~ ~ ~
Jet found another wireless hot spot after dinner and checked back in. Moriarty had delivered, but the result hadn’t helped. There had been no hospital admissions that matched David.
She was now fifteen thousand dollars poorer and dead in the water.
The hacker agreed to keep monitoring and alert her if anything surfaced, but her longshot had just gotten way longer, and she wasn’t hopeful.
Yawning, she realized that she needed to get a room somewhere. There wasn’t anything more she could think of doing that night, so all that remained was to wait and see what surfaced the following day.
One of the motels near the highway looked clean enough, and the manager didn’t seem to be interested in niggling details like identification – he was just happy to take her cash. She tromped up the stairs to her room overlooking the parking lot and quickly unpacked, then took a long shower and tried to decompress. There was no point staying up all night, worrying at the situation. After a decent night’s sleep, maybe something would occur to her.
It only took five hours.
She sat bolt upright in the bed and stared at the clock, heart trip-hammering as her mind raced, sure that she’d had a breakthrough. She reached across the end table and grabbed a bottle of water, mulling over the best way to proceed. Whether or not she was right, it was too late to do anything about it until daylight.
The rest of the night went by slowly, and she found herself tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable, frowning at her watch’s minute hand as it inched toward morning.
Jet Page 25