Page 33 of Logan’s Way

Six cases. He'd found them the same way he'd found Marcus Volk — following the geographic trail of the ATM withdrawals Murphy had traced moving west, cross-referencing with national missing persons databases he'd accessed before his credentials were restricted. Different years. Different locations. Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, California.

Each one involved a predator the system had been building toward—traffickers, abusers, men operating in the margins where evidence was difficult to secure and witnesses feared speaking out. Men the law knew of but couldn’t quite reach—not with the evidence available, not before more people got hurt.

And then each predator had vanished.

Not violently. Not dramatically. Just … gone. Disappeared from motels or rest stops or places between places. Their vehicles were found abandoned. Their networks fractured afterward. And within weeks of each disappearance, victims were freed. Sources became cooperative. Investigations that had been stalled suddenly moved forward.

The pattern was there. Had always been there. Angus had just been looking at it as chaos—unconnected incidents, fortunate outcomes, the kind of lucky breaks that sometimes happened in law enforcement.

But it wasn’t chaos.

It was consistency.

It was the same method across different jurisdictions. The same timing—predator removed, victims recovered, investigations concluded—yielded the same result: lives saved, networks disrupted, justice achieved through means that never appeared in official reports.

Angus pulled out a timeline he’d sketched. Marked each disappearance. Noted the locations. Traced the movement west over years. Not random. Not reactive. Purposeful. Planned. Someone moving through regions where trafficking networks operated, where the vulnerable disappeared into systems that exploited them, where the law was always three steps behind the harm itself.

He thought about Marcus Volk. About Elena Martinez ,who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—identify the person who’d told her she didn’t have to be afraid anymore. About Sandra Hammond, who’d deliberately omitted details from official records because sometimes the system required plausible deniability.

And he understood something he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge: This wasn’t someone reacting to circumstances. It was someone operating by principle. By choice. With restraint that looked more like discipline than rage.

The predators who’d vanished hadn’t been killed out of vengeance or anger. Their removals were surgical. Precise. Timed to cause maximum disruption to their networks while enabling maximum recovery of victims. This level of planning required patience, intelligence, and a working understanding of how criminal networks functioned.

This was professional. Strategic. Intentional.

Someone had found the fault lines in the law and begun operating there. Not chaotically. Not reactively. But systematically—choosing targets, executing removals, staying invisible while outcomes became visible.

Scout shifted in his sleep, a soft sound that briefly drew Angus’s attention before the dog settled again, his dreams uncomplicated by moral weight.

Angus looked at his notes. At the cases arranged chronologically. At the pattern that could no longer be dismissed as coincidence or luck or fortunate timing.

Someone had done this and was likely still doing it. Someone had spent years—maybe the full eighteen years since Logan disappeared—operating in shadows where the law couldn’t reach, removing threats the system couldn’t eliminate, saving people who’d fallen through every crack society created.

And someone had gone to enormous trouble to ensure no one would connect these outcomes to a name. A death certificate had been manufactured. Vital records had been manipulated. Institutional silence had been created around a person who needed to remain dead on paper so he could continue doing what the law couldn’t.

The thought took root, weighted with something far removed from databases or administrative holds or environmental pressure.

This wasn’t a man hiding.

This was a man staying out of sight on purpose.

Because visibility would end the work. Because identification would mean arrest, prosecution, incarceration. Because continuing required invisibility, and invisibility required everyone—including Angus—believing the person was dead.

Something had shifted—not in the investigation, but in the way he made sense of it.

He had been chasing truth. Evidence. Proof that Logan’s death was fabricated and his brother might still be alive. He had been thinking like a sheriff building a case—following trails, documenting facts, assembling proof.

But now he was someone who recognized that the truth he was chasing wasn’t simple. That finding Logan—if Logan was the one who’d done this—wouldn’t just resolve eighteen years of questions.

It would unmake something.

Angus paced from the kitchen to the living room and back before sitting heavily. Scout lifted his head, checking if his presence was needed, then settled back when Angus remained still.

The files were still there. The pattern still visible. The evidence of systematic intervention still undeniable.

But now Angus had to confront what that evidence meant.

Lives had been saved. He could document that. Elena Martinez and others like her—people who had been trafficked, abused, controlled by predators the law couldn’t touch quickly enough—were free. Safe. Alive.