Law enforcement moved Travis's family again before dawn.
No one argued.
Not even Kaylee.
She barely woke while Travis carried her wrapped in a blanket to an unmarked SUV.
Bethany climbed in beside her.
Hale traveled separately.
The destination changed twice during the drive.
Travis noticed.
Nobody explained.
That was probably intentional.
They ended up at a small federal training residence connected to the expanding fraud investigation.
Concrete walls.
Controlled access.
No neighbors.
Kaylee woke at sunrise and asked where the ducks were.
"Different house," Travis told her.
She frowned.
"Bad house."
He could not disagree.
Darren finding the previous safe location created an obvious question.
How?
He had no access to law-enforcement planning that investigators knew about.
The move had been arranged quickly.
Only a limited group knew the address.
Alvarez.
Two deputies.
Hale.
A dispatcher.
A supervisor.
A transport officer.
And the people inside the family.
Travis looked around the room.
The implication was uncomfortable.
"Someone leaked it."
"Possibly," Alvarez said.
"How else?"
"Tracking device."
That possibility changed everything.
Officers searched vehicles.
Travis's truck remained elsewhere and had not been used.
Bethany's sedan had been left behind.
Police vehicles were checked.
One transport SUV carried a small magnetic tracker beneath the rear bumper.
Cheap.
Commercial.
Recently attached.
Travis stared at the evidence photograph.
"When?"
Unknown.
The vehicle had parked near Melissa's house earlier that day.
Anyone observing could have placed it.
Darren did not necessarily have a source inside police.
That should have been reassuring.
It was not.
It meant he could work alone.
Investigators reviewed nearby cameras.
One house had a doorbell view partially covering the street.
A figure approached the unmarked transport SUV six hours before the family moved.
Baseball cap.
Hoodie.
Face obscured.
Build roughly Darren's.
He knelt near the rear bumper for eleven seconds.
Then walked away.
"He tagged the police car before we ever left."
"Looks that way."
Darren had not needed to know the safe-house address.
He had followed the vehicle electronically.
Simple.
Cheap.
Effective.
Travis found that almost insulting.
After all the forged documents and complicated fraud, a twenty-dollar tracker had defeated secrecy.
Alvarez said, "Simple methods work because people look for complicated ones."
That sounded like something Kurt would understand.
Investigators now checked every vehicle before movement.
Kaylee thought the mirror inspections were funny.
"Police looking under car."
"Yep."
"Monster?"
"Something like that."
She seemed satisfied.
Darren's confidence created another opportunity.
He believed he had scared Travis.
He sent a new email at 8:22.
NEXT TIME I DON'T CALL.
No demand.
No amount.
No instructions.
Hale studied it.
"He wants you anxious."
"Working."
"Don't reward him."
"How?"
"By contacting him."
Travis had no intention of doing that.
Alvarez wanted to force Darren to commit to a communication channel.
A reply was drafted.
Travis hated every version.
Finally investigators sent:
SAY WHAT YOU WANT.
Five words.
No emotion.
No threat.
Darren responded after forty minutes.
50000.
Fifty thousand.
Exactly within the range he had written beside Travis's family months earlier.
Travis stared.
"Where did that number come from?"
The note VALUE 50+.
Darren had priced them long before everything collapsed.
Another message:
CASH.
Then:
I GET MONEY YOU GET PEACE.
Travis almost laughed.
"Peace?"
Hale said, "He's selling something he doesn't possess."
Darren did not have Kaylee.
He did not have the house.
He did not have Travis's identity packet.
He had only fear.
But fear had value if Travis paid.
Investigators decided to let him believe the tactic worked.
Reply:
NEED PROOF YOU CAN GET TO HER.
Travis objected.
"I don't want him trying."
Alvarez explained.
"If he answers with information rather than action, we may locate him."
"May."
"Yes."
Travis hated strategy when his daughter sat in the next room.
But refusing to engage would not make Darren disappear.
They sent it.
Darren replied with a photograph.
Not Kaylee.
Melissa.
Standing outside her house that morning speaking with an officer.
Timestamp recent.
Darren was still monitoring Melissa's property after the family moved.
That gave law enforcement geography.
Cameras in the neighborhood were checked.
One captured a vehicle.
Not Darren's van.
Not the dark SUV.
A red compact car.
Registered owner: Nicole Voss.
Travis stared.
"His ex-wife?"
Nicole had supposedly cooperated.
She lived in Arkansas.
Her car being near Melissa changed the entire conversation.
Police contacted her immediately.
Nicole answered from home.
Her red car was parked outside.
Officers confirmed.
Same plate?
No.
Cloned plate.
Darren had copied Nicole's registration.
Another impersonation.
Another attempt to send suspicion elsewhere.
Nicole was furious enough to provide investigators with something new.
Darren had once made spare plates using an online vendor.
He kept a list of vehicle-identification numbers.
He liked using cars that resembled those belonging to people he knew.
If stopped briefly, databases might lead officers toward someone else before inconsistencies surfaced.
"How many fake plates?"
Nicole did not know.
But she remembered one storage box.
Darren called it his travel kit.
Where?
An old auto-body shop owned by one of his gambling friends.
Police identified the property.
The friend was named Russell Cade.
Cade had appeared nowhere in Kurt's fraud files.
Another branch.
