Page 50 of Shadow Burn

Before she could finish her careful search, Sebastian’s voice cut through the room. “Jasper.”

The tone was enough to pull every eye to the big screen where the former agent and Reid stood. The enhanced image of the sedan’s rear plate filled it. The mud still obscured part of it, but the cleaned frame had sharpened around two letters and a number.

Reid whistled under his breath. “The plate is government issue.”

Katherine dropped her pen.

Garrett leaned forward. “Federal?”

“Looks like it,” Jasper said. “Not standard local, state, or rental. Federal pool vehicle or a clone of one.”

The room spun so hard she had to slam one hand onto the table to steady herself.

Jasper whirled toward her, his expression instantly concerned.

A masked man had tried to kill her, and he’d been driving a sedan that might belong to the government she’d served faithfully for ten years.

She shut her eyes against the out-of-control feeling. Not just the room spinning; her whole world was.

Then a familiar hand landed on top of hers. When she looked up, Jasper was there.

“Hey,” he said, giving her hand a light squeeze. “We’ll get this figured out.”

Katherine nodded, and Priss meowed. Then Katherine put her hands on the keyboard and started typing her notification email with shaking fingers.

CHAPTER TEN

By evening, Jasper had decided the sedan was mocking him.

The grainy image sat frozen on the center monitor in his tech room, a dark government-issue vehicle moving past the library at a speed too slow to be casual and too controlled to be lost. The angle of the traffic camera had been just bad enough to make the partial hit irritating instead of useful.

He’d cleaned the image through every enhancement program he trusted, run the visible letters and possible number combinations through more databases than he cared to explain to anyone, and still had nothing solid enough to put a name on the man who’d tried to kill Katherine.

Nothing solid enough was starting to feel like failure, and failure was not acceptable.

He sat forward, forearms braced on the desk, and forced himself to review the facts instead of the feeling. The plate had the structure of a federal fleet number, but it didn’t match current active assignments. That meant one of three things: the plate was cloned, the database he’d accessed was incomplete, or the vehicle had once belonged to a federal pool and had been taken out of circulation without disappearing from the world.

The last option had been eating at him for the past hour because government vehicles didn’t always vanish when paperwork said they did. Sometimes they went to auction. Sometimes they were transferred to contractors. Sometimes they were written off in one system and quietly kept alive in another because old things had uses if someone knew where to look.

He knew where to look.

Usually.

He scrubbed both hands over his face. On the left monitor, Garrett’s running update thread with Blackridge PD kept blinking new messages. The department had confirmed the gun was a compact nine millimeter with the serial filed down, the kind of weapon used by both law enforcement and civilians. The jacket fabric snagged on Katherine’s window had been collected, photographed, and sent for fiber analysis, which would take longer than any of them liked.

The two bullets recovered from the rental had been logged. The first had gone through the bedroom window. The second had lodged in the wall over the bed, close enough to Katherine’s head that Jasper had to stop reading the report the first time and stand up before he did something stupid to his desk.

He’d had enough self-control to sit back down. Barely.

On the right monitor, a message from CB updated every few minutes with a location check-in from him and the motorcycle club contacts he’d called in to help sweep Blackridge. CB’s Outlaws owed him enough favors to put eyes on roads, alleys, motels, gas stations, repair shops, and back lots without making it look like Shadow Point Security had declared war on the Montana town. So far, no one had spotted the sedan. No abandoned government car, no muddy rear bumper, no nervous man with bruises on his face or glass cuts on his hands.

Jasper had asked CB to watch for someone favoring one leg, too. Katherine had mentioned the scuffing shoe, and after the bedroom fight, the man might have picked up an injury. Maybe from the fall courtesy of Priss. Maybe from Katherine kicking him.

He switched to the window on Caldwell’s consulting firm and opened the file Katherine had flagged. Matthew Caldwell had been a junior officer in Vance’s private correspondence after the official record had already moved him to State, and that discrepancy kept tugging at Jasper’s attention. People disappeared from official records for a lot of reasons. Cover, embarrassment, protection, corruption. The trick was figuring out who benefited from the disappearance and who’d had access to the eraser.

Caldwell’s public-facing life looked clean. Too clean, which Jasper had disliked from the start. He’d left government service in 1996, married Helen Bristol, and started a consulting firm that now handled risk assessment, records compliance, secure document workflows, and historical review projects for government-adjacent clients.

On paper, it was exactly the kind of bland private firm that charged six figures to tell agencies their filing systems were terrible.