Hidden Salem

by Kay Hooper

“Got it. Thanks, Ms. Payton.”

  She did not, as many innkeepers would have done, ask him to call her by her Christian name. Instead, she merely smiled with her usual professional courtesy and left the parlor to return to the front desk and whatever work awaited her there.

  One of the neatly dressed waitresses came to silently top off his half-empty coffee cup, checked that he had sugar and milk, and then slipped away just as silently.

  Grayson looked up to intercept a glance from Ms. Payton, who smiled mechanically and returned to her paperwork.

  So I’m being watched.

  And fairly closely, at that.

  Because all “outsiders” were watched?

  Or was there a far less innocuous reason?

  TEN

  Grayson had offered Ms. Payton an excuse for returning to his room, so he did just that. He actually did call his doctor—a doctor who was not in the FBI but was a friend of Bishop’s and treated quite a few of the psychics in the SCU, especially with their common headaches and occasional migraines and even blackouts—and requested that the prescription that sometimes helped his headaches be called in or faxed to the drugstore in Salem. His request was approved, but only after the doctor got on the phone himself and asked a few brief, familiar questions.

  None of them could be sure, after all, if the psychic abilities they used might one day damage their brains. Or already had. So medical as well as psychological questions and frequent examinations were the rule rather than the exception within the SCU.

  Grayson thought they might be the healthiest unit in the entire FBI just due to Bishop’s caution and the understandable curiosity of doctors.

  Unless their brains shorted out one day, of course. Then being otherwise healthy wouldn’t mean a whole hell of a lot.

  “It’s just the same old thing,” he told the doctor. “I strained my eyes, and my head is pounding. It’s not too bad now, but I’m in the mountains and I’d rather have the meds if I need them.”

  The doctor, who knew better than to ask too-specific questions on a line he had not been told was secure, said merely, “I’ll fax in both, then. One you can take and still function normally during the day, and the other to help you sleep. We both know the migraines and even mild headaches get worse over time if you don’t get enough sleep.”

  It was a familiar warning, and one Grayson had learned the hard way to listen to. “Yeah, okay, Doc. Thanks.”

  “Call if anything changes,” the doctor ordered rather than requested, and hung up.

  Grayson cradled the receiver of the landline phone in his room, wondering for an absent moment if the doctor would report to Bishop. It only took that moment to realize that of course he would. Medical ethics and privacy laws were one thing, but Bishop needed to be aware of the physical and mental condition of his agents, and sometimes direct communication just wasn’t possible even if agents always understood what was going on with them physically and mentally. Which they as often as not didn’t, especially when on a case and pushing themselves and their abilities to their limits. Bishop would have thought of that and arranged things accordingly.

  Shrugging off that realization, Grayson got his almost empty backpack out of the closet in his room. All his clothing except what he’d been wearing had been sent to be cleaned as soon as he’d checked in, and it was already back. What hadn’t been left neatly folded on his bed was now hanging neatly in his closet, which amused him briefly since the very casual and even rough clothing of a serious hiker looked odd on hangers.

  He got his laptop out of its zippered compartment of the backpack, along with various cords and cables and what was obviously a solar charger—which would have been his only alternate power source on the Trail everywhere except at periodic rest stops set up for hikers. And even then the solar charger could be used only sporadically, given weather and forest cover.

  He carried everything to the compact desk in his small sitting room and got the equipment connected, plugged in, and booted up.

  He debated silently for some minutes before using the Wi-Fi password for the B and B. His laptop, which appeared innocent and ordinary, had beneath its very deceptive surface enough firewalls and other layers of security to impress someone with top DOJ clearance. And it would take someone with that level of expertise to even realize the security existed.

  It would take all the skills of a very, very gifted hacker to get through that security.

  Grayson was one of the lucky team members of the SCU; he could use electronics, even wear a watch, without either draining them of power or shorting everything out.

  Geneva could stop a clock by standing too close to it, and if she even touched a laptop or tablet, it simply died. Smart watches refused to even light up long enough for her to get them buckled around her wrist, and cell phones gave up and died almost as quickly. Within seconds. Hotel keycards were one of the banes of her existence, since she had to have them remagnetized every single time she wanted back in her room (or pick the lock if she was being slippery). She had also been known to blow out lightbulbs in a room if she got really pissed or otherwise upset.

  And Grayson had no idea why their abilities created such different reactions in them. Technically, they were both receivers; he picked up emotions and she picked up thoughts. The fact that she had touched his mind more than once . . . well, that was something different, not so much a reaching out as . . .

  He decided not to even finish that thought.

  The point was that although Geneva had brought a drained cell phone, a tablet, and a very nice laptop with her (the latter two both plugged in, in her room, charging fairly normally if she had stayed the hell away from them), it was because to not have those now-common devices in her possession would have seemed weird indeed to anyone even casually interested in her presence here. But all were useless for communication as far as she was concerned. And she hadn’t trusted the landline in her room here, for whatever reason.

