by Jay McLean
He looked at me. He was holding a plastic water bottle in his hands—the same one, I think, that Rory had drunk from—and juggling it back and forth. "Where did you find her?"
"Long story."
"Given that your girlfriends have a tendency to go missing—"
"Fuck you, Finlay. Say what you came to say and get out."
"Take it easy. I'll deny I ever said this, and the little I know will disappear forever if you ever say a word about what I'm about to tell you."
"How the fuck do you know anything at all?"
"Because, like your smartass friend out there, I've been poking around in your ex's case."
My ex. Funny, but I'd never thought of Hadley that way. We'd never broken up, after all. She was just gone.
"Why? What's it got to do with you?" A sudden suspicion assailed me. I'd been fairly sure that Hadley was being honest with me about her other hookups. She had never mentioned Finlay, but his rough treatment of Rory made me suspicious. Hadley would have been excited by that sort of thing. "Was she seeing you?" Unconsciously I stepped into his space, and we were nose to nose again. Finlay was anvil tough and he'd already proved that I probably couldn't take him, but I didn't care. He didn't back down, but he didn't up the ante any, either.
"No. I never even met the girl. I was investigating something entirely different when I got a whiff of something rotten. I could be wrong. I need more time to figure this thing out."
"Who do you work for, exactly?" I'd realized I had no notion where this guy's loyalties were likely to be. Like me, he came from the poor side of town, but I'd heard that he hung out a lot with Alec Cranmore.
I hadn't admitted it to Rory last night, but to me, guys like Cranmore were the enemy. Spoiled rich dudes. It wasn't as if Cranmore had made every penny of his wealth on his own; he'd been born into it. I wasn't too impressed with someone who made his first billion in his twenties after he'd inherited hundreds of millions when his daddy had frozen to death on a windblown Himalayan cliff.
"I have my own firm," Finley said. "I take care of computer security for a wide range of clients."
"Including Cranmore, right?"
"Including all Alec's enterprises, yeah. It was one of his foundations your girl broke into. We have high level security there because we operate in a bunch of countries that are rife with terrorism and other criminal activity. What the hell was she doing trying to get access there?"
I sighed. "She's detail-oriented. She's looking at everything Hadley ever expressed the slightest interest in. I think she broke into Starbucks a couple nights ago."
"Whatever your friend thinks she's doing, she needs to stop. I can't have amateurs fucking around with international corporations, foundations, and financial institutions."
"She doesn't have much of a life and her school is on break. Prying her away from the computer is not easy."
"I get that," he said, and I'm sure he did. Sean used to tell me that Connor lived in front of his computer back in high school. "Look, she's obviously talented, but I can't have her pulling shit like that. You need to get her to talk to me, show me exactly what she did. If it's as clever as I think it was, I'll give her a fucking job. She made at least one careless error, and she could use some training so she doesn't do that again."
"She's still in college."
"Fuck college. I want her working for the good guys. Otherwise there's a risk the bad guys will get her." He paused. "Like they may have gotten Hadley."
I could hardly breathe. "What the fuck?"
"Look, I'm not sure. At the moment, I have no real info to give you. But I don't think you had anything to do with her disappearance. I'm actually gonna follow your friend's suggestion and look for surveillance photos. Because it's possible, small chance, but it's just barely possible, that photos like that might exist."
* * *
After he left, I was pissed off and not even sure why.
Rory had done as he requested and shown him how she'd broken his security. He'd looked impressed. But he'd told me nothing more about Hadley, and left me with a head teeming with questions.
I was freaked out by the possibility that Rory's crazy investigation might lead to real information about what had happened to Hadley. Had Finlay meant that she might still be alive? I'd given up hope of that a long time ago. Hard though it was to imagine her dead, it had been even harder to imagine her living and not making herself known to her friends and family. She had been vocal, irrepressible. She would never have stayed radio-silent.
Plus, weird though it was, I'd gotten used to Hadley being gone. I didn't like it. I hated it, in fact, but I've never been one of those people who hang on to things that are lost. Or to people, either.
Rory, being female, wanted to talk about it. She demanded to know what Finlay had said in "your secret tète a tète." She wanted to discuss the situation in general, and bombard me with theories and questions and analysis. But I wasn't in the mood for that, blast her.
"Look. I need to think." Or not think, which might be even better. "Leave me alone."
"But we need to understand this."
"Leave me the fuck alone." I stalked into the bedroom and shut the door behind me.
I do that a lot around her.
* * *
I relented, as usual, and Rory joined me in bed later that night. We had sex, and it was just as sweet and hot as it had been from the beginning. But after a couple hours she woke up sobbing. Tears were all over her face, and I thought I must have done something until I realized she was dreaming. I gathered her close. "Ssh, it's okay. You're having a nightmare."
