J.M.J.

A/N: Thank you so much for reading, following, and/or favoriting this story! Thank you especially to Candylou, max2013, Cherylann Rivers, ErinJordan, and BMSH for your reviews on chapter 6!

Chapter VII

A Troubling Disappearance

It was late by the time Sam Radley reached Bayport. He had just wrapped up the case in Boston and was eager to get home, so he had driven back that night instead of waiting for morning. He'd planned on surprising his wife, Ethel, and so he hadn't called, and by this time he was sure she would already be asleep. He felt he could take a little extra time to stop off at the agency. There were a few last things to tie up there, and between the next day being Saturday and him having just finished a case, he had no intention of going into work if he could possibly help it. It would be much better to get it done tonight.

Sam got the sense that something was wrong the minute the agency came into sight. The lights were still on. He checked his dashboard clock – 12:53. There was no reason for anyone to be around that late. At the same time, if someone had broken in, they wouldn't have turned on all the lights. Most likely Joe had been the last one to leave and had forgotten to turn them off.

Sam had just reached this conclusion when he parked his car in front of the agency. He took out his keys and was about to open the door when he saw that the front door wasn't locked at all. Growing more suspicious, he went in. The alarm wasn't set either. Even Joe couldn't be that careless.

That's when he noticed the purse and the laptop on the floor. Both items had clearly been dropped. Whatever had caused Joe or the secretary – Rhonda – to leave must have been urgent for either of them to leave the place in a state like this. Sam hoped they'd left on their own volition.

He took out his phone and called Joe. There was no answer. Sam texted him to call him immediately. Next, he tried Rhonda. Again, there was no answer. Drumming his finger on the front desk, Sam considered his options. If he called anyone this time of night, it was bound to cause alarm, which could prove to be a false alarm. On the other hand, if Joe and Rhonda were in some kind of trouble, it couldn't wait until morning.

Sam placed his next call to Laura Hardy. He knew he'd wake her up and worry her, but there was no help for it.

"Sam?" Laura answered the phone practically immediately, sounding wide awake and concerned. A call from her husband's partner in the middle of the night was rarely good news. "Is something wrong?"

"I don't know for sure," Sam replied honestly. He knew Laura had been surrounded by danger-prone detectives long enough that there was no point in trying to skirt around anything. "When's the last time you heard from Joe?"

"Yesterday," Laura told him. "Thursday, that is."

Sam tightened his jaw. Over twenty-four hours. "Was he working on a case of some kind?"

"I don't know," Laura said. "I don't think so. Has something happened to him?"

"I'm not sure," Sam admitted. "The agency wasn't locked up and it looks like, if Joe was here, he left in a hurry. I tried to call him and he didn't answer, but maybe he's just asleep and didn't hear the phone ring. I'll go by his apartment and see if his car's there. Before I do that, though, is there anything else you can tell me? Anything that might explain where he would have gone?"

Laura thought for a few moments. "I don't know if this has any bearing on anything, but Joe has been really upset for almost a week now. He and Iola had a fight."

"All right," Sam replied. "I'll call you back as soon as I know anything."

Being sure to lock the door this time, Sam got back in his car and drove to Joe's apartment. Joe's car was nowhere to be found. His next move was to call Iola. She answered after a few rings, sounding very confused.

"When's the last time you heard from Joe?" Sam asked without preamble.

There was silence for a few moments. Finally, Iola said, "This morning. Why? Did something happen to him?"

"I don't know," Sam replied. "When exactly did you talk to him?"

"It was around ten-thirty," Iola told him. "He came to my apartment."

"Did he say where he was going after that?" Sam asked.

"No." Iola drew out the word a few seconds longer than she needed to.

"Did he say anything that might give you a hint where he went?" Sam pressed, sensing that Iola wasn't saying everything she knew.

"Not really," Iola told him. "He – You don't think – You don't think he could have done something desperate?"

"You tell me," Sam replied.

Iola's voice broke. "We had a fight. He was trying to straighten things out, but I wouldn't listen. I – I broke up with him." She finished the sentence with a sob.

Sam let out a long breath, guessing what was in Iola's mind. "I'm sure it's not anything like that."

"I tried to call him later," Iola went on, not paying any attention. "But he didn't answer. He never called back. I wanted to tell him I was sorry."

"When was that exactly?" Sam asked.

"It was a few hours later. Maybe around two," Iola told him. "I was so stupid. I should have listened to him."

