January 20

Ben

We set our bags down in our new safehouse, which is somehow even less inviting than the last one. Even with the power out.

"Is this really the best the FBI can do?"

Ana's eyeing me like this is my fault.

"I'm not the FBI. Don't look at me."

"The badge you're wearing says something different."

I pull the lanyard with the FBI ID badge from around my neck and stuff it in my pocket. "That's just temporary until this assignment is over."

Ana scoffs harshly. "And we both know that's just imminent." Her voice drips with sarcasm. "Next you'll be telling me that the police actually found something useful during their searches and aren't as wildly incompetent as they've led me to believe."

I thought we'd left this hostility in the past. I know she's tired and frustrated and still grieving everything she's lost, but I'm tired too and I don't feel like being gracious right now. She's not the only one who's had her life overturned by this case.

"If you're angry, I'd prefer you just come out and say it."

"Yes, ok, I'm mad! I'm completely pissed off!"

Ana looks at me with a fire and a sharpness in her eye that I haven't seen since the day she chopped off her hair and announced she was going to tell all.

"I have nothing. I literally have nothing!" she gestures at the bag of all her current possessions. "I have no life. I have no friends, aside from you and Jones, and you guys are only here because of work. They promised me, they promised me, that if I testified, they could send my family's murderers to rot in jail until the end of time. Then the FBI made all their promises but here we are, in this shoebox, and nothing has changed. People are still hunting me down. The trial is postponed indefinitely, the people who killed my family are out on bail, and it's like everything I did, everything I suffered through and everything I fought so hard for - it didn't change a single thing. Nothing I did made any difference at all. So yeah, I'm mad."

She looks at me defiantly, her hands on her hips, waiting for me to challenge her.

"I understand what you're going through. I told you about what happened to my sister. I was mad too, for a very long time. I still get furious when I remember the day the police stopped investigating her murder. But sitting around being mad at the cops didn't help anyone. I had to do something about it."

"And what do you expect me to do, exactly? I've done everything I can! I cooperated with the police, with the FBI, I told them everything about that night. Do you know how hard that was for me? Do you have any idea?"

"There's something you're still holding back," I point out.

Her expression switches to confusion before transforming into cold fury. "This mess already got him killed. I won't let it destroy the privacy he fought so hard for."

"But he's dead," I say, lifting a questioning hand. "How's he going to care if some police officers in Arizona find out the identity of a hermit in the Alaskan wilderness?"

She doesn't speak but glares at me like I was the one to shoot the mystery man she's trying to protect. Then she turns and walks into one of the two bedrooms, slamming the door behind her.

~~~

"I'm sorry for being an ass earlier. I misplaced my anger on you and that wasn't fair," Ana says, her face shrouded in the darkness of winter evenings.

"I understand," I say. I really do, more than she knows. "But if you think you were an ass today, you should have seen me back in high school."

"Oh really?" she asks, sounding like she's ready to hear some embarrassing stories of how I lost my temper. "Punch any holes in walls? I've never understood why men do that."

"I may have smashed my hand into a cinderblock wall once."

She laughs. "Oh no, you're not supposed to punch solid stone walls! Gosh, even I know this."

I chuckle a little at my own expense. "That was my only wall-punching experience. I learned more constructive outlets for my rage at anger management, where they sent me after the cinderblock incident."

She sighs and smiles at me before looking outside at the park around us.

"Thanks for agreeing to take me back here," she says.

"You're welcome. I'm learning to appreciate this place."

We're back at the North Mountain State Park. We've visited a handful of times since the day Ana passed out after talking about the murder of her Alaskan friend. It's a full moon tonight and the desert mountain around us is dimly illuminated by the silvery glow. Sometimes we walk around, but after the events of yesterday, I insisted we stay in the car. We don't know who else found out where we were staying. Though we've moved to a new safehouse and I'm driving a different car now, I'm still not convinced we're safe.

Being out here in the relative wilderness seems to be calming for Ana. I asked her at some point if she visited this park often, but she said she'd never been here before. Once she led us through the trails all the way to the mountain peak. While she sat on the bench there, gazing out over the city, she looked almost serene.

"Have you ever been fishing or camping?" she asks, interrupting my reflection.

"Never," I admit. "I've hardly ever stepped foot outside city limits, aside from the few times we visited my grandmother's family on the reservation."

"Reservation?" she asks. "Your grandmother was Native American?"

"Yep. My dad's mother. She grew up in the Navajo Nation and left after she married my grandpa. Her father was a Navajo code-talker during World War II."

"No way, really?" she asks, her eyebrows shooting up as she turns to fully face me.

I nod.

"That's so cool," she says. "I bet he had amazing stories to tell."

"He died when I was little. I don't remember him much."

"That's too bad. If I hadn't been so interested in economics, I would have majored in history. World War II was especially fascinating to me. People don't realize how much of today's world is the way is it because of that war."

She begins to list off effects of WWII in a disjointed, enthusiastic manner.

I chuckle. "You're such a nerd," I tease her light-heartedly.

"I know," she says, the moonlight glinting off her wide, self-satisfied smile.

