“Ma’am, my name is Darren Mathews, and I’m a Texas Ranger, and you’re not the only one who thinks something is wrong.”

“Gail Combs,” she said then, almost sighing her own name in relief. “I run a notary business here in Jefferson. Ms. Maldonado reached out to me when she arrived in town a couple of weeks ago about using my services for some legal documents she needed signed. I asked for payment up front, since she mentioned something about having to travel some distance to the signatories, and I wrote up an invoice for my services. I sent it to her office…” And here it seemed like she was carefully reading the name off of her own paperwork. “Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene in Alexandria, the one in Virginia. I never received payment or acknowledgment that they’d gotten the invoice, and like I said, she never showed for our appointment. Maybe I’m a nosy one who ought to mind her own business, but I think it’s weird that she won’t answer her phone, and even though this is the hotel she told me she was staying at, the front desk keeps telling me they never had a guest by that name, even when I told them the room number she gave me as her contact info when she first called me.”

And when Darren had asked about room 207, he’d been told that the guest had checked out the same night he’d heard strange noises coming from the room, the same night Darren had seen Gaines escort a possibly inebriated woman through the Cardinal’s front doors, a woman he now believed was Monica Maldonado. “I just hope she’s safe,” Gail said. “I mean, my husband tells me I watch too much Dateline, but a woman traveling alone, and now missing…”

Missing.