It is unclear how he became the most trusted adviser to one of the largest crime syndicates in North America.

The organization was based out of New York and South Florida, where their top leaders lived in places like Fisher Island and oceanfront South Beach. They played golf and wore Brioni suits and told their neighbors they worked in securities. This was how the new regime operated. Quietly. Efficiently. Brutally. Their lieutenants preserved their stronghold in several core businesses—extortion, loan-sharking, narcotics—while also moving into more sophisticated revenue streams, like international online gaming and brokerage fraud on Wall Street.

Most notably, though, they bulked up their OxyContin business long before their competitors saw the opening there. And while these competitors were still primarily shilling the traditional illegals (heroin, cocaine), this organization became the largest trafficker of oxycodone in North America.

This is how Nicholas wound up in their orbit. One of the organization’s young associates found himself in trouble in Austin while distributing OxyContin at UT-Austin. Nicholas managed to keep him out of prison.

Nicholas then spent the better part of the next three decades fighting on behalf of this organization—his work leading to acquittals or mistrials on eighteen counts of murder, twenty-eight indictments for drug trafficking, sixty-one counts of extortion and fraud.

He proved himself invaluable and got wealthy in the process. But as the DEA and the FBI kept losing case after case against him, he became a target too. He remained unafraid they’d find anything that added up to his being anything more than a devoted attorney.

Until something went wrong. His grown daughter was walking down the street on her way home from her job, her beloved job. She was a clerk for the Texas Supreme Court—a year and change out of law school, a new mother. She was walking home, after a long week, when a car struck her.

It would have looked like any other accident, any other hit-and-run, except that she was hit on a small street near her Austin house and it was a clear day and it was a Friday afternoon. And Friday afternoons were when Nicholas spent time at his daughter’s home, watching his granddaughter. Just the two of them. It was his favorite time of the week—picking his granddaughter up from music class and taking her to the park with the good swings, the park that was a block away from where his daughter was killed. So he’d be the one to find her. So he’d be the one to see it.

His clients said they had nothing to do with the accident, even though he had just lost a major case for them. And it seemed like the truth. They had a code. They didn’t go after people’s families. But someone had done it. As vengeance. As a warning shot. There was speculation that it had been members of a different organization who were aiming to secure his services for themselves.

None of these details mattered to his daughter’s husband, though, who could only blame his father-in-law. The fact that it occurred on a Friday afternoon convinced him that his father-in-law’s employers were involved, one way or another. And, regardless, he blamed his father-in-law for his deep entanglement with the kind of people that made it a question in the first place—that could bring this kind of tragedy to a family.

Not that The Good Lawyer had wanted his daughter to be hurt. He’d always been a great father and was devastated by her death, but his son-in-law was too angry to care. And his son-in-law knew things. He knew things The Good Lawyer had trusted him not to share with anyone else.

Which was why the son-in-law was able to turn state’s evidence against his father-in-law and become the lead witness in a case that put his father-in-law in jail while casting a blow to the organization itself—eighteen members of the organization implicated in the sweep. The Good Lawyer carted off behind them.

The son-in-law and his small daughter, who would have only a couple of memories of her mother—of her grandfather—disappeared after the trial, never to be heard from again.

The lawyer’s full name was Daniel Nicholas Bell, aka: D. Nicholas Bell.

His son-in-law went by the name of Ethan Young.

Ethan’s daughter’s name was Kristin.

I drop my phone to the ground and smash it. I smash it in one quick motion, kicking it hard with my foot, as hard as I’ve ever kicked anything.

And I open the bathroom door. I open the bathroom door to get Bailey and grab our things and get the hell out of Austin. Not in five minutes. Not in five seconds. Now.

“Bailey, we need to get out of here right now,” I say. “Just grab what you’ve already packed. We’re going.”

But the hotel room is empty. Bailey is no longer there.

She is gone.

“Bailey?”

My heart stars to race as I reach for my phone to call her, to text her. And I remember that I just smashed my phone. I have no phone.

So I run into the hallway, which is empty, save for a housekeeping cart. I run past it and toward the elevator bank, the staircase. She isn’t there. No one is there. I take the elevator down to the hotel lobby, hoping she went to the hotel bar to get a snack. I run into the hotel restaurants, each of them, into the Starbucks. Bailey is not there either. Bailey is not anywhere.

You make a hundred decisions. You make decisions all the time. And the one you don’t think of twice shouldn’t get to determine what happens to her: Go into your hotel room, double bolt the door. You think you’re safe. But then you head into the bathroom. You head into the bathroom and trust a sixteen-year-old to stay on the bed, stay in the room, because where is she going to go?

Except she is terrified. Except there is that. Except she told you she didn’t want to leave Austin.

So why did you believe she would go without a fight?

Why did you believe she would listen to you?

I race back into the elevator, race back down the hall. I am enraged at myself that my phone is broken on the bathroom floor, that I don’t have it to text her. That I don’t have it to turn on locations and track her.

“Bailey, please answer me!”

I head into the hotel room and look around again—as though she will be hiding somewhere in those 580 square feet. I search the closet, search under the beds anyway, hoping to find her huddled in a ball, crying. Needing to be alone. Miserable, but safe. How quickly I would take that! Miserable, safe.

The door swings open. I feel temporary relief. It is a relief I have never felt before, thinking Bailey is back, thinking that I just missed her when I did my frantic search in the hotel—that she did, after all, just go down the hall to get a bucket of ice or a soda. That she went to call Bobby. That she found a cigarette and went outside to smoke it. Any of it, all of it.

But Bailey isn’t standing there.

Grady Bradford is.

Grady is standing there in his faded jeans and backward baseball cap. His stupid windbreaker.

He drills me with an angry look, his arms crossed over his chest. “So you certainly went and made a mess of everything now,” he says.

— Part 3 —

Rotten wood cannot be carved.

—Confucius

When We Were Young

The U.S. Marshals’ office in downtown Austin is on a side street, its windows peering in on other buildings, peering in on the parking garage across the street. Most of those buildings are now dark and closed for the night. The parking lot is mostly empty. But Grady’s office—and his colleagues’ offices—are lit up and bustling.

“Let’s walk through this again,” Grady says.

He sits on the edge of his desk as I pace back and forth. I can feel his judgment but it’s unnecessary. No one is judging me more than I’m judging myself. Bailey is missing. She’s missing. She is out there, alone.

“How’s this helping to find Bailey?” I say. “Unless you arrest me, I’m going out there to look for her.”

I start to walk out of the office, but Grady hops down from his desk and blocks my exit.

“We have eight deputies looking for her,” he says. “What you need to do right now is go through it all again. If you want to help us find her, that’s the only thing to do.”

I hold his gaze but relent, knowing he’s right.

I walk back over to the windows and look outside, as though there is something I can do—as though I’ll spot Bailey somewhere on the street below. I don’t know who I’m looking at—the myriad of people walking through nighttime Austin. The sliver of moon, the only light, makes it feel even more terrifying that Bailey is roaming among them.

“What if he took her?” I say.

“Nicholas?” he says.

I nod, my head starting to spin. I go obsessively over everything I know about him now—how dangerous he is, the heights Owen went to get away from him. To keep his daughter away from Nicholas’s world. How I’ve brought her back.

Protect her.

“That’s unlikely,” Grady says.

“But not impossible?”

“I guess nothing is impossible, now that you brought her to Austin.”