 4)

as it crowded painfully under her fingernail. She thought about Dutch. What had happened to him? Was he okay? Her attempts to locate him had been futile. If only she knew his real name. Saxon’s aggressive face popped into her mind. This isn’t over. A shiver chilled her spine.
“It’ll be fast. A day, maybe two.”
“Where?” Cassidy asked, feeling resigned. There was no getting out of a grand jury testimony.
“San Francisco.”
Cassidy began to panic, picturing herself strapped to a chair while a room of men in suits fired off questions like darts to a target board. “Will you be there?”
Bruce nodded. “You’re sort of my job right now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know you did what you thought was right,” Bruce said, his voice softening. “But hell, Cass, that warehouse…our informant…thankfully we got lucky and no one got killed.”
Except Lars, Cassidy wanted to say, but her mind flashed to the warehouse and the image of Izzy handcuffed to that bed while the sprinklers gushed water from the ceiling.
Her heart twisted with regret. At least I saved them from one night of hell, she thought, cringing at the realization of what these girls were being forced to do, possibly at this very minute.
“Did…they rescue anyone?” she asked, imagining firefighters pouring into the building, busting down doors to find scared young girls cowering on stained mattresses.
Bruce’s face took on a pained look. “One. She was hiding inside a closet.” He crossed his arms. “There was also…evidence.”
Cassidy remembered the instruments laid out on the table in the room where Izzy was being held, and the boisterous laughter from the men who had entered.
“I’m guessing the bullet hole in the wall was yours?” Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow.
“He wanted Izzy,” Cassidy said, her voice firm. “I couldn’t let him take her.”
“We’ll need to speak with her, too.”
Cassidy eyed him sharply. “No. Leave her alone.”
Bruce’s jaw pulsed like the gills of a shark. “Forgive me for being so blunt, Cassidy, but this isn’t your show. Your and Izzy’s testimonies could give us the information we need to finally nail these guys.”
He’s right, she thought as her stomach tightened further. “I don’t think you’ll locate her. Her dad can’t even find her.” She remembered Preston Ford’s stern voice over the phone line. For reasons she still did not understand, she had kept Cody’s identity a secret.
“You want to catch one more wave?” Bruce asked, lowering to his board to paddle. “We still have a little bit of time before our flight.”
The playful spark in his eyes filled her with relief. Even though he was furious with her—and likely the entire task force shared this sentiment—they were still friends. Speaking to the task force would be taxing, but she wasn’t going to have to do it alone.
“Bruce,” she said as they paddled side by side toward the lineup. “What about Saxon?”
“He’s gone into hiding.” He made a gesture with his hands. “We’ve got him on cameras entering Mexico.”
A rush of relief flooded her, but it didn’t last. For how long would he stay away? Would they catch him when he tried to come back? “Do you think…I’m in danger?”
Bruce glanced her way, his face pulled tight in a grimace. “As long as you’re with me, and do what I say, you’ll be safe.”
Cassidy inhaled a steadying breath. “Then I better tell you who I called before I left.”

Two
“I swear I left it right here,” Cassidy said, rubbing her forehead. She scanned her desk again, zooming out to take in the two stacks of notebooks, her laptop, and the loose piles of papers on the floor. Her tired eyes were dry after the long flight to Seattle, so she blinked a few times, then tried again.
“Where did you last have it?” Bruce asked from where he was leaning against the door jamb.
She had expected it to feel weird, having Bruce in her house, but after the awkward moment when he stepped over the threshold passed, she discovered that it wasn’t.
“Oh, the table, maybe,” she said, stepping past him into her kitchen. On the edge of the picnic table she used as dining room furniture she found the stack of papers hiding the notebook. “Here it is,” she said, relieved that she wasn’t losing her mind.
On the night she’d returned from San Francisco, she’d already figured out that Pete and Lars were somehow connected. Before switching gears to depart for her field work in Hawaii, she had pounced on the box full of Pete’s notebooks. In the three hours between flights, she had steeled her courage and flipped through every single one: pocket-sized ones, full-sized ones with no lines, medium-sized ones with recycled covers, spiral-bound, book-bound, even the single sheets of 8 ½ x 11 paper folded into fourths that he used in a pinch. Seeing his tight scrawl flying across so many pages, sometimes careful, sometimes so rushed it was illegible, had cracked open another hole in her damaged heart.
But she’d forced her way through the emotions and the result was a name: Brad Sawyer.
Pete didn’t use a formal calendar, instead he made one out of a single 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper every Sunday and kept it in his back right pants pocket. But the notebook—spiral-bound, unlined paper, plain blue cover—contained details she recognized from the period before his death. At that time, he had been interviewing athletes for his book about near-death experiences, an idea inspired by his own brush with death in an avalanche the year before. But he also had been researching the story about the “umbrella girls” they had seen working the backroads of Sicily.
Cassidy opened the notebook to the page containing her find and handed it to Bruce.
Dressed in pressed khakis and a button-down blue shirt, he could be a businessman traveling home after a long week of meetings, but his athletic frame and quick eyes made her think scholar with a running habit, or personal trainer. Certainly nothing that said, “federal agent.” That’s probably why he