Is she hurt? Is she scared? If he touches her . . .

She stomped on the brakes for that direction of thought.

Her father’s notes offered a partial distraction. She refused for the hundredth time to look at the clock, and she felt the waves of impatience rolling off Chris as he flipped pages next to her.

How much longer?

Her phone buzzed. Saul. She gathered the energy to speak with her uncle. They’d parted on uncertain terms. She hadn’t known whether to be furious with him or feel sorry about the burden he’d carried for decades. She still didn’t know.

“Saul?”

“Gianna.” His regularly booming voice was weak. “Any word?”

“Not really. They found Jamie’s car not far from the location. It looks like they switched vehicles and they believe he’s driving a black Escalade. There’s an image of a man who might be the driver, but they’re not one hundred percent certain. It’s a start.”

“Damn it. What can I do?”

She had no answer for him. “Keep praying.”

“I need to do something. I can make some calls, get some private agencies searching.”

Gianna understood his impatience. That same need to take action burned in her chest. Instead she scanned handwritten pages, searching for a needle in a haystack, fighting every second to keep from climbing the walls or dissolving into a puddle of tears.

Violet.

“Do what you need to do. No one will stop you.” She glanced through the room’s window at Hawes and Becker as she said the words. The detectives were deep in a discussion in an adjoining room. Maps had appeared on a wall there. Pins with flags marking the morning’s incidents. A huge whiteboard was already covered with time stamps, and Gianna read Violet’s name at the top. The investigation was taking shape, but it felt like a slow crawl along a dry riverbed.

I feel like I’m in a movie and Violet might stroll in at any moment.

“What are you doing?” Saul asked.

“We’re at the police station. We found a ton of notebooks in my father’s apartment. They needed every pair of eyes to help read through them. We’re hoping he made a notation about who he thought was following him recently. He wrote down everything else,” she added bitterly.

“Ahhh,” Saul said in a knowing tone. “The notebooks. Yes, a few years after the accident he started making daily entries. I think one of his therapists told him to do it, to help him feel more in control. We talked about it a few times. He said that the world kept moving forward and that memories weren’t being noted and they were dissolving into the air. He felt he needed to make records so that everything would be acknowledged.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think he felt that if it wasn’t written down, then it didn’t happen.”

“He’d appointed himself some sort of universal record keeper?”

“Only the record keeper of what he could see.”

Gianna was silent. How had her father stayed sane? “Is that why he lived removed from everyone most of the time? Less to take in?”

“I believe so. I have some of his notebooks in storage and a few at the house. He’d always give me some for safekeeping when we met. He’d beg me to keep them in a safe place. I have letters from him for you and Violet, too.”

“What?” Her voice cracked. “He wrote to us?”

“Oh, yes. There were times when his brain knew exactly what had happened.”

“Why didn’t you give them to me?” she whispered. “I have to see them.”

“We both agreed it was best you didn’t know he was alive. It was hard at first. Later it was simply the easiest thing to do. Every time I saw him, I walked away thankful you didn’t know what kind of person he’d turned into. Your father died that day, Gianna. In every sense of the word. There was a different person walking around in his body after that.”

“I had the right to choose. The two of you took that away from me.”

“We chose while you were still a child, and I have no doubt in my mind we did the right thing. Someone tried to kill you and your family. They succeeded on one count.”

“Two counts,” she said, thinking of her father. “You should have told me as I got older. I would have understood.”

“I thought about it a million times. I’m not proud that I chose to perpetuate the lie. You have every right to be angry with me. But honestly”—he paused—“I’d do the exact same thing again. Especially because of what’s happened in the last few days. Something isn’t right.”

“Maybe if I’d known my father was alive, he wouldn’t be dead now. Maybe knowing me would have put him on a different path.”

“Maybe you’d all be gone,” he said sharply.

Violet is gone. No! I will get her back! She forced her brain to focus. “Leo Berg didn’t know my father survived, right?”

“No, he didn’t. Your father didn’t want any word getting back to the South African company. He was afraid they’d come after him and you again. That meant Leo had to stay out of the loop, too.”

“If the same man who killed my father now has Violet, then he could be linked to that company, right?”

“It’s been years, Gianna. Surely too much time has gone by.”

“But you said earlier that Dad was paranoid about Leo recently. That he’d implied that the investment company could have hired someone to kill me so Leo no longer had to share the company’s profits, right?”