by Toby Neal
Connor had planned this.
He had chosen her to be his partner, his woman. His dog’s guardian.
She wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing wasn’t smoke and mirrors. He could be watching her right now through some hacked surveillance cam, sipping a margarita on a tropical beach in Belize.
No. Connor wouldn’t be sipping in careless comfort. He’d be tortured by regret, but he’d be watching, nonetheless. She and his dog weren’t his priorities. The Ghost was.
The FBI was getting too close, and he’d cut his losses and run.
Or, he was dead.
She was not sure which felt worse to contemplate.
Sophie sat down on the bench, looking out at the peaceful, turquoise sea, gilded with afternoon sun and ruffled by a gentle breeze. The cooing of doves and chattering of mynahs in a nearby monkeypod tree should have been soothing, but only wound the knot in her belly even tighter.
Either he had faked his death, in an elaborate scheme with multiple stages of planning, or Connor really was dead, at the hands of some unknown enemy.
What did it say about her relationship with Connor that, now that she’d picked up Anubis, she was more convinced he was faking his death than that he’d really died?
Either way, the only feeling she could muster about the body in the morgue was a numb sense of betrayal. Her response to the corpse she’d examined had been nothing but detached coldness, a clinical analysis that had raised even Dr. Fukushima’s brows.
Sophie tipped her head back and closed her eyes, trusting the dogs to warn her of any hostiles, and concentrated on what Connor would have had to do to fake his death.
He’d have had to find a body that was a virtual double of his own, keeping it frozen until the time was right. He’d have had to set up the dental records with teeth matching that of the cadaver. He’d have had to cut the toes off the corpse, eliminating the only truly individual thing about his own body, and create a plausible reason for the toes to be gone. He’d have had to deal with his money, his affairs, and his dog. He’d have had to clean out any and all DNA from his apartment and workplace and other venues, and he’d have had to build a bomb big enough to decimate his apartment, but small enough not to cause any other damage to the building.
He’d have had to thaw the body, staging it out and placing it where it would get maximum damage in an explosion. And then, he would have had to disappear after he set off the explosive, wiping all evidence of his activities and identity.
All this to avoid detection by the FBI, so he could keep being a vigilante. The part of Sophie that still hoped Connor was alive shriveled within her.
If he was still alive, he’d fled just when she could have used his help and support, facing the threat of Assan.
And if he was capable of all of those things, of setting her up to grieve, of having to go through identifying his body, then he wasn’t someone worthy of her love.
And then there was the alternative: Connor really was dead. And while the Ghost had plenty of enemies, the one most likely to have blown him up was Sophie’s ex.
She hunched over suddenly, curling around a white-hot ball of agony that tightened her gut. Was it even a physical pain? She couldn’t tell.
“Are you all right?”
Sophie opened her eyes, still hunched over her folded arms. A woman approached her, but stopped as Anubis stepped in front of Sophie, growling, his lip raised over a row of gleaming teeth. Sophie snapped her fingers and pointed to the ground beside her, as she’d seen Connor do. The Doberman sat beside her, docile, as Ginger galloped up to the woman, wagging her tail.
“I’m fine. Thanks for asking, just a bit of bad fish last night.” The dog owner smiled back, patting Ginger’s head, and went off after her own dog.
Ginger turned to lick Anubis’s face, a gesture so like a kiss that Sophie’s heart constricted. How could Connor leave her like this, just when they were getting started as a couple?
She was cursed to live alone and die alone. She was poison to anyone who tried to love her…
The black maw of depression yawned before her, a depthless hole drawing her in. Soon she’d dive into it, and be lost.
She had one more thing to do before she gave in to its pull.
Sophie walked into the computer lab of the University of Hawaii with her laptop under her arm. Wearing Mary Watson’s floral exercise wear and a pink hoodie, she plugged in the laptop, hooked up to the data stream, and booted up DAVID.
Sophie kept big, light brown Jackie O sunglasses on as she cycled through her surveillance caches, looking for anything new on Todd “Connor” Remarkian, as well as the Ghost.
No activity on any of his credit cards, personal accounts. She had expected that—but not discovering that when she pulled up his ID, his middle name was listed as Colin, not Connor.
Was even the private name he’d given her a lie?
Sophie hacked into facial recognition at the airport, running an FBI program she’d kept a copy of. While that ran, she searched for his name on all incoming and outgoing flights in the last week.
Nothing, of course. He’d have an alias. Maybe a dozen of them. And he was excellent at disguises.
She tried combinations of his name, knowing he was too smart for that, but driven to try, anyway.
She planted a spyware program on the airport surveillance feed and set it to ping to her phone if the recognition program identified him.
But what about ocean travel?
He wouldn’t go that way. Too slow, too vulnerable on a boat, too trapped if something “went sideways” as Jake called it.
Sophie imagined Connor sitting in the “Batcave,” as they’d called his secret lab, activating his departure measures that included destroying his rigs and accessing a bug-out bag of new identity, funds, and disguise. They had never discussed it, but she knew he had one.
Because she had one. She was already using it. But she had another one set up after Mary Watson, and she wasn’t half as paranoid as Connor was.
