A woman. Of course. Has to be a woman. Must be someone significant. May explain what I was thinking of earlier… about a gap in the proximal area of my memories where Chris lay buried.

“We first knew her as Alexis.”

“But you know her by another name.”

“And you told us you were in love with her.”

I cracked the biggest smile I could manage in my state.

In love? I was in love?

After Chris – I’d found love?

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Harley

6 hours earlier

I couldn’t sleep and tossed and turned. I’d just tried to ring Jack up as it was an hour after we’d hung up from our quick conversation earlier, and he’d told me that an intermission was scheduled about forty-five minutes from that time.

But he wasn’t answering the phone and the lack of response was making me crazy.

Finally I sat up in the bed and played with the satellite phone. I was about to hit “redial” when a thought occurred to me.

I scanned through the list of calls made from the phone and noticed that one kept reappearing. The satellite phone belonged to the security firm Jack worked for and he’d been upset with Aerin when she’d told him that she’d given the phone to me.

But he’d told me, during one of my check-ins with him that Aerin had been adamant while explaining that I needed to know what was going on. Jack said he’d accepted her argument that, since the place I was going to had inconsistent cell service, the satellite phone was the next best answer.

Aerin had just walked out to join the group waiting by the driveway as Jack and I talked, and so he’d handed the phone to Aerin. It was then that she’d described to me a plan called “Serpico,” which, if initiated, would cause all her accounts to be frozen and she’d sent instructions to all the banks and financial firms that held her accounts that I’d been given the authority to reopen them.

She barely got through telling me all that before she had to hang up again, and could not answer my questions, because Jack was calling her to talk to Brom.

As I thought back to that conversation a brainwave hit me. Brom! That’s it! He was probably reachable through that recurring number in the satellite phone’s call list!