“It doesn’t take long.”
“What’s next on the tour?”
“It’s time to sit down with my brothers.”
She glanced up at him, surprise on her face. “Oh, I didn’t realize you were brothers.”
“We’re not blood brothers, but brothers all the same.”
“I love that.”
“When you’re held in a room for two weeks with two other boys, you bond. I hated the kidnapping part, but that event brought Gray and Liam into my life, and I’ll never regret that.”
“The Phoenix Three. The three of you from the ashes.”
He smiled, liking that she got it. “That’s right. Here’s the conference room where we’re meeting.” He opened the door, allowing her to walk in first. Without waiting to be told, she took a seat across from Grayson and Liam, and he sat next to her.
“What the three of you have created here is pretty incredible,” she said. “My favorite thing was the board with pictures of all the children you’ve saved.”
“We couldn’t have done it without each other,” Liam said.
Grayson nodded. “He’s right. Each of those children has a story, a life that we were able to hopefully help change for the better.”
“Amen to that,” Cooper said. He swiveled his chair toward Kendall. “Ready to talk about why we’re here?”
“I wish there wasn’t a reason for it, but since there is, yes.”
He wished the same. When they found who had taken Livie and was now threatening Kendall, Grayson and Liam were going to have to hold him back from doing serious damage to the man.
“I’m going to put the note that was pinned to Livie up on the screen,” Grayson said. “There are some clues in it.” He glanced at Kendall. “Is that okay with you?”
When she visibly swallowed as she nodded, Cooper wanted to pull her onto his lap, wrap his arms around her and make all of this go away. Cooper read the note again when it appeared on the screen.
Dearest Kendall, your little girl is such a beautiful child. I thought about keeping her, but she’s not the prize I want. It was fun, though, being able to steal her away from you. To let you worry. You, with all your sad podcast stories. Now you understand how those families felt when their child went missing, so think of it as me doing you a favor. You’re welcome.
I’ll be seeing you, love. Soon.
A devoted fan.
The note ignited a rage inside him. He’d had to kill when in the military, but he’d never liked that he had to. Now, though? There was a man out there he could kill and still sleep at night. “He listens to her podcasts and is obsessed with her.”
Grayson nodded. “Yes, and there’s something else. We have to consider the possibility that Livie isn’t the first child he’s taken. We’ve sent the email to an FBI profiler but haven’t heard back yet.”
Kendall gasped. “Oh, God. You think he’s done this before?”
“After Coop sent us a copy of the note, Gray and I agreed it was likely,” Liam said. “I did some research, and there are five unsolved child kidnappings within a two-hundred-mile radius of Decatur. I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts, and you did one on Lacy Alexander. Remember her? Six years old, taken from her bed in the middle of the night three years ago?”
“Yes. The parents were suspects until her body was found in a shallow grave in the woods.” Her eyes widened. “There was a note pinned to her shirt. Just like Livie. What the note said wasn’t released to the public, but apparently it was enough to clear the parents. Her abductor was never caught, which is why I did a podcast on her.”
Grayson picked up his pen and wrote something on a notepad. “I’ll see if the police will tell me what it said.”
“I only went back ten years, so there could be more,” Liam said.
Kendall sat back in her chair. “His note to me says he’ll see me soon. I can’t live my life jumping at every shadow. What can I do?”
“What canwedo?” Cooper said. “First, you and Livie aren’t going to be left alone until the man is behind bars.” He’d worked with his brothers long enough to know what they were thinking, and it took only a glance at both of them to see them look from him to Kendall, to know they had the same thought as him.
He wished there was another way, but they needed to draw the man threatening Kendall in, set a trap. “How often do you do a podcast?” he asked her.