  Some kind of trouble. Bound to be. So—

  Again, he stopped himself from following a path of thought. He couldn’t think about Geneva right now.

  GS, you’re looking for a little girl gone missing. Take care. Stay away from me. Red

  He rubbed his eyes with both hands briefly, telling himself he could stand the headache for a bit longer, that he could wait to go collect the prescriptions that would help.

  He had to start looking for a missing little girl. And when children were missing, there was no time to waste. The statistics on the life spans of children in unfriendly hands were dark indeed.

  Today’s weekend edition of the local daily newspaper he’d been reading earlier, the Salem Chronicle, had not contained a single article about anybody missing, far less a child, but that didn’t stop him from using his laptop to tap into a data bank of state newspapers.

  Only to discover that the Salem Chronicle did not keep back or even current issues online. Anywhere. And the newspaper did not publish an online edition.

  Shit. Microfilm?

  There had to be a newspaper “morgue” somewhere, after all. Newspapers kept some kind of electronic copies of their publications because the newspapers themselves were too fragile to trust their continued existence into posterity, and the information they contained was always valuable sooner or later for historical research. So Grayson was willing to bet that the entire historical record of the Chronicle was on microfilm either in the town library—or some storage room in the newspaper’s own offices.

  Either way, whatever information the Chronicle might have published was out of Grayson’s reach, at least for now. Because he couldn’t think of a single damned good reason why a weary hiker just stopping in for a little rest and warmth would be at all interested in back issues of the local newspaper.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’RE SURE?” DUNCAN asked his lieutenant in the militia. He was sure
himself but wanted confirmation.

  “It’s her, all right. Not a dark Cavendish like most here; looks just like that picture you showed me of her mother. She’s using an alias. Reed.”

  “Her mother’s maiden name.” Duncan shook off yet another nagging question about what, if anything, Nellie had inherited from her mother. “How long is she booked into Hales?”

  “Two weeks, with the possibility of an extended stay.” Expressionlessly, Aaron Cavendish, a cousin of Duncan’s, added, “She has a dog. A Pit, probably ninety pounds or better. I’m betting he’d go for the throat of anyone threatening her. So far, he hasn’t left her side.”

  Duncan frowned. He hadn’t counted on a dog. Not that it mattered; dogs could be dealt with, if necessary. In the meantime, he had his innocent, and the moon would be full on Sunday. Two days, and he’d have the power he needed to confront his niece and take whatever Talent she possessed, just as he’d taken her father’s.

  “I want her watched,” he said calmly. “Not obviously. She’ll have the usual . . . escort . . . but I want you or those you trust to watch her as well. I want to know where she goes, who she talks to—”

  “She’s already talked to Finn. The sidewalk tables at the café.”

  Duncan frowned. “A friendly conversation?”

  “I’d say not. Whatever he was trying to sell, she wasn’t buying. Walked away from him with her dog and didn’t look back.”

  How far would Finn go to interfere? Duncan wasn’t sure. He’d never been able to read the boy. All he could be certain of was that his loyalists in the militia outnumbered Finn’s. And that the full moon was only two days away.

  “All right. Don’t worry about Finn for now, but have your man standing ready in case we need Finn distracted from the girl. Easy enough to cause problems at a newspaper office, I should think.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Duncan nodded a dismissal and turned back to the big desk in his study. He pondered the problem of Finn for a few minutes, considering how to best turn Nellie away from any advice or information that young man might offer. When the solution came to him, he could only smile at its simplicity.

  He picked up his phone to call the Dreamer.

  * * *

  —

  FACED WITH NO access to back editions of Salem’s newspaper without calling far too much attention to himself, Grayson thought briefly, then tapped in a command for his system to check all newspapers in the Southeast, looking for articles about little girls gone missing, last seen within a five-hundred-mile radius of Salem. He would have preferred a narrower search area, but he wanted to get as many decent-sized newspapers as he could, and that meant at least a couple of the nearest cities.

  Which were not close.

  Even as good as his system was, it took a few minutes, and he spent those minutes staring into space and wondering why the newspaper—or someone else—had decided against making their information available online. It was such a common practice today, even in small towns. In fact, most newspapers these days published an electronic version, often daily, because it was cheaper and because “news” was a constant stream of information rather than specific broadcasts on some kind of predictable cycle as it had been in the old days; so many people got their news, virtually as it happened, via their phones or tablets. So why, at least as far as local news went, was that different in Salem?

  There was probably a good explanation, but Grayson couldn’t think of one offhand. It wasn’t as if this was a town left behind by technology. They had satellite TV, Wi-Fi, cell towers. Maybe the Wi-Fi was a bit unstable, but that was common in mountainous areas. And the whole town was powered by solar, for Christ’s sake.

