“You aren’t making sense, Joe,” Lauren said.

“We need to go back to San Diego,” I said.

“What?”

I nodded, chewing on my bottom lip. “Back to San Diego. That’s where it started.”

She squeezed my hand. “Hey. Look at me.”

The elevator reached the bottom and we stepped out into the hospital lobby. I looked at her.

“What is going on?” she asked.

I started to say something, but her phone dinged. She pulled it out of her pocket and her face went pale.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“I…I set up an alert,” she said, her voice shaking. “On the credit card. To notify me if it was used.”

Heat flooded my entire body. “Where?”

“I gotta pull it up,” she said, her hand quivering as she tapped the screen.

I took her by the arm and we walked outside into the frozen night air. I exhaled, trying to kick the rising heat out of my body, knives of excitement and anxiety tearing at my gut as I waited. My breath exploded out of me in an icy cloud, a puff of smoke against the dark evening sky.

My head was spinning. For years, there had been nothing. And then, in a matter of hours, there was everything.

“Got it,” she said. “I got it. A hotel.”

“Where?”

“We should call the police,” Lauren said. “Now.”

“No,” I said. “No more police. Not yet.”

“What?”

“Trust me, Lauren. I’ll explain. But we aren’t calling anyone right now. It’s me and you. You are the only person I trust right now and I swear to God, I’ll explain.” I shook my head. “But it’s me and you. We’re the ones that are going to get her. Tell me where she is. So we can get her.”

She stared at me, a hundred more questions in her eyes. But whatever she saw in mine just made her nod, let her trust me that I had my reasons. And even as I felt the small tickle of elation as we closed the distance between us and our daughter, a new kind of anger was blossoming inside me, anger I hadn’t felt in quite some time. Anger that was going to eventually drive me back to Coronado.

Lauren held out the phone.

I took it.

Looked at the screen.

Read it.

Exhaled.

Handed her the phone back.

The anger would have to wait.

The gap had just closed even further.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go find our daughter in Denver.”

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of people:

The readers who responded so enthusiastically to the first Joe book.

My family and friends for their encouragement, support and good humor.

Pam Applegate for her editing expertise.

Hayley, Nick, Hannah and Julia for being the best kids ever.

Beth Balmanno for making me happier than I’ve ever been.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thanks so much for reading THREAD OF SUSPICION, the second book in the Joe Tyler series. If you enjoyed the book, I’ve included the first few chapters to the third book in the Joe Tyler series, THREAD OF BETRAYAL.

If you’re looking for something a little more light-hearted, I’ve also included the opening chapter to THE MURDER PIT, a funny, cozy mystery and the first book in a brand new series that I’ve just started.

You can sign up for my monthly newsletter if you’d like to make sure you hear about all my upcoming releases. I promise to never use your email for any other reason or to sell it to anyone else.

Here’s the book description and excerpt from THREAD OF BETRAYAL, the third book in the Joe Tyler series by Jeff Shelby.

Joe Tyler is close to finding his daughter.

After a narrow miss in Minnesota, Joe follows a money trail to Denver, hoping to finally find Elizabeth, the daughter who was stolen from him nearly a decade earlier. Accompanied by his ex-wife Lauren, he enlists the reluctant help of Elizabeth’s friends, only to find that he’s missed her. Again.

Armed with new information, Joe races to California, desperate to find his daughter. Stymied by roadblocks and dead-ends, Joe soldiers on with his search, realizing there is more than a reunion at stake. He just might be saving his daughter’s life.

With time ticking and no clear answers in sight, Joe focuses on the one thing he’s always held on to – the thread of hope that he’ll finally reunite with his daughter and bring her back where she belongs.

Home.

ONE

Elizabeth was down there somewhere.

I focused on this as the plane began its descent. The snow-covered Rockies stood sentry out the window to our right, the city of Denver pocketed against them like a tiny winter village. The brilliant blue sky hung like a backdrop against the jagged mountain edges and the sun reflected off the wing of the plane, forcing me to squint into the early morning sunlight.

Lauren and I had driven straight to the airport after our visit with Rodney. Still reeling from the news he’d shared, we’d raced to ticketing, only to find there were no scheduled outbound flights to Colorado that evening. We’d been forced to wait until daybreak and had spent the night stretched out across several uncomfortable chairs, waiting at our gate. To the people around us, we probably looked like people who had missed their flight and were simply stuck waiting for the next one. But the truth was we were too impatient and didn’t dare leave the airport for fear of missing the earliest flight out.

Neither of us slept, but we didn’t really talk, either. We sat next to one another, both of us caught up in our own thoughts and worries. By the time they called our flight and we boarded, Lauren had collapsed from exhaustion and slept with her head on my shoulder the entire way. I’d stared out the window, waiting for us to get to right where we were, so I could look down and know that the daughter I hadn’t seen in eight years was down there somewhere.

Lauren stirred against my shoulder and lifted her head up. “We’re here?”

“Almost. Descending now.”

She straightened in her seat and ran a hand through her hair. Her auburn strands were mussed from sleep, her eyes half-lidded, and she stifled a yawn. “You sleep?”

“No.”

She tugged at the seatbelt across her lap. “I never understood how you could operate on so little sleep.”

“A gift.”

“Or a curse,” she said. She leaned across me to get a look out the window. “It’s pretty.”

I nodded. I’d been to Colorado twice before and both times were for fun. Once to ski when I’d been in college and once when I was a kid, a road trip stop on the way to visit relatives in Missouri. I didn’t remember much from the trip as a kid, but the college vacation was seared into my memory. We skied in T-shirts and drank beer on the outside deck, watching other skiers fly down the mountain. There were far worse places to spend the winter.

Lauren reached over and touched the window. “It’s cold. Even with all that sun.”

“Wait until we get out and you can’t breathe,” I said.

“Thin air?”

I nodded.

“Great.” She stared out the window, her fingers tracing an invisible pattern on the glass. “She’s down there, Joe. She’s down there.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

She moved her eyes from the window to me. “Are we going to find her?”

The landing gear kicked to life beneath us and the flight attendant announced our final descent as the plane leaned downward toward Denver.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re going to find Elizabeth.”

TWO

We took the underground trains to the transportation area and then were shuttled out to the rental car lot on the west side of the sprawling airport. While Lauren had slept on the plane, I’d hooked my phone to the inflight Wi-Fi and pulled up the address of the hotel that had come through on the credit card alert. I punched it into the GPS in the rental car which told us it would take thirty minutes to get to an area called Lakewood over in the foothills.