She set some new keywords on DAVID, checked for anything new on Assan. Nothing there, either.
Time to take a break, and go check for clues in the “Batcave.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sophie walked down Connor’s familiar hallway. It reeked of smoke and the chemical aftermath of fire suppression.
She’d taken extra care in disguising herself for the surveillance cameras embedded along the hall outside the door of Connor’s apartment. A large sun hat and a velour jogging suit over a towel wrapped around her middle distorted her body shape, and an auburn wig hung past her shoulders. Bright pink athletic shoes that fastened with Velcro tabs were consistent with the look.
She walked quickly past Connor’s door, crisscrossed with crime scene tape, to the adjacent apartment that he rented under a different name.
Even though this one wasn’t sealed, she had to work fast in case the watchman downstairs was actually paying attention. Wearing thin latex gloves, her back to the camera, the large brim of the hat hiding her activity, Sophie jimmied the door with her lock picks and slipped inside.
Pitch black with the power out, the apartment reeked of smoke.
Sophie switched on a small, powerful flashlight and walked through the open, empty living area to the bedroom in back, a room connected to Connor’s apartment by a door concealed in the closet between the two rooms.
She flipped the light switch, but of course nothing happened.
If he were going to leave her a message, it would be here.
She walked up to the computer bay where Connor spent the most time. Three monitors in his work area gleamed in the flashlight’s beam, three more in hers. The desk that wrapped around one side of the room was characteristically tidy. She shone the light around, but the area appeared undisturbed. She’d have to take his computers to know anything more.
There wasn’t time to clone his hard drives, nor power to support that process, so she’d take them manually. Dropping to
her knees, Sophie took a small toolkit out of the backpack she’d carried in and unscrewed the panel of Connor’s main rig. A few minutes later she’d disconnected the hard drives running that computer and stowed them in her bag. He’d set up a computer area for her to work on as well, and she took those hard drives, too.
The foul air stung her lungs. She had to get out of there; every minute that went by was one more that she could be trapped in a compromising position. She paused for one last look around the space, for anything out of place, any clue he might have left.
A landscape postcard, of a towering, contoured green valley ending at a cobalt sea, was stuck on the wall over the main monitor in her area. “See Kalalau, Kaua‘i!” the caption across the front trumpeted.
Connor would never just thumbtack a postcard onto the wall. He was precise and careful about his personal space—he’d tuck a memento like this somewhere, or use two-sided tape that wouldn’t ruin the paint to hold it. This could be a message. Feeling her belly flip, Sophie reached out and pulled the thumbtack, taking the postcard down, turning it over.
Nothing on the back.
Her breath whooshed out and her knees buckled at the disappointment.
Of course, there was no message. He had to assume the investigators would find this place—but apparently, they had not.
She stuck the postcard in the bag and left the way she’d come, hurrying to the stairs and all the way down multiple floors out of the building, not taking a deep breath until she was outside and well down the sidewalk.
Chapter Eighteen
After taking the dogs for a quick walk, Sophie hooked up the hard drives and activated them—but nothing would come up but a staticky white screen.
They’d been wiped, probably magnetically. Was it possible that was related to the explosion? Nothing could be retrieved—more evidence that Connor could be alive. He’d never want his computers to fall into anyone’s hands! But maybe he’d had a backup measure that wiped them automatically if there was a threat to his system? There was just no way to know.
Sophie pushed away from her desk in the bedroom, swinging back and forth in the chair, studying the postcard in her hand.
Maybe he had left her a message, maybe he had not. Nothing she had found so far was definitive either way—and did she want to keep looking for a man who was either dead, or had let her think he was?
The soul-sucking loss, grief, and depression gnawed at Sophie. And now, she had nothing to hold it back.
No one knew where she was, and that was just how it should be.
She closed the laptop, unplugged it, and barricaded herself and the dogs inside Mary Watson’s apartment, activating her security measures. To avoid worries that Ang had captured her, she recorded a message on the burner’s outgoing voice mail that she was sick. She shut the blackout curtains, and went to bed.
Three days went by.
Sophie slept, cocooned and smothered in darkness, only responding to the dogs’ needs for food and exercise by staggering out twice a day for short walks.
An insistent pounding on Sophie’s door, accompanied by the buzzing of her phone surveillance app, woke Sophie on the fourth day. She picked up the phone and saw Marcella’s face in the video cam window. Marcella was the only person who knew where Mary Watson lived. Damn it!
She got up, undid the locks and chains, and lurched back to bed. Light striking her eyes woke Sophie further as Marcella yanked the blackout curtains wide.
“Sick, my left tit.” Marcella put hands on her curvy hips. “I knew you’d be in bed. Wallowing.”
“Why did I ever show you Mary Watson’s apartment?” Sophie rubbed her face and pushed her hands into her cropped hair. It felt greasy and matted.
“I know you’re grieving, but Jake was driving us all nuts down at the office. I told him I would verify that you were still alive.” Marcella sat down on the bed beside her. “That guard dog of Todd’s didn’t even bark when I was pounding on the door. He knew you needed rousting.”