Her eyes opened and there was fear in them for a moment there. Then they cleared. "Griff?" Her arms convulsively wrapped around my shoulders. "Thank God it's you."
Wow, it had been a long time since any woman had said anything like that to me. These days, on the rare occasions when one was willing to fuck me, she got the hell away from me as fast as she could. I wasn't exactly considered a trustworthy guy.
What kind of fucked up world had Rory come from that she would willingly seek shelter in my arms? She knew a lot about me, but I still didn't know much about her, other than that she was wicked smart and awesome with computers.
I tried to soothe her by stroking her hair. Being with Hadley hadn't exactly taught me how to be gentle. So I didn't know how to be with Rory. I tended to worry a lot these days about how I was supposed to be. When I'd been younger, I hadn't even thought about it, but ever since Sean had died and Hadley had disappeared, I'd lost all my anchors. I was no longer sure exactly who the fuck I was.
One thing I liked about Rory is she seemed to accept me as I was. She might be analyzing what had happened to Hadley, but so far she hadn't focused much on analyzing me. Or changing me. She was good at just letting me be myself.
"Babe, that guy you were running from the other night? The one with the shotgun? Who the hell was that dude?"
She shuddered. "He was just—"
I put my hand over her mouth just long enough to shut her up for a moment. "Did he hurt you? Some kind of abuse? If so, we'll get him, Rory. I promise you."
She shook her head. "Griff, no. That was just Ray. It was my own fault for dropping in on LaVerle without warning. I'm so stupid sometimes."
"So why are you crying?"
"It was just a dream, but so vivid. I was dreaming about my friend Anna. I don't know...maybe the thing with Ray set it off. Or maybe—" she stopped. Her voice was still thick with sleep, and I realized she probably didn't have complete control of her thoughts yet.
"Maybe what?"
"Maybe being with you."
I must have stiffened, because she added, "Not being with you, but thinking so much about your case. The missing girl. The false accusations against you. How the cops always seem to go for the person they figure they can nail down the easiest, instead of looking a little harder for evil. Real evil."
"Who's Anna?"
She shivered a little. I pulled her clo
ser, throwing a leg over her. She snuggled into me, her face against my chest. I liked the way she felt. She still reminded me of a ridiculously cute puppy, loyal and loving, with huge, sweet eyes and a perpetually wagging tail. I know I shouldn't keep comparing my girlfriend to a dog, but I mean it in a good way.
"She was my best friend in seventh grade. My only friend. I was young for my grade because of being skipped ahead, and everyone treated me like a freak. It didn't help that my mother was gorgeous while I was all weird-looking. The other girls were all adolescent and hormonal in 7th grade, but I had no boobs and no height and a bunch of baby fat. They used to called me the hobbit."
"Kids suck." I wondered how the other kids in her school had known what her mom looked like. Surely the woman hadn't done her exotic dancing for boys that young. Maybe there'd been videos online or something. I could well imagine Rory being tormented over something like that. No one at that age wanted to think of their mothers as sexual.
"It's not just kids that suck," she said grimly. "Anna was stolen from her bedroom. She disappeared. She was just 13. Anna and her older sister Meredith were home alone. Their parents were at some big Oscar party. It was Merry who found Anna missing from her bed. The window leading to the backyard was open and the screen was broken."
She grew silent.
I wondered who big Oscar was. Some pimp in the 'hood? "Did they find her?"
"Ten days later her body was found in a ditch on the side of the freeway. Fifty miles away or so. She had been sexually abused before being stabbed with a knife."
"I'm sorry," I said awkwardly.
"Yeah. Me too."
I just held her for a while. I felt bad for her, but I also felt bad for me. Whenever I heard about someone dying young, I couldn't stop myself from remembering Sean.
"They arrested the pool guy," she went on. "He was young, Mexican, and he used to run with a gang. The cops beat him up pretty bad for resisting arrest. Everybody was sure he'd done it because he knew the house and could have had access. But I knew Miguel and I liked him a lot. He was a sweet guy, and I couldn't see him hurting her. I was only eleven myself and not totally clear on what he was supposed to have done, but the killing part I understood."
"Wait. The pool guy?" Given the neighborhood where I'd picked her up, I was picturing some punk hustler with a cue in his hand. But I got the feeling she meant the other kind of pool guy—the kind that cleaned swimming pools and balanced the chlorine.
There was a taut little silence before Rory said, "Yeah. There was this pool where kids used to go and swim sometimes."
I sensed she was lying, but I didn't want conflict, especially during this wrenching story, so I kept it to myself. "Go on."
"I was sure he hadn't done it. Turned out I was right. The cops eventually got a confession from a psychopath neighbor. Anna used to walk by his place on her way to school. I did, too." She shuddered again. "He had a camera behind the curtains. The creep used to film all the kids walking to school. I found out later that there were shots of me too."
