by Linda Barlow
I couldn’t think about this for more than a second or two, though. Brandon Finlay opened the thing he had in his hand, which turned out to be a 7-inch tablet. A picture came up on the screen. He handed the device to me.
At first, I couldn't make out exactly what I was looking at. There were a lot of people in the picture, milling around inside some large, high-ceilinged structure. From the backpacks and suitcases most of them were lugging, it appeared to be an airport or maybe a train station. There was a foreign look to the place. I tried to nail the location down, but I wasn't exactly a world traveler. “Where is this?”
“Middle East somewhere?” Rory guessed. She was pressing against me and peering at the screen. “Or maybe eastern Europe, former Russian republic?”
“Close. It's Istanbul,” Connor said.
Istanbul? What the fuck?
He pointed to a spot on the top right of the photograph. All four of us were gathered around, squinting at the tablet.
“Here. The next picture has this area enlarged.” He flicked the screen to bring up the next shot. I leaned over the tablet.
My heart started hammering, and I felt a little dizzy as I saw her. Red hair. A wide mouth. A well-defined cleft in her chin. And a body much thinner than I had ever seen it.
Brandon Finlay cleared his throat and asked, “What do you think? Could that be Hadley?”
“There's another shot,” Connor said, and flicked the screen again. Same place, different angle, taken maybe a few seconds later. The redhead's face was turned away from the camera, but her profile was clear. “And another.” The following picture showed her face again, from closer.
It must have been some sort of surveillance shot, since she was on the edge of the frame now, moving out of camera range. There was a man I'd never seen beside her. It looked like he might have an arm around her, but it was hard to tell. The dude was wearing a hat that was pulled down to shadow most of his face.
Still, there was something about her body language that shook me. Her face was partly in shadow, but it looked haunted, maybe even scared. I had never seen Hadley look as if she was shaken by anything.
“It's her. She's alive.”
“Are you certain?”
I’m not even sure which man asked the question. I was fixated on the photographs. “Yes. Her hair, her mouth, her chin. It's Hadley.”
“What about the guy beside her? Ever seen him before?”
I shook my head. “He’s hiding his face, but what I can see of him doesn't ring any bells. You couldn't ID him?”
“Nope. Facial recognition requires more of a face than he’s showing in any of the shots.”
“She looks stressed,” Rory said. There was something strange in her tone, although I was too shocked to make much sense of it. “Is she there of her own free will, do you think?”
“It’s hard to tell. She’s out in public without being restrained. She’s not calling for help. Is she under some kind of compulsion? It’s possible. It’s also possible that she’s there willingly.”
My throat was too dry to say anything. Willingly? The word felt like dust in my brain. Was it possible that Hadley had disappeared on purpose?
“When were these pictures taken?” Rory asked.
“Three months ago,” said Connor. “She was alive at the end of the year.”
“Obviously, since she was alive three months ago in Turkey, you didn't kill her a year ago in Cranton,” Brandon said. “Her face matches enough facial recognition criteria to confirm her identity. Technically, you’re off the hook.”
I should have been happy, right? The cops and the FBI would stop hassling me. People would have to admit I wasn't a killer. The shadow that had been hanging over me would be lifted.
“Technically?” It was Rory who picked up on that word.
Brandon cleared his throat. “We’ve only had these photographs for a day. I wouldn't even have been here to tell you about them if he,” nodding to Connor, “hadn’t insisted. Right now the investigation is being kept private. No one can know about this until we have a lot more information.”
I would have brushed this aside. Other questions were flooding my mind. But Rory pushed it: “So you’re saying that as far as anybody outside the investigation knows, Griff will remain under suspicion of murdering a woman who is still alive? That is unacceptable.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Malley, but that’s the way it has to be. This is new information and it's being shared only with her family and the authorities. I understand that Griff has an interest in the case because of the suspicions that were directed at him, but you’ll have to discuss that with the other agencies who will be taking over.” He glanced at me. “Congratulations, by the way. I didn’t know you’d gotten married.”
I probably would have been embarrassed by the lie if I weren’t still so floored at the sight of Hadley’s photographs. “If those pictures were taken several months ago, how do we know she’s still alive?”
“We don’t,” said Connor.
“Why would she just disappear? And why Istanbul? She must be in some kind of trouble.”
“Not necessarily,” Brandon said. “Sometimes people decide to throw their old life away and start again somewhere else. It’s unusual, but it does happen.”
I thought about the Hadley I had known and I just couldn't buy it. I looked at Connor Finlay, ex Special Forces or CIA or whatever the hell he’d been. So leet a hacker that even Rory respected him.
“Who took her?” I asked him. “And how the fuck do we get her back?”
Chapter 29
Griff
I felt Rory shift beside me, and I sensed she was uneasy. I’d gotten to know her pretty well; I could tell now when she was upset.
She didn’t say anything, though.
“Right now there’s no evidence that anyone took her,” Brandon said. “She’s strolling through an international airport.”
“Do you have a record of her traveling? Using her passport? These days you can’t go anywhere without the airlines knowing exactly who you are, right? You must have checked that months ago, when she first disappeared.”