  He opened a second window on his laptop while the search program worked busily in the background, and discovered quickly that he could access the usual social media platforms. He found the names of the five families among Facebook pages and connected at least a few to people actually living here in Salem, though it looked to be something only the younger generations used, and for the usual self-centered, overly dramatic, far-too-personal selfies, other photos, and musings or rants about their lives.

  As far as he could tell, very few people beyond high school age even had a Facebook page, Instagram, or a Twitter account.

  Well. Not so unusual, that. His own mother still didn’t trust cell phones.

  Not so unusual in his experience that it was mostly the kids who really used Instagram and Twitter, Snapchat, and most of the rest of the social media platforms. Apparently kids, at any rate. It wasn’t something he could be absolutely certain of, because so many people used screen names or other pseudonyms, and because too many hid behind alternate identities.

  For both good and bad reasons.

  He could set his system to begin the slow crawl through social media looking for specific keywords, just as he was searching newspaper archives for those same keywords, but even narrowing those down as far as he was able, what he expected was a boatload of information that would take forever to wade through. Social media was just too damned vast and couldn’t really be accurately narrowed as to actual physical areas covered because of all those pseudonyms and false identities, which often included “adopted” hometowns or cities. Everywhere.

  Maybe a DOJ analyst or six with a monster mainframe and top clearance to dig into the code of the actual platforms could at least weed out a boatload of extraneous information. Maybe the Bureau could. But those avenues were closed to him, because he was here quietly and because there was no “official” investigation going on in or around Salem.

  Yet, at least.

  Before he could begin to swear out loud about that, a quiet beep informed him that his search program had finished combing through those newspapers within his search parameters that were archived online or in databases to which he had access.

  All the major newspapers within five hundred miles, and at least a dozen more from small cities and small towns. He’d had to make more than a few assumptions as to what he was searching for, of course, because he had so little to work with. A “little girl” could have been any age below, he was guessing, thirteen, so he had used that as an arbitrary marker. Because Geneva had used the phrase “gone missing,” he was assuming she knew or believed she knew it hadn’t been a parental abduction or runaway, that it hadn’t been traffickers—and that whether it had even been reported was a large question mark. A little girl had disappeared, reasons unknown. Means unknown. He was assuming it had happened recently, perhaps even since Geneva herself had arrived in Salem, but he was uncertain enough of that to add a couple of weeks and set an arbitrary time limit of a month. Geneva also, clearly, had seen or picked up nothing to lead her to believe the little girl was dead.

  Just missing.

  He was reasonably sure she had picked up most of what information she had telepathically; her cover was as a professional photographer putting together shots mostly of the gorgeous scenery for a coffee table “travel” book on the Southern Appalachians. And that cover gave Geneva every reason to wander around pretty much to her heart’s content as long as she had that very professional camera—or two—hanging around her neck. Two cameras, in their cases, were in her room, which told him she had very likely slipped out late at night, which was a habit of hers on a case.

  That was not a cheerful thought.

  He was certain she’d taken one or both with her while out during the day, snapping more shots of pretty scenery to add to those already on rolls of exposed film and printed out, neatly stacked in case anybody snooped. And while she was wandering around, she could pick up whatever she was able to telepathically. Hence her knowledge of a missing girl.

  Grayson stared at the grim number his search had revealed, drew a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

  Twenty-eight.

  Twenty-eight girls thirteen or younger had gone missing during the last t
hirty days, last seen somewhere within a five-hundred-mile radius of Salem.

  * * *

  —

  GRAYSON DIDN’T TRUST a video transmission even from his very secure laptop, but Bishop had long ago set up a very, very secure means of receiving from agents in tricky situations transmissions that were almost like cell texts or e-mails but were encoded and protected at both ends. Though even that was limited to those of his agents who could use electronics—or had someone with them they could trust to do so.

  With no idea of where the unit chief might be or what sort of situation he might be involved in, Grayson merely sent through a request for a real-time discussion and asked when Bishop would be available.

  And wasn’t really surprised when an affirmative response came through in less than five minutes. He barely had time to consider what he most needed to communicate before, in the dark window on his laptop’s screen, white letters appeared. Bishop was a fast and easy typist. So was Grayson. And neither of them was prone to substitute letters for words or otherwise use text or Internet “shorthand.”

  What’s up, Gray?

  Trouble. Geneva’s missing, possibly for as long as two or three days. Nobody here seems concerned, maybe because I’m pretty sure she left at night, slipped out late to avoid being seen leaving.

  Because?

  Her cameras are still in her room, and since they’re part of her cover, she’d have them with her during the day.

  Okay, makes sense. And?

  Left me a coded note in the local newspaper; I worked out it meant I was to look for a little girl gone missing, but NOT to look for Gen. I don’t like it, Bishop. I need to find Gen. And since the newspaper does not archive or publish online, and there was nothing in today’s paper about a missing kid, I had to search the databases for five hundred miles around Salem. 28 girls under the age of 13 currently reported as missing, or at least were when I checked earlier.