~~~

I wake up to screams. I'm wrenching open the door the next instant later with no memory of getting out of bed or crossing the room. By the time I make it to Ana's room, I've realized what's going on. It's another one of her nightmares. Ever since that first incident, Jones has always been the one to calm Ana when she has nightmares. This is the first time Ana's had a full-on night terror while Jones is out.

I ease into the room and speak to her in what I hope are soothing tones, but this does nothing to calm her agitation. She is thrashing and shrieking loud enough that she probably can't hear me. Thanks to the quick internet research I did after the last nightmare incident, I know that trying to wake Ana from the dream might not be possible. It also might not be advisable. If she's dreaming about being beaten for information and I grab her shoulders, I might make her nightmare worse.

But I hate watching her experience terror like this. I settle for sitting on the edge of her bed, talking gently to her, telling her she's OK and that she's safe, and holding my arms in front of myself so she doesn't hit me.

Slowly, she becomes still and her cries and shrieks dissolve into tears. And then she says a word. A name.

"Ryan."

There's so much heartbreak in her voice that I can't help leaning forward and bending over her slightly. She hasn't let me see her cry in weeks. She's been so strong, but she's utterly broken now.

I almost wrench away in surprise when Ana suddenly grabs me. I have to brace my forearms against the bed to keep her from pulling me down on top of her. If she came to her senses while we were in that position, I'm not sure I'd make it out of this room with all body parts intact.

Carefully, I pull myself to a seated position with Ana still clinging to me and crying into my shirt. I'm about to ask her if she's awake.

"I'm so sorry Ryan," she cries, her voice filled with emotion. "I'm so sorry."

I hold her gently, letting her cry. I keep murmuring quietly to her that she's ok and she's safe, but I don't think she's listening. Gradually she grows quieter and quieter until her slow breaths are the only thing I hear. Slowly, I lower her back down to the bed and ease off of it, trying really hard not to wake her up.

Even after I've tiptoed out of her room and climbed back into my bed, what she said sticks with me. When I familiarized myself with her case back in November, I'm pretty sure I became aware of every major person in her life. I even knew that she shared a dorm room in college with a theater major named Kelsey Willard from her second semester of freshman year until she dropped out last year.

But I'm certain there was no mention of any Ryan anywhere. And I have a hunch why. It's probably crazy. I'll probably wake up tomorrow morning and I won't give this a second thought. But the more I try to discredit the idea in my mind, the more I become convinced. Ryan is the mystery man who took Ana in and died when she was kidnapped.

If it's still bothering me tomorrow, I'll look into it. Start with the case files on Ana, see if there's a Ryan in there somewhere that I missed. If not, I'll start doing some research into vital records in Alaska. If this guy died, there will be a death certificate. I've even got a good estimate of the timeframe to search. After speaking with the trucker who drove Ana across Alaska, I have a very general idea of where this cabin was. I'm going to find this Ryan and maybe that will be enough to convince Ana to talk about what happened at the cabin that day. Maybe that cabin will contain some useful evidence, unlike Ana's family home. Maybe if I can find Ryan, I can get this case closed.

I get out of bed. There's no way I'm going back to sleep now. Alaska's a big place and Ryan is a common name. I don't even have a last name to work with. Might as well start looking.