I felt my blood pressure climb at the thought of that. I held her tighter, feeling glad they had caught the fucker.
"No one had known he was a child molester. He wasn't in any sex crime databases. But a couple of months after Anna's death he tried to snatch another girl. He messed up and got nabbed. Miguel had been in jail all that time on some misdemeanor drug charge they'd dragged up from his past. Prime example of bigotry and unequal justice."
"Is that why you were so willing to consider that I might be innocent? Because of Miguel?"
She shook her unusual grim mood off. I saw the light of a smile radiate in her eyes. "Well," she said, running her fingers over my ass and squeezing, "I was only a kid at the time, but I was old enough to notice that Miguel was hot. He smoldered...like you do."
"Smoldered?"
"Yeah."
Soon we were burning up the sheets with our mutual smoldering.
Chapter Twelve
It was on the sixth night Rory was with me, Tuesday, that I got home from work to find a black-and-white parked in front of my house. Shit. This time it really was the cops.
I got that familiar icy feeling in my belly. Town cops. At least it wasn't the FBI. They sat there, not stirring, while I parked in my driveway and got out. I stood, glaring, and waited for them to emerge.
Rory opened the door and stepped out on the porch. I hopped up to greet her. "I see we have company. Which one of us are they here for?" I asked, ruffling her hair, trying to act lighthearted. I was pretty sure they were here for me.
"They came to the door about twenty minutes ago, asking for you. I told them to go away."
"That always works," I teased her, and she laughed, which immediately made me feel better.
The two men were climbing out. "Oh," she said. "It's him. That Connor Finlay guy. 'Cept he's got a cop with him."
"His big brother." I'd recognized Brandon Finlay, who worked for the Cranton PD. He wasn't a bad guy, as cops went. He was a couple of years older than Connor, and heftier. Family guy, kids. One of the better members of Cranton's finest.
They strolled across my small patch of winter-brown lawn to my front door. Rory might be on her spring break, but March had been cold so far, and no brave little sprouts had yet broken through the ground here at the O'Malley home. "Good evening gentlemen," I said, leaning up against my front door. "No warrant, no entry."
"Fuck you, Griff," Brandon said cheerfully. "It's good news. Let us in."
Good news wasn't a term I was too familiar with, so I'm not sure I would have opened the door. But Rory didn't hesitate. She invited the Finlay brothers in. "You found something?" She was speaking to Connor, not to Brandon.
"We might have something," Brandon said. "We're not totally sure. We want you to take a look at a photo for us, Griff. Can you do that?"
"Sure."
Brandon 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, but 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. "Or maybe eastern Europe, former Russian republic?"
"Close. It's Istanbul," Connor said. "Ataturk Airport." He was holding a stylus, and he pointed with it to a spot on the top right of the photograph. "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 had 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 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. Had to be some sort of surveillance shot, since she was on the edge of the frame now, moving out of camera range. There were two men whom I'd never seen on either side of her. One had his arm around her, but there was something about her body language that told me she was shrinking from his touch. Her face was partly in shadow, but it looked haunted, frightened. I had never seen Hadley look like that. Never.
"It's her," I said. "She's alive."
"Are you sure?" One of the brothers asked. I'm not even sure which because I was fixated on the picture.
"Yes. Her hair, her mouth, her chin. It's Hadley."
"She looks scared," Rory said. There was something strange in her tone, although I was too shocked to make much sense of it. "She'
s not there willingly, is she?"
"No," Connor Finlay said. "I doubt very much that there was anything consensual about her predicament at the time these pictures were taken."
"When were they taken?" Rory again. My throat was too dry to ask anything.
"Three months ago. She was alive at the end of the year. Whether she's still alive now, we just don't know."
"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. Which means you're technically 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.
But Hadley was still missing. She was in trouble. And just like before, she might be dead.
I looked at Connor Finlay, ex Special Forces or Whatever. Tough Guy. 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 Thirteen
Rory gave me a quick hug and told me she was going outside for a walk. "You've got a lot to think about," she said, "and I need some exercise. Be back in a bit."
I nodded, paying little attention. I was trying to get my mind around the facts.
"We figure it's some kind of sex slavery thing," Brandon Finlay said. "Trafficking. What they used to call white slavery. Most of the people trafficked today aren't white, of course, but some are. The shortage of Caucasian women on the market makes them valuable. Factor in young and gorgeous like Hadley was and you've got a valuable commodity."
I choked up at the idea of Hadley as a commodity.
"The market is international. If we'd found a picture of her in the U.S., it could have been any freak kidnapping her, but to get her out of this country without being caught and into a foreign airport suggests powerful people are involved. One of the big drug cartels, maybe, or some wealthy Middle Eastern businessman."