I’d gotten some solid work in already, and without Mannie talking and the team still searching for any additional videos of suicides, I probably could spare an hour for church with my stepdaughter who was so troubled last night that she was in tears.

Folding up my computer, I said, “We should go.”

“I just told you I didn’t want to. I hate it when Mom takes me.”

“Do you promise to hate it just as much if I take you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to complain if I take you to church?”

“Obviously.”

“Would you complain if I didn’t?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Let’s get changed.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Can I drive?”

“That would be a no.”

++++

Blake knew something was wrong.

Mannie never would have gone this long without checking in if he could help it.

Considering that he was such a high-profile suspect, Blake thought it likely that if he’d been apprehended, word would’ve hit the cable news cycle or the wire, but so far there hadn’t been anything about his arrest or any homicides of John Does fitting his description. But then again, the news couldn’t always be trusted.

Additionally, the timing of his disappearance was not ideal, not with the distribution happening on Tuesday and all that needed to be done before then.

One of his men, Aaron Jasper, had been siphoning money into his own accounts and, if the intel Blake had received was accurate, Aaron had been to see the Matchmaker—something that was strictly off-limits for Blake’s employees.

It was time to make an example of Mr. Jasper and to have a word with Ibrahim, who seemed to be keeping a few too many secrets himself—both situations that Mannie was typically more adept at handling than Blake was.

Until last summer, Blake would have leveraged his two contacts in the FBI for information about Mannie’s possible apprehension, but since then, one had been killed by terrorists and the other had been arrested, severely hampering the amount of intel he was able to get from the Bureau.

However, he still had a compromised NSA employee that he could contact, and now he reached out to him to see if he could find out what’d happened to his most trusted associate.

16

Knowing how conservative Christie’s church was, I went with a tie, which Tessa smirked at when she saw me.

On the way out the door, she asked, “So did you find out what a dotterel is yet?”

“Actually, that sort of slipped off my radar screen.”

“I’ll give you a hint—it’s a trip of dotterels, remember? That’s a huge clue.”

“A trip. Okay, got it. I’ll look into it.”

++++

Christie attended a small storefront church, which, on a good Sunday, might have sixty people in attendance.

Apparently, this was not a good Sunday.