Page 148 of The Advocate’s Ultimatum

Monday morning

JP worked at Sabre’s desk in her office until she got there. He had spent most of the morning chasing a car he already suspected he’d never find. That was part of investigations too. Sometimes you followed leads because they mattered. Sometimes you followed them so you could stop wondering about them.

He sat at the desk with coffee gone cold and Marcus Caldwell’s statement in front of him. Yellow 1965 or ‘66 Mustang. Oceanside. Two to three weeks after Hannah disappeared.

It wouldn’t mean much if Nigel Gates hadn’t also reported seeing a 1966 yellow Mustang following Hayes the day of the abduction. He had been complaining about Victor Hayes and insisting everybody focused on the wrong details. Maybe he was right.

JP wrote it down. School pickup → Hayes→ yellow Mustang, weeks later → Oceanside → yellow Mustang

One sighting could be nothing. Two separated by weeks meant the car mattered, and the clerk at the 7-11 saw a yellow car. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to identify anyone.

JP made four calls before ten o’clock, one to a retired DMV contact who occasionally helped narrow vehicle searches, one to a PI who specialized in vehicle tracing, one to a classic-car insurance adjuster he’d worked with years earlier, and the other to Detective Nelson to let him know about the Mustang.

“Do you have plate digits?” the DMV contact asked.

“No.”

“VIN?”

“No.”

“Unique identifiers?”

“Nothing besides yellow, sixty-six Mustang, maybe a sixty-five.”

A laugh crackled through the speaker. “Do you know how many restored Mustangs are in Southern California?”

JP rubbed his jaw. “What if I narrow it to San Diego County?”

“Still too many.” Papers shuffled. “And that assumes it stayed registered here. Cars move. They get repainted, go non-op, get sold privately.”

JP wrote notes anyway. “No realistic path?”

“Not from this.”

The insurance adjuster was worse. “Classic Mustangs are everywhere down here,” he said. “Especially sixty-five and sixty-sixes.”

“How many are yellow?”

“No clue.” A short laugh. “Enough to ruin your day.”

The PI didn’t pretend to be optimistic. “No plate means a dead end,” he said flatly. “Eight years later? Forget it.”

JP sat quietly. Three independent answers. Impossible, or close enough to it. The truth was that he wasn’t surprised, but he had hoped.

He looked back down at the notes. Nigel Gates had seen the Mustang near the school the day Hannah disappeared. It was seen at the 7-11 around the same time as Hannah and Hayes were there. Marcus saw it weeks later in Oceanside with a girl who looked like Hannah in the passenger seat. That meant the car traveled with her. Which meant whoever drove it wasn’t panicking.

That was the part JP couldn’t shake. The first weeks after a kidnapping should’ve looked desperate and secretive or not look like anything because the person went into hiding. But instead, someone was driving around Oceanside in a bright yellow collector car with Hannah sitting beside him calmly enough for Marcus to remember it nearly a decade later.

JP walked to the window overlooking downtown. If you were hiding a kidnapped child, you didn’t drive a bright-yellow, classic Mustang unless you believed nobody was looking for you anymore. Or unless you never thought of yourself as a kidnapper to begin with. That thought settled heavily.

The car appeared before Hannah vanished, then afterward in Oceanside. Which meant Victor Hayes may never have been alone in this.

JP was about to move on to something else when Sabre returned from court. He told her about his morning, then moved to the small conference table. Sabre sat down at her desk.

He spread the homicide discovery in organized stacks around him. He had police reports, witness statements, digital extraction summaries, and a preliminary autopsy report.

As JP worked, Sabre reviewed dependency files, but JP knew she was listening to every page turn.