“Of course.” Susan patted her shoulder and gave it a quick squeeze before disappearing into the kitchen.
Ian was holding Kate’s hand, and he followed Phillip into the living room and led Kate to the couch. Phillip sat down across from them.
“Thank you,” Kate said when Susan returned and handed her a glass of water. She took a drink, and it soothed the burn in her throat.
“I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” Susan said.
Phillip smiled and nodded at her. Kate set the glass on the coffee table and turned to Ian. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, and he seemed exhausted.
“They found you,” she said. When she’d finally allowed herself to believe he might actually be alive, she’d started putting it all together. “That’s why you put your car in the river. You wanted them to think you were dead.”
“Yes,” Ian replied. “They found out who I was and where I lived.” Ian and Philip shared a glance. “But even worse than that, and the reason I did this, is because they found you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Kate felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “Me?”
Ian nodded somberly. “I realized it when you asked me to look at your computer. Your firewall had been turned off, you had a backdoor, and there were several shell scripts running simultaneously. I couldn’t do anything about it. If I had, they’d have known I’d discovered it.”
Kate’s mind was reeling, and she felt like a weight was pressing down on her chest. The room was suddenly too warm. “Do they know where I live? Where I work?”
“They know everything,” Ian said.
“How?” Kate asked. “How did they find you?”
“We’re not sure,” Ian said. “My computers are all clean. I would have known immediately if they weren’t. Phillip and I have some theories, but nothing we’ve been able to prove. But they would have seen us together as soon as they started watching me. Then it would have taken them no time at all to identify and hack you.
“You said if they ever found you there would be threats,” Kate said, her voice rising. “Disturbing threats.”
“They wanted me, Kate. Not you. The fact that they hadn’t made any direct threats yet meant they were probably planning to use you to draw me out, to force me to react in some way. And I would have. I’d have done anything they asked if it meant they’d leave you out of this. Even so, there’s no way I would leave you unprotected. Your new neighbor, Don Murray, is an FBI agent who works out of the Minneapolis field office. So does the man who follows you to and from work every day, and the two men who keep an eye on your street and the food pantry.”
Kate sat in stunned silence. How had she gone from running a nonprofit organization to being under FBI surveillance? She could not wrap her brain around it no matter how hard she tried. It was simply too surreal.
“We had to act fast,” Ian said, “before they could put whatever they were planning into motion. We got lucky because we didn’t have to wait long for another storm.”
“How were you able to convince the police, the media?”
Phillip answered her. “Ian abandoned the car on the side of the road. The streets were fairly empty because of the road conditions, and it didn’t take much to stage a collision that pushed the Shelby over the embankment. We called 911 ourselves and reported a car in the river. No one would have survived something like that, not in a vehicle without airbags and not in freezing-cold water. Then we leaked to the media that a body had been recovered and identified. The FBI claimed jurisdiction, and the only information we shared was what we wanted to make public.”
“There was a death notice,” Kate said.
Ian’s expression remained blank, but his features hardened and Kate detected a slight clenching of his jaw. “I wrote it.”
“After you found out about Ian’s death, did you google Ian Merrick on your laptop?” Phillip asked.
“Yes. I did a general search and then a more specific one. That’s how I found the death notice.”