"Hey," Sam said. "I'm sure he's fine. He's probably with one of his friends or something. Don't worry. It'll be okay."

Despite his attempts to reassure Iola, Sam was worried. As soon as he hung up, he called police headquarters to see if they could shed any light on the matter. After listening to Sam, the officer at the desk connected him to Captain Olaf's office, as Olaf was in command when Chief Collig was off-duty. There was a minute or two before Olaf answered, and Sam guessed that the desk officer was filling the captain in on what Sam had told him.

"Captain Olaf here," the captain's voice finally came through. "Officer Willis told me what you're calling about."

"Well?" Sam asked as the captain paused. "Do you have any news?"

Olaf let out a long breath. "Yeah, I might. But I have to warn you – it's not good news."

"What is it?" Sam willed himself to stay calm. He'd learned a long time ago that it was best not to assume anything in his line of work.

"We've got a Jane Doe who fits your Rhonda Marrow's description," Olaf said.

"You can't identify her?" Sam asked.

"No," Olaf replied. "She didn't have any ID on her."

"What are you holding her for?" Sam insisted.

"We're not holding her," Olaf told him. "She's dead."

HBHBHBHBHB

"It's about time you woke up," Tony said as Joe came into the small kitchen area with his hair uncombed and wearing a set of Tony's clothes. "It's almost ten."

Joe yawned. "That's the second morning in a row sleeping in that late. Did I miss breakfast?"

"Man, if you would have slept any longer, you would have missed lunch," Tony replied. Then he grinned. "Truth be told, I only just woke up a little bit ago myself. I'm making breakfast now."

Joe also grinned and sat down at the kitchen table. "Well, don't let me keep you. I'm half-starved. It must be about twenty-four hours since last time I ate. Man! At that rate, I'm fully starved."

"Scrambled eggs are coming up in about two minutes." Tony gave the frying pan on the stove a stir.

A couple minutes later, Tony sat down at the table as well, handing one plate of eggs to Joe and keeping another for himself. Joe dug in eagerly, but he made a face after the first bite.

"What did you do to these?" he asked.

"This is how I always eat my eggs." Tony shrugged and continued eating.

Joe shook his head. "Remind me to sign you up for cooking lessons. If I wasn't starved, there'd be no way I could eat this."

"Hey, we don't all have cooks like your mom or your Aunt Gertrude making our meals for us," Tony said. "This is how the rest of the world of mediocre cooks eats."

"I don't even live at home anymore," Joe reminded him. "They don't cook all my meals."

"Yeah, but I bet anytime you do go home for dinner, your mom and aunt send enough food with you to last a week," Tony told him.

"Well, maybe," Joe admitted, turning his attention back to the food.

Once the meal was over, Tony put the dishes in the sink, saying he'd wash them later. Then he poured them each another cup of coffee, sat back down, and crossed his legs.

"So these people who are out to get you," he began, "why exactly are they trying to kill you and how likely are they to succeed?"

"For your first question, I have no idea," Joe replied. "As for your second, I'd say they've got an excellent chance."

Tony nodded and took a sip of his coffee. "Okay. Sounds like nothing out of the ordinary. How about you tell me the whole story?"

Joe took in a deep breath and his joviality faded. "You know the secretary we hired at the agency about a month ago, Rhonda Marrow? Turns out she was trying to frame me for – well, yeah. She was trying to frame me for something. She claims it was to use it as leverage to get Dad and Frank to give up the case their working on in Italy, which doesn't make any sense because she must have been planning this long before they got called in on that case."

"What was she trying to frame you for?" Tony asked.

Joe squirmed uncomfortably. "Um, you can probably imagine."

"Oh." Tony made a guess. "That's ridiculous, of course. Nobody's going to fall for it."

"That's what I would have thought." Joe's voice had become softer. "She decided to prove it to me. She got to Iola –"

"What?" Fortunately, Tony had just swallowed a sip of coffee. Otherwise, he probably would have spit it out over the table. "She actually convinced Iola? What the - ? How could Iola believe anything like that? She must be on something. I ought to tell her a thing or two."

"Just leave it alone, Tony." Joe bit his lip to keep it from trembling. He could still feel that raw, searing pain like a stab wound, and at the moment, Tony wasn't helping. "Just let me go on. After I found out, I guess I lost my head. I confronted Rhonda about it, and we got into a fight and then a chase. I chased back to her apartment, I guess. It was a trap, and there were two guys there, pretty much just waiting to capture. That's when she gave the whole line about framing me and using it as leverage against Dad and Frank. But then I realized that her and her two thugs were Black Rose."

