“I don’t want to wait. There’s no reason to wait.”

Lyle still sounded fuzzy, and Max wondered if he might have been drinking. Max had empathy for his friend, knowing the headwinds that Lyle faced. Lyle had to know that Sandy was likely dead, even though neither he nor Max had ever said those words out loud to each other. Still, Lyle’s impatience could throw their work and Niki’s sacrifice into jeopardy. It had been reckless to follow Reed the night before. Max should have put his foot down but didn’t. For a moment, Max questioned whether he should give the coordinates to Lyle at all. The last thing he needed was for Lyle to go off half cocked, hell-bent on appeasing his grief.

“We need to take our time, Lyle. We need to do this right.”

“I’ll just drive by and get the lay of the land.”

“We go together,” Max said.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally Lyle said, “Whatever you say.”

“It’ll take a little while to get the information from the provider, so sit tight and I’ll call you back.” He returned to the cubicle where Niki sat waiting.

“Everything good on your end?” Niki asked.

“Yeah. Lyle’s a bit… impatient. This whole thing’s got him twisted up inside. He’ll be okay.”

Max hovered at the opening to the cubicle, unsure what to do. Niki must have sensed his discomfort. “You can sit in Matty’s chair. He won’t mind.”

Max nodded his thanks. The chair felt like an old friend.

“You miss it?” Niki asked.

“The chair?”

“Being a detective. Solving crimes. The hunt.”

If he had been truthful, he would have told Niki that he missed it more than he could bear. It was as if he’d lost a limb and hadn’t realized that it was missing until Lyle showed up at his cabin. But this wasn’t his world anymore. It wasn’t his chair or his cubicle, and it never could be again. He didn’t deserve it. So, Max lied. “There’s peace in the woods, a slowness that makes me feel like I’m living with purpose. I don’t know how to explain it, but… that’s my home now.”

Niki looked away. He had hurt her again.

The phone rang and Niki answered it. Max looked over her shoulder as she wrote two strings of numbers, longitudes and latitudes. Before hanging up, she typed the numbers into the search box of the map on her computer. She pressed enter and a dot appeared, but it was not in northern Minnesota. Instead, the dot appeared in St. Paul.

“That’s not right,” Max whispered.

Niki spoke to the person on the other end of the phone. “Could you read those numbers to me again?” She touched a pen to each number on her tablet, making no corrections. “And you’re sure you typed the correct phone number?” There was a pause and then, “Okay, thank you.”

“That’s the correct address,” Niki said. “Is it possible that it wasn’t a burner phone, or that he was simply calling a friend here in the Twin Cities?”