“That’s right, we did. There were no hits. But if she wanted to run for some reason, she was wealthy enough to purchase false documents.”
“Why? Why would she just leave? Suddenly, without telling anyone? Without leaving a trace?”
“Maybe that guy she’s with had some sort of hold over her,” Connor said. “Maybe he threatened her. Or her family. It could even be some sort of sex slavery thing. Trafficking. A woman as young and gorgeous as Hadley would be a valuable commodity.”
I choked up at the idea of Hadley as a commodity.
“If someone got her out of this country and into a foreign airport without being stopped, there could be powerful people involved. One of the big drug cartels, maybe, or some wealthy international businessman.”
“But how would these international creeps even know about Hadley? You're not trying to tell me there are sex traffickers operating out of Cranton.”
“Probably not, although with two fancy colleges in adjoining towns, it’s not impossible. What's more likely, though, is that Hadley came into contact with someone through her family. Her dad's conglomerate owns hotels in countries all over the world. Hadley worked for her father during the summers. She was in Thailand one year and in Dubai the next. She might have met someone who took an interest in her.”
Neither of them said it, but I knew what they were thinking—she might have had sex with one of these trafficking freaks who “took an interest in her.” Risk-taking Hadley.
Why the fuck hadn't I been able to stop her doing that? Maybe if I'd been willing to try some of the edgy shit she'd wanted to do, she wouldn't have needed to seek satisfaction from strangers?
I knew it was a fucked-up way to think about this. She was alive. Or at least, she had been alive recently. I needed to stop blaming myself for what had happened to her.
“There must be other
explanations?” I said. “Isn’t sex trafficking far-fetched for a woman like Hadley? Why not demand a ransom? Her father is wealthy.”
The two men exchanged a look. As if they knew something they weren't telling us.
“What? Spill it, for fuck's sake. After what the cops have put me through, I have a right to know.”
“We’ve known for a while that there were a few irregularities in her father’s business,” Brandon said. “Some of his overseas dealings were not strictly within the letter of the law. One possibility is that Daddy may have pissed off some important people. Nasty people. Abducting his precious daughter could be their way of punishing him.”
“Seriously?” That sounded odd to me. Like something out of a movie.
Brandon Finlay shrugged. “It’s a theory.” He nodded toward Connor. “As I said, we’ve just become aware of these photographs. It’s a break in the case, but there’s a lot of work to do before we have any definitive answers.”
“Well, I need to know how we're going to rescue her.” I knew some people got rescued because my brother used to do shit like that. “We need to send somebody in to find her and bring her home.”
“There’s no ‘we’ about this, Griff. We’re only telling you as a courtesy. The rest is up to her family and the authorities. You’re out of it.”
Rory cleared her throat. “You know what? This is bullshit.”
She said it with such assurance that we all looked at her.
She’d been much more passive than usual so far, but now she elbowed her way between me and the two guys, looking bristly.
She was cute when she was bristly.
“Let me see that.” She seized the tablet and enlarged Hadley’s picture with her fingers. She stared hard at it and then took it over near the window where the light was better. She looked again.
“What are you doing? It’s Hadley. No mistaking that face.”
“She’s pretty,” she said in a tight voice. “But pictures can be digitally altered. It’s not even hard to do.” She flipped to the other shots and studied the screen from several angles. “Could be ‘shopped.”
“It’s real,” Connor said. “You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get those pictures, but they’re one hundred percent authentic.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t believe you,” Rory said to Connor.
He looked amused. “Really. And I’m supposed to give a shit about your opinion?”
She was unfazed. “It’s too neat and tidy. I suggest you get surveillance pictures and presto, you get them. Takes you no time at all.” She looked at me, explaining, “Big files like photographs and videos require processing and that takes time. Then there’s the problem of knowing exactly where to look.”
She turned back to Finlay, who was watching her calmly, without interrupting.
“Pictures from airport surveillance in Turkey? How the hell did you get authorization for that? If you hacked it, fine, but how’d you know to hack Istanbul? Either you have a lot more information than you’re admitting, or these things are fake.”
Damn, it was good to have her backing me up. She knew stuff about technology that I had no clue about.
Before anyone could contradict her, she charged on: “Meanwhile, your pal Silas Marks tells us last night that he thinks Hadley’s still alive. Alive and out of the country. And voila, she turns up in Turkey? What a coincidence. That’s what he wants us to believe, so the evidence conveniently appears.”
She had a point.
“You know what I think? I think this is all an elaborate ruse inspired by our getting too close to the truth.”
Finlay raised his eyebrows. “And the truth is?”
His tone was scathing, but Rory ignored it.
“The truth is that that bastard killed her and buried her somewhere on his property. And the town police—” she scowled at Brandon “—are reluctant to meddle with the local billionaire.”
Brandon’s face got a trifle red. “If Mr. Marks had been a suspect, he’d have been arrested same as any other person, no matter how rich he is.”
“Yeah? So why isn't he a suspect? He admitted to us that he’d been involved with her. The man is a sadist. Have the cops even considered him as a possibility?”
