Free Enemy Outside (Unseen Enemy Book 2) by Marysol James Page B

gown.”
    He grinned. “OK, baby. Let’s enjoy it, yeah?” He lifted the serving dish. “More rice? Maybe some more chicken curry?”
    “You better believe it,” she said. “Gimme loads of carbs, Dallas. And I’m going to eat fattening cream sauce until I pass out from pure happiness.”
    **
    Late the next day, Dallas sat in his office. In front of him were two files. Both of them disturbed him, for completely different reasons.
    The first file contained the police and medical reports about what had happened to Jennifer Marie Sawyer. Dallas had read the details about Jenny’s attack with a knot in his stomach, and by the time he’d finished, he was fucking livid.
    It was with savage glee that he found out that three of the men involved were now dead – one in prison, one in some drugs mess, the last one shot by a cop during an armed robbery – and the last guy was currently in jail. It seemed that after years of assault and battery, he’d finally graduated to murder and the state had seen fit to stick his ass in prison for a nice, long stretch. Dallas didn’t think he’d breathe free air for at least another fifteen years.
    He felt deeply uncomfortable knowing all this about Jenny: like what he knew about Olivia, he’d have preferred for her to have shared these details with him by choice. But he was wearing his professional hat right now, not his personal one, and as hard as it was, he had to treat Olivia, Jenny and Kat as simply a part of an investigation.
    Yeah, right, man. You’ve been crossing personal lines all over the fucking place since this whole thing began, and you know it.
    As bad as Jenny’s file was, though, it was the second one that really threw him for a loop. It was Katherine Lawrence’s file – Kat’s – and it was completely fucking empty. He’d been digging for information about her life for almost twelve hours and it seemed that Kat simply did not exist.
    She didn’t have a bank account, didn’t work legally at the hair salon, so she didn’t pay taxes. She didn’t have a registered cell phone, no registered address. He knew her middle name was Joanna – the same as his mother’s – and she’d told Jim that she was originally from Oregon. But a thorough search through the birth records showed that no Katherine Joanna Lawrence who matched Kat’s physical description had been born in that state in the past thirty-five years. Dallas had then gone through the driver’s license photos of every single woman with that name from Oregon, and none of them was Kat.
    So either she doesn’t even have a driver’s license… or that’s not her name .
    Kat changed her appearance so often, it made Dallas’ head spin. She was cagey about any details to do with her life. She had no job history, no taxes filed under that name, no social insurance number that he could find. No social media at all: no Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts. It was like she’d just popped up out of the ground a year or so ago, taken up work at the salon for cash-in-hand, and conjured a whole life out of thin air. She was totally off-the-grid, and Dallas had only ever come across that kind of thing once before… when a woman was hiding from her ex-husband, who had tried to strangle her with piano-wire.
    What’s your real story, Kat? If that’s even your name …
    There was a knock at the door and he glanced up. “Come on in.”
    The door opened and Marnie Lyons stood there holding a file. “Hey, Dallas. I got that information about Abraham Castell that you requested.”
    He immediately refocused. “Tell me.”
    “No way the man was at work on Friday night,” she said.
    “Where was he?”
    “No clue. I went through his cell history and he had it off all that night.”
    Dallas frowned. “So no way to get any sense of his location.”
    “None.”
    “Dammit.”
    “I know. You want me to keep digging?”
    “Damn right I do,” he said. “Go back in to his life for the past nine months, OK? Work