Investigators approached carefully.
Russell Cade cooperated immediately.
He had no idea Darren was wanted.
At least that was his initial claim.
He admitted Darren rented a back bay for cash.
Stored car parts.
License plates.
Tools.
Police obtained consent to inspect.
The bay contained plate blanks.
Registration stickers.
Magnetic trackers.
Two burner phones.
A police scanner.
Several changes of clothing.
And a wall map.
Melissa's address.
Travis's house.
His father's house.
The playground.
The safe house they had just abandoned.
The last one had been added in red marker.
Darren was updating the map in real time.
But there was one more location.
The new federal residence.
Circled.
Travis felt cold.
"Impossible."
Alvarez said nothing.
They had moved there only hours ago.
No tracked vehicle had gone directly.
Routes had changed.
Vehicles checked.
The location was restricted.
Darren should not have known it.
Yet the map showed it.
That revived the leak theory.
Someone was still feeding him addresses.
The body shop became a crime scene.
Russell Cade's phone was seized with consent.
Investigators found Darren's messages.
Some innocuous.
Some not.
One from that morning:
NEW PLACE?
Cade replied:
ASK YOUR COP.
Alvarez went still when he read it.
"Your cop."
The phrase changed the direction of the room.
Cade was questioned again.
He became frightened.
He said it was a joke.
Police pressed.
He asked for a lawyer.
Hours passed.
Then, through counsel, he identified the person Darren sometimes called for "heads-up information."
Not a detective.
Not a patrol officer.
A county communications employee.
Dispatcher.
Name: Paula Trent.
Travis remembered the list of people who knew the first safe-house address.
A dispatcher had been one of them.
Paula had access to unit locations and call details.
Investigators moved immediately.
Her workstation logs showed searches unrelated to her assignments.
Melissa's address.
Travis's property.
The highway transfer point after police began searching it.
The safe-house protection call.
Even patrol movements around the motel where Kurt had been located.
Travis felt fury rise.
"She was helping them."
Alvarez said, "Looks that way."
"How long?"
"Audit underway."
Paula was interviewed.
She denied everything.
Then investigators showed her records of a payment app.
Small transfers from Darren.
Fifty dollars.
A hundred.
Seventy-five.
Not large enough to look dramatic.
Enough to buy information.
She broke.
Paula said Darren originally paid for harmless favors.
Whether officers were near a casino.
Whether a traffic stop had been logged.
Whether a complaint existed.
Then he asked for addresses.
Unit locations.
Names.
She told herself she was not changing reports.
Not deleting evidence.
Not warning him about arrests.
Just looking.
Travis heard Ethan Keene in that justification.
Everybody in Kurt and Darren's network had a version of the same excuse.
I only provided information.
I didn't know what they would do with it.
Paula admitted telling Darren where police were concentrating after Kurt's arrest.
She told him Melissa's house remained protected.
She also supplied the first secure-house address.
"What about this location?" Travis asked.
Alvarez had already asked.
Paula denied providing it.
Her logs supported that.
She had been removed from access before the second move.
So how did Darren know?
Investigators returned to the body-shop map.
The circle around the federal residence looked fresh.
But there was no label.
Maybe Travis had assumed too much.
Alvarez compared coordinates.
The circle was not exactly on their building.
It was three miles east.
An old National Guard training site.
Darren did not know their current location.
He was guessing based on facilities associated with law enforcement and military personnel.
Travis finally breathed.
The unknown had shrunk.
Paula was the last active information source investigators could identify.
Once her access ended, Darren lost real-time visibility.
His map stopped updating.
At 5:14 that afternoon, investigators sent another controlled message.
YOU GET MONEY WHERE.
Darren replied:
OLD REST AREA TOMORROW 6 AM.
The transfer point.
The place he had rehearsed.
The place where he had intended to move Kaylee.
Alvarez looked at Travis.
"He wants the cash there."
Travis understood immediately.
"You want me to go."
"No."
The answer came so quickly it surprised him.
"We want Darren to believe you will."
Hale folded her arms.
"Travis stays with Kaylee."
He almost argued.
Then remembered Kurt's phrase.
Make them choose.
Darren expected the same weakness.
Expected Travis to chase him.
Expected him to leave his daughter somewhere else while trying to buy her safety.
Travis looked through the doorway.
Kaylee sat on the floor making the wooden zebra jump over a plastic cup.
He shook his head.
"No."
Alvarez waited.
Travis looked back.
"He wants me at the rest area because that's the choice he understands."
"Yes."
"So give him what he expects."
A decoy.
Money.
Vehicle.
Movement.
Everything except Travis.
Investigators prepared the operation.
Darren sent one final instruction before sunset.
COME ALONE OR YOU'LL NEVER SEE HER AGAIN.
Travis read it while Kaylee laughed in the next room.
Darren's threat depended on one assumption.
That Travis believed Darren controlled something he did not.
For the first time since returning from Fort Sill, Travis understood the balance had reversed.
Darren was now the one working from bad information.
Click here to continue reading: PART 25: Darren Arrived for Fifty Thousand Dollars and Found an Empty Car, but the Trap Failed When He Recognized Who Wasn’t Driving
After Nineteen Hours on the Road, Travis Found Another Man Wearing His Robe and Answering His Front Door
Part 24 of 28