“I can't comment on our investigation,” Brandon said stiffly.
Connor spoke again: “What is your interest in this matter anyway, Ms. Whatever Your Name Really Is? The girl you’re researching is O’Malley’s ex. Why this obsession with her? Before you started poking around, everybody thought Hadley was dead. Must be a shock to discover she’s alive just as you get your claws into your new boyfriend.”
Rory’s face colored. “My claws?! Fuck that! It’s not about me! It’s about ruining a man’s life. Accusing him of a murder he didn’t commit and never letting him come out from underneath that rock…that boulder of suspicion. It’s about Griff getting his future back.”
Brandon Finlay was frowning. “Wait. Her new boyfriend? I thought they were married?”
“Stop trying to deflect my objections,” Rory said. “I think this story about Hadley running off to Istanbul is bullshit. As for the sex trafficking theory—please. No billionaire’s daughter is getting sex trafficked. Ransomed, maybe. Or even killed, if someone had a vendetta against her family. But trafficked? No way.” She put her fists on her hips and got in their faces. “How about you tell Griff the truth? Because I think you’re both lying.”
I took Rory’s hand and pulled her back a little. But I wasn't trying to stop her. Only to protect her. I didn’t like the expression on Connor Finlay’s face and I hadn't forgotten the way he’d grabbed her round the throat the other day and tried to intimidate her. Or the way Silas Marks had grabbed her, either.
Rory seemed to have a knack for pissing these guys off.
But I loved the way she didn't hesitate to call people out when they tried to run their games by her. She was one smart cookie, and I loved that about her.
The brothers exchanged a glance. “Lemme talk to them alone,” Connor said.
Brandon looked doubtful, but some unspoken accord must have passed between them because after a few seconds he raised his hands. “Okay, fine,” he said to his brother. “The FBI and God only knows what international agencies are gonna be taking this case over, anyway.” To me, he added, “This was supposed to be a courtesy call to let you know the pressure would be easing.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. If he was expecting me to apologize for Rory’s skepticism, forget it. I didn’t owe anything to the cops in this town.
Brandon left the apartment.
Now what? I didn’t know where we stood with Connor. I think Rory was confused, too. She reached out and grabbed my hand, and both our palms were a bit clammy. Neither of us knew what to expect or what the fuck was truly going on.
“Well, that was awkward,” Finlay said. “I’m not surprised, though. Sam predicted this might be necessary.”
“What might be necessary?” Sam, I remembered, was Silas Marks.
“That you wouldn't be satisfied. That you’d want more. And that you’d make nothing but trouble until we gave you something that would shut you up.”
I don’t know what I thought was gonna happen, but I instinctively moved closer to Rory as Finlay reached into his backpack. He removed what I half-expected would be a weapon. I was tense and ready to fight.
I wasn’t sure exactly what we had stumbled into when Rory had decided to target Silas Marks, but it felt like we’d been peeling back the layers of an onion. Now we’d reached the point where somebody was going to cry.
But what he pulled out was a slim laptop computer. He strolled over to the coffee table and set it down, sat on the sofa and attached some gadget with an antenna to it. I wasn’t sure what it was, but Rory knew.
“He’s getting a connection. Not through your local WiFi.”
That made sense. He wouldn't want to leave any tracks on my network. No doubt for someone like Super Hacker here, getting
on the internet was a trivial matter.
He began typing with fingers that flashed over the keys with a quickness similar to Rory’s.
“He’s contacting someone,” she said, squinting at his screen. He promptly angled it away so she couldn’t see.
Finlay pulled out a headset and plugged it into the laptop. It had an earpiece and a microphone, which he spoke into. In numbers. He reeled of a long set of what sounded like random numbers.
I looked at Rory. Her forehead was furrowed and I knew she must be analyzing the code, but it didn’t look as if she could make anything of it.
Who was this guy? Who the fuck did he actually work for?
Finlay nodded as if acknowledging something we couldn't hear. Then he waited. We all waited. For what, I wish I knew.
At last, he nodded. He spoke again, this time in normal English. “Yeah. Right now. This connection is secure but keep it short, please.”
He pulled the headset out of the computer and turned the screen so we could see the web telephony app that was running. It was not an interface with which I was familiar.
But sweat ran down my spine as the picture on the screen resolved into a face that I knew.
“Hey, Griff,” said a voice from my past. “How’s it going?”
It was Hadley.
Chapter 30
Griff
Well, fuck me.
Rory had pretty much convinced me that the images had been fake, so this was the last thing I’d expected. The air whooshed out of my lungs and I thought I was going to fall on my face.
It was her. No doubt about it. It was Hadley, her red hair pulled back and piled atop her head. She was sitting at a small table in a featureless, ill-lit room that had a foreign air about it. She looked thinner than usual and her face seemed drawn, but she sounded the same—her voice sharp and bright.
I flopped down on the sofa and stared at the screen. I was dumbfounded. Could she see me, too? Probably, if it was one of those web telephony apps.
“I thought you were dead,” was all I could manage to say.