The Cleaner (Professionals 9)

But I wasn't familiar with this area, or the operations of the local hog farms. So a dozen deep holes it was. Then smoothing of surfaces. And planting of saplings on the spots, moving brush around them as well.

Then it was my turn to bathe in the creek.

And then take one more turn of the house because I was feeling uncharacteristically insecure about the job I'd done since my mind had been all over the place.

I ignored a dozen or so calls from Quin on my burner until I got back in my truck, ready to head back home.

"Jesus Christ, Finn," Quin snapped. "I was about to send Gunner out to you. What the fuck is going on?"

"This was high profile," I told him. "I wanted to make sure there was nothing missed." I'd cleaned the air ducts twice for fuck's sake. That was how paranoid I was about my mind not being in the right place.

"Alright. You okay? You sound off."

"I'm fine."

"Finn..."

"I'm on my way back," I said, hanging up.

I was reaching for my key in the cupholder when I noticed something sitting on top of them.

A small, wooden owl.

A hand whittled wooden owl.

That was Holden.

His form of gratitude.

I got a couple miles down the road before I checked my real phone, feeling my stomach drop when I saw five missed calls from Poppy.

In a row.

Poppy wasn't the crazy chick who obsessively calls you type.

I knew it in my gut.

Just like I knew something had to be very, very wrong for her to call me that many times.

Feeling the anxiety bubble up and burst over, I called her back. Again and again and again.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I stalked her social media accounts, her podcast, her Youtube.

Again, nothing.

Which was not like her.

Even her fans were starting to comment, asking if she was okay, where she was, if they needed to be worried about her.

Where the hell was she?

Chapter Eight

Poppy

I thought I was losing it a bit at first.

Jumping at strange noises, swearing I was seeing things—seeing someone—in my peripheral. But then when I looked, nothing and no one was there.

Paranoia was a side effect of my job to an extent. I studied the worst in people. I saw the awful things they did to one another. It made me look twice at people. It made me expect the worst. It made me actively look for the worst-case scenario.

The harder I worked, the more acute the paranoia got at times. And I'd been working my ass off on the missing girls' cases, getting engaged with every conversation in every corner of the internet, trying to get more amateur detectives on it, working every angle they could.

Part of it was because there was still a bit of niggling guilt.

The other part was trying to keep my mind occupied because I knew if I didn't, I was going to obsess about Finn, about him getting back, about us curled up in bed, about the potential for more.

I wasn't a "potential for more" type of woman usually.

But I just got a good feeling about Finn.

And that good feeling was what made me painfully aware that I would go full-on high-school-girl-crush about the whole situation.

I had just enough pride that I couldn't allow myself to do that.

So, instead, I worked.

And I was starting to think I was making some headway. I'd even gotten some good information that I passed onto the police.

I wasn't exactly hopeful that I would find the girls alive, but answers for the families were important. It was what you heard the most when you heard family members talking about their loved ones who were missing—they just wanted to know what happened. And, if it was possible, they wanted the remains, so they could give them a proper burial.

It was important to figure out what happened to these girls. And maybe if we found them, we could find traces of who took them. If we did that, more girls could be saved.

It wouldn't help the families who likely already lost their loved ones, but it made the world a better place.

But the thing was, when I came up for air, when I went out, I felt like someone was there.

Which sent me on a spiral, back to the night with the crashing outside my porch.

It wasn't even that crazy to think it, was it?

That was the thing. I knew all of the statistics.

Like one in every six women will be stalked in her lifetime. Sometimes without even knowing it.

I went ahead and made it much more likely by becoming a public figure. If you could call what I was a "public figure."

As much as I tried to protect my identity, there was only so much I could do. When people really wanted to know who you were, they could figure it out. Freedom of Information and all that jazz.