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replaced. Lora had carried her daughter into the depths of the house and returned to stand nearby, arms crossed protectively over her stomach.
    Chad wanted to tell her they were done and it was as tight as Fort Knox, but she could see with her own eyes that it wasn’t.
    “It’s as good as we can get it for now. I know of a contractor that would be willing to come work on it, but it may have to be after his regular work hours.”
    Lora nodded. “That’s fine.”
    Chad called his buddy Rich and told him about the situation. He promised to be over early the next morning.
    Roger eventually left for work, leaving Chad alone in the house with Lora and the girl. The way she paced, he knew she didn’t want him there, but he tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. Several times he caught her dozing in the chair, but she refused to actually go to bed. When the exhaustion finally caught up with her, he found her curled up in her daughter’s bed. He peeked into the room and little Mercy held a finger to her lips to make sure he stayed quiet, then snuggled back into her mother’s arms.
    Grinning, Chad left the room, closing the door softly behind him. That little girl was really something.
    *     *     *
    Still nothing. He watched the street below and several blocks out, waiting to see the hunched figure come out of the alley.
    He’d been waiting for weeks.
    Duncan heard the phone ring, but didn’t think anything about it until Shannon stepped to the office doorway. Her eyes were wide with alarm. “You need to answer line one. Truman Medical Center Lakewood in Kansas City, Missouri.”
    Swiveling the chair away from the window, he reached for the phone. “Wilde.”
    “Hello. This is Dr. Alex Hartfield with Truman Medical Center. We have a patient in our facility we’re trying to identify. He had a business card with your name on it in his coat pocket. The male appears to be mid-thirties, brownish hair and beard, a bit over six feet tall. Ring any bells?”
    Duncan rocked back in the chair, staggered. “Yes, ma’am. I think it may be Aiden Willingham. He’s been missing for several weeks. Is he okay?”
    “He is. We didn’t get him directly. One of the local urgent care centers did. A trucker found him in the back of his truck, hypothermic and delirious. It’s pretty amazing that he recovered as well as he did, because he truly was on death’s door. His core body temp had gotten down to eighty-six by the time he came in here. He’s underweight, bordering on malnourished, but we’ve got him hooked up to IVs and we’re pumping good stuff into him. We had to sedate him because he became frantic when he roused. Do you know anything about his medical history?”
    Duncan sighed. “I believe he’s former military, just from the interaction I’ve had with him. I filed a missing person’s report with the PD here in Denver and they were unable to find any kind of service record on him for any of the branches. From my experience though, he appears to be suffering from PTSD.”
    The doctor hummed on the other end of the line. “I agree. He is sedated right now because he knocked one of my nurses to the floor. I have a psych consult scheduled for this afternoon.”
    Duncan cringed at the thought of what the guy would have to go through. “Do you have a VA he can transfer to? They might be better equipped to deal with the PTSD.”
    “Well,” the woman murmured, “we do, but unless we can confirm his service record I can’t just drop him off on their doorstep.”
    He rocked back in the chair, shifting his hips to ease the ache. Thoughts chased through his head. No, he didn’t know Aiden very well, but if he could ease the vet’s suffering in any way he would.
    “Tell me where you are, Dr. Hartfield, and I’ll hop on a plane.”
    Duncan started planning even as he wrote directions from the doctor. John could take over while he ran to KC. Shannon knew most of what he had his fingers in anyway, so between the