“Anubis is very intelligent, and he knows you.” Sophie looked over at the dogs. Anubis and Ginger sat by the door, ears pricked, clearly hopeful she was going to take them out.
She tried to remember when she had last taken them out.
Yesterday evening. Yes, definitely yesterday. And she had fed them too. She wasn’t so far gone that she would let the dogs suffer. “Well, now that you’ve seen that I’m alive, would you mind closing the curtains?”
“Of course, I mind! You don’t get to check out of life just because your boyfriend did.” Marcella winced. “I’m sorry. That came out harsher than I meant it to.”
All that Sophie couldn’t say about Connor and his “death” choked her. But if she told Marcella about the Ghost now, it would either continue the manhunt against him, or the Bureau would be chasing a literal ghost. No, she had to keep sitting on the secret, and it was one more reason to be angry with him.
Sophie swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up. Her head spun, and she sat back down again.
“When did you eat last?” Marcella was already heading for the kitchen. “Never mind, don’t answer that. Go get in the shower. You stink.”
Marcella sounded just like her mother. Disobeying peppery Anna Scatalina was out of the question, too.
Under the fall of water, Sophie felt herself slowly regathering from the dark place she had gone, re-entering her body as if fitting back into a too-tight glove. Her fingers traced along the delicate tracery of her tattoos. Hope. Respect. Power. Truth. Freedom. Courage. She could live with those, even if she never got the joy, love, and bliss circling her navel.
She had to go back to the things that had worked in the past to beat her depression…or it might drag her under, and never let her go.
Her mother, a lifelong depression sufferer, was now permanently placed in a treatment facility in Thailand, semi-catatonic. Thoughts of Pim Wat’s severe symptoms prodded Sophie to keep moving. She shaved her legs, oiled her skin, conditioned her hair, dried off, wrapped herself in her robe, and joined Marcella in the dining nook.
“You look better.” Marcella handed Sophie a mug of tea. “Breakfast is on the table.”
An hour later, with a plate of scrambled eggs and chopped veggies topped with cheese tucked into her belly, Sophie felt almost human again. She drank the strong tea, and each sip seemed to bring fresh vitality into the husk of her body.
“Thanks, Marcella.” Words she wanted to say, about how her friend went above and beyond the normal balance of friendship, caught in her throat like burrs. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Of course, you don’t.” Marcella burped behind her hand, setting her fork down beside her cleaned plate. “But I love an excuse to invade your place and feed you. Mama taught me well. Now, when are you coming back to work?” Marcella pointed at the phone, plugged into the charger. “Jake says he needs you over on Maui.”
A tiny fern of interest uncurled inside of Sophie. What could be wrong with the case? She thought it was wrapped up. “I’ll call him.” She swallowed a fortifying swig of tea. “Any positive identification on the body at Pendragon Arches?”
“Yes. The dental records confirm the body as Todd Remarkian.” Marcella put her hand over Sophie’s. “I’m so sorry.”
Sophie felt nothing. She’d expected that. “What about DNA?”
“Weirdly, we can’t find any viable DNA from Remarkian at the apartment. Even with the explosion, it’s pretty odd. I was hoping you had something that the crime lab couldn’t find.” Marcella looked pointedly around the apartment. “But I don’t see anything of his in this apartment.”
“I have no doubt you already looked through the cupboards and my bedroom.” Sophie quirked a brow at her friend. “I never brought him here.”
“Not ready for that level of commitment?” Marcella’s cocked head and big dark eyes reminded Sophie of an inquisitive blackbird.
Sophie stood up and cleared their plates. “We were just starting a relationsh
ip. I was a long way from telling him about Mary Watson.”
But Connor had known about Mary Watson, anyway. He probably knew where her apartment was, too. Her shoe size, her bra size…there wasn’t a thing about her that Connor hadn’t known or couldn’t find out if he wanted to—while he had managed to make sure he left nothing—not even DNA—behind.
Nothing but his dog.
Her heart lurched at the thought. Connor had loved Anubis, and he’d left the dog to her. What did it mean?
“Well, we need a warrant to send a lab team into your father’s apartment where he did spend some time with you, unless you want to just let us in there?” Marcella asked.
Sophie nodded as she washed up the dishes. “You can have the key. I’ll call my father and let him know the FBI will be going in looking for trace.”
“I’m guessing a few of the messages on your phone are from your dad, too.” Marcella sipped her mug of coffee. “He must be worried sick.”
Sophie shrugged. She was doing the best she could, and that had to be enough. Frank Smithson, after living with her mother all those years, understood. He’d told her that as long as Sophie let him know she was okay, he could live with her periods of silence and withdrawal. But if longer than a week went by, and he had reason for concern, he would send whoever he could find looking for her.
She had reached that limit.
“I owe him a phone call, anyway.” Sophie turned, and opened her arms to her friend. “I’m ready to get on with things. Thanks for understanding that I needed a little time out.”
“You’re entitled.” Marcella’s hug was fierce, and smelled of the pikake perfume she had taken to wearing. “You can always count on me.”