"What's that?" Tony asked.

"A terrorist organization," Joe told him. "Super secretive. Unlike most terrorist organizations, they're not trying to get publicity. Honestly, nobody knows what they're after or who they really are. There's only two things that you know them by for sure – they always have a tattoo of a black rose under their left ear and not a single one of them has ever been captured alive."

"Oh great." Tony groaned. "I should have figured there'd be terrorists on top of everything else."

"Anyway," Joe continued, "once they knew that I knew, then they knew that the only thing they could do was to kill me. I had to get away, and they were blocking the door."

"So, that's the part where you jumped out the window, right?" Tony asked.

"Fell out," Joe corrected him. "I backed into the window, but I didn't expect it to break like that."

"Honestly, you're pretty lucky it did," Tony told him, his tone a little more serious this time.

Joe nodded. "One of the first guys ever to be lucky to fall out a window. After that, I got away as fast as I could and called you."

"And this is the part where we go to the police or the FBI or whoever deals with terrorists, right?" Tony asked. "Seriously, Joe, I was willing to let it go last night, but after hearing what it's all about, we need help."

"We can't do that," Joe protested. "There's two reasons why we can't. The first is that if we go to the police and they do catch Rhonda - which they probably won't, at least not alive – then she'll still bring up all her phony evidence to frame me and that'll ruin everything, even if it will be perfectly obvious that it's a frame-up. Except it'll never go to trial because Black Rose will know exactly where I am and then they'll kill me."

"But the police and FBI will protect you," Tony pointed out. "I mean, sure, they'll lock you up and you'll hate it, but at least you'll be alive."

"That's the second reason," Joe said. "The police and the FBI. I might as well tell them that Darth Vader is after me as Black Rose."

"Why?" Tony asked.

"Because the FBI officially doesn't believe in Black Rose," Joe explained. "There's all sorts of conspiracy theories about it – that Black Rose is actually a covert government kill squad, that they're holding the President hostage and the guy in the White House is actually an imposter and so they've got the FBI under their thumb. According to the FBI, Black Rose is an urban legend. They claim that there's absolutely no evidence that such a group exists. They don't show up in the media often, and there's even more conspiracy theories about that. It's pretty hard to sort out the truth about it."

"Then why do you believe in it?" Tony inquired.

"Do you remember several years ago when Callie got held hostage in that airport?" Joe asked. As Tony nodded, Joe continued, "That was the first time I'd ever heard of Black Rose. Nancy Drew – er, Nickerson – never going to get used to that one – Nancy recognized those guys as Black Rose. She'd run into them before. See, she's had a few cases that are pretty – yeah. She knows enough about this kind of stuff that I trust her."

"Okay, but these people tried to kill you," Tony reminded him. "The authorities can't just ignore that."

"No, I guess not," Joe admitted, "but to be honest, I don't know what they will do. I don't want to go them until I have a better idea about what they will do."

"Then at least call your dad and Frank," Tony said. "If they agree with you, I won't argue anymore, and whatever they do, they'll be able to help."

Joe shook his head. "I can't call them, either. Rhonda worked for us for a month, remember? I don't think she was just answering the phone and filling out paperwork all that time. She probably has all our phones tapped. If she does and I call Dad or Frank, they'll be next on Black Rose's hit list. Nope. We're on our own."

"Well, what if you called Callie from my phone?" Tony asked. "Then she could relay the message to your dad and Frank."

Joe considered this. "It's risky, but it might be worth a try. But not from your phone. I don't know how thorough these characters are, but they might have tapped yours and Callie's phones, too. If these people connect you to all of this, it'll take them about five minutes to find me."

"Well, then, we'll have to find someone else's phone to borrow," Tony said.

"No," Joe replied. "That won't do. A public phone would be much harder to trace. There must still be a phone booth somewhere in this town. If there is, we'll find it. When we do, though, don't expect Dad and Frank to come sailing in and rescue us. In fact, I'm going to tell them not to."

"Why not?" Tony asked.

"Because that's what these people want for some reason," Joe explained. "I don't know why, but they want them to leave Rome, so I'm only calling to make sure they don't. And then, after that, we've still got to find a way for me to disappear."