“I never even met the girl,” Finlay was saying. “I was looking into another matter when I got a whiff of something rotten. I’m not sure what it means, if anything. And I could be wrong.”
“Well, that’s definitive.”
“No need for sarcasm. I’m trying to help.”
“Fine. I get it. You suspect something, but you’ve got your clients to protect. You work for Silas Marks, clearly. And Cranmore, too? You do computer security consulting for most of the big technology companies in the area, right?”
“I take care of computer security for a wide range of clients. And yeah, it was one of Silas Marks’ 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?”
“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 she thinks she's doing, she needs to stop. I can't have amateurs fucking around with international corporations, foundations, and financial institutions.”
“And private Hellfire clubs?”
“Look, you were with Hadley for months, right? She never took you to Reef Hill?”
“If it’s a club for rich kinksters, no she didn't. I was just the townie hook-up guy, and, as I’ve told the cops half a million times, we weren't exclusive. She had other partners.”
“Yeah and the cops investigated them all. Thoroughly. They did a decent enough job of it and they didn’t blab about people’s private lifestyles. Not everyone is as open about their kinks as Hadley apparently was.”
“So that’s it? That’s your interest? You’re fretting about your clients’ forays into leather dungeons? In case their do-gooder charities find out that they’re perverts?”
“That, yes. I want to make sure your hacker chick doesn't dox anyone, because that would suck big time for some of these dudes. Why are you letting her do this shit, anyway?”
“She doesn't have much of a life and her school is on break. Prying her away from a computer isn’t easy.”
Hey! He pried me away easily enough when he wanted to take me to bed.
“She's obviously talented or she never would have gotten this far. But I can't have her pulling this privacy-invading crap with my clients. 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.”
“She should be working for the good guys, not poking around in people’s virtual crotches. For the record, whatever happened to Hadley, I doubt it had anything to do with Reef Hill. Except maybe tangentially.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Only that the club has always been a playground of the rich. Your ex was wealthy and the way some folks
get
wealthy is by doing sketchy stuff. If she hung out there a lot, she might have known people who were into much worse shit than a little harmless kink. She might even have messed with things she shouldn't have messed with.”
“Criminal activities? Like what? Drugs? Hacking? Financial manipulation? Terrorism?”
“Can't talk about that. I guess I can tell you, though, that Sam and Alec are making some changes with the Reef Hill group. Kicking out some of the older members whose hands have been tainted by various illegal activities. Takes a certain amount of guts to go after the bad apples, but together they’ve got both the money and the clout.”
What the fuck? It sounded to me as if Finlay knew a whole lot more than he was willing to spill. I could tell by the angry note in Griff’s voice that he thought the same.
“You work for those zillionaires. What else do you know, Finlay?”
Finlay didn't have an answer to that. Instead he said, “She’s probably dead, man. It's been a year and the case is cold. Chances are, her body will never be found.”
He thought Hadley was dead, too. Just like everyone else. Well. It was certainly the most likely conclusion.
I wondered if my investigation had raised in Griff some hope that we might find her alive. Surely not. He must know she was dead. All I was trying to do is figure out who killed her. At least to find some evidence that might prove that it hadn’t been him.
But what if this whole thing had simply made him think about her again? Remember the good times? Want her back? Maybe in his mind he was comparing me to her? I knew I’d lose out in any such comparison. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of her now. Hadley was gorgeous.
I felt deflated. For the last day or two, I’d been fantasizing about how grateful Griff would be when we finally proved him innocent. Now I realized that maybe I was just helping him get obsessed with Hadley all over again.
Fuck my life. I was such a fool.
“But hey,” Connor said in the other room, “I'm gonna follow your friend's suggestion and look for surveillance photos. It’s actually not a bad idea, and I have the tech to do it. It’s unlikely, but I guess there’s a chance that photos of her might exist.”
Griff
After Finlay 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 had led anyone, even a geek like Finlay, to poking around in the case. I’d given up hope of unraveling the mystery a long time ago. Hard though it was to imagine her dead, it had been even harder to imagine her living somewhere 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 hangs on to things that are lost. Or to people, either.
I didn't even think about her much anymore. Sure, Rory’s curiosity and constant questions had gotten me going again, as had the anticipation of the first anniversary of her disappearance. But the chick who was in my mind all hours of the day and night now was Rory, not Hadley.
“Look. I told you. I’m sick of this Hadley crap,” I snarled at her. “Shut up about it, okay?”
“But we need to understand—”
“Leave me the fuck alone.” I stalked into the bedroom and shut the door behind me.
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. 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 for myself. 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 me.
“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 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.” She pushed away some hair that was plastered to her face. She was sweaty and shaky.
“That must have been some nightmare.” I kissed her gently, trying to soothe her. “D’you want to tell me about it?”
“I was dreaming about someone I knew a long time ago. 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. How the cops always seem to go for the person they can nail down the easiest, instead of looking a little harder for evil. Real evil.”
“So who’s Anna?”
She shivered a little. I pulled her closer, 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 close friend. I was young for my grade because of being skipped ahead, and most of the other kids treated me like a freak. It didn't help that my mother was gorgeous while I was all weird-looking. The other girls were adolescent and hormonal in 7th grade, but I had no boobs and no height and a bunch of baby fat. They used to call 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 the sexual assault part, but the killing 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 told myself that was crazy. She was half asleep and upset, but she was telling me about her past, of which I knew little. Why would she lie? “Go on.”
“I kept insisting to everyone that Miguel couldn't have done it. I begged my mother to intercede on his behalf. My teachers. I even went to the police station and demanded to talk to the detective investigating the case. But everybody treated me like the eleven-year-old kid I was. They wouldn't listen, no matter how much I argued. I guess most of them thought I was just crazy with grief over losing my friend. And I was. But I wasn't crazy-stupid.”
I could see it—Rory standing up for some guy and challenging the authorities on his behalf, just the way she’d confronted Marks and stood up to Finlay. I could easily believe she’d been a crusader for justice even at the age of eleven.
I felt a surge of warmth for her. She was something.
“What happened? Did they send the guy away?”
“They tried. But then another kid got snatched from her house, same method, and Miguel couldn't have done it since he was in jail. Girl got lucky—the creep was driving her off in his van when he got pulled over for a traffic violation. Turned out he was a psychopath neighbor. A dentist.” She spat out the word, sounding enraged. “A children’s dentist! We used to walk by his house on our way to school. Anna and Megan—that was the other girl—and me as well.”
She shuddered again. “He had a camera behind the curtains, set on a timer to record the kids walking back and forth to school while he was in his office, drilling kids’ teeth. I found out later that there were shots of me too. A lot of them. I was one of his next targets.”
I felt my blood pressure climb at the thought of that. I held her tighter, thankful they had caught the fucker. “Was he your dentist?”
“No. He was careful not to target his own patients, probably because it might have shown up in an investigation. No one knew he was a child molester. He wasn't in any sex crime databases. But his house was full of child pornography and snuff films. Really sick, violent stuff. Anyway, even after they caught the creep, it took a while to get Miguel released. Cops had dragged up some misdemeanor drug charge from his past. Prime example of bigotry and unequal justice.”