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He compared the names with the list of those presumed missing.
One by one, he checked them off. Of the seven names they had, five were on her list.
“They didn’t start with the org chart,” she said. “Oh God…they started with me. And I led them to the others. ”
“We don’t know that,” he said. “It’s easy to see a pattern where none exists, when you’re looking at this kind of data. They could have just as easily started with Jason and had him list everyone whose name he knew. That would have had the same effect, Bryn. ”
Maybe. But she couldn’t escape the fact that if she hadn’t opened those lines of communication, hadn’t put these people in contact with each other to share their anguish and grief and fear, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Chandra was a slight, nervous young lady, very shy. She’d been scared to speak in front of others at first, but over the course of four weeks she’d seemed to really bloom. When she’d missed a couple of meetings, Bryn hadn’t really thought much of it. She didn’t expect people to come every time…only when they felt they needed help.
But they’d stopped because they’d been taken, and she hadn’t wondered. Hadn’t tried.
“Bryn!”
Patrick took hold of her shoulders, and she looked up at him with tears burning in her eyes. He couldn’t understand how she felt, not fully. “Chandra never hurt anyone, Patrick. She didn’t work on Returné at all. She was making drugs for children’s chemotherapy. She’s my age, and first those bastards at Pharmadene put a bag over her head and brought her back as their slave, and then…then this? How is that fair?”
“It isn’t,” he said. “So let’s focus. Let’s find her. Let’s find them. ”
Bryn took a deep breath, nodded, and forced herself to think about the work, not the trauma, not the people she knew, liked, had shared coffee and tears with.
Chandra.
We’ll get you back.
The morning came merciless and early, and Bryn was up before the sun and driving to the funeral home. Even then, she didn’t beat Joe Fideli; when she pulled in and parked, his truck was already in the lot, and the lights of the business were on, windows glowing warm in the chill dawn.
The door was, as always, locked until opening time (and she could hardly even tell that new glass had been put in overnight), but the security was off, and as Bryn came in, she smelled the sharp, welcoming aroma of brewing coffee. “You,” she said when she entered the kitchen area, “deserve a
raise for that. ”
Joe Fideli raised a cup to her, sipped, then put it down to pour her a mug of her own. She took it black, and would have mainlined it if she could have; the warmth spread through her aching muscles and helped steady her into something like normality.
“So,” Joe said, “I heard you had adventures last night. Which seems a lot, on top of jumping out of a burning building. ”
“How much did Patrick tell you?”
“He didn’t,” Joe said. “I gossiped with the cops who were still here on-site. They said you’d been ambushed by two guys. Opinion was they were your garden-variety abducting serial killer types with a thing for hot blond funeral directors. ”
“Excuse me?”
“Which part of that did you object to? I hope not the ‘hot blond. ’”
“I think I should start with the cops thinking there’s anything garden-variety about serial killers. ”
“Yeah, well, San Diego is prone to that sort of thing, in case you didn’t know. We’ve had more sickos grow wild here than in Los Angeles. The police get a little jaded about it. Hell, the street talk is they just busted open a storage locker for one of those reality shows and found creepy photos from another Gacy or something. But anyway, the point is, you got jumped and stayed unabducted, which, congratulations, by the way. How’d the broken window figure into it?”
She told him the whole thing, from the first moment of alarm to the arrival of police on the scene. One thing she loved about Joe—he was unflappable. He just sipped his coffee and nodded, as if of course it would have happened that way. “They weren’t garden-variety,” he said. “They sound like experienced professional murderers to me, not enthusiastic amateurs. ”
“That makes it so much better. ”
“Well, at least you rated someone getting paid to do you. That’s a compliment, right?”
“Not really. ”
Joe was quiet for a second, then said in a different tone, “And what else happened?”
She told him about the recordings, the disappearances, Riley’s threats, everything. The only time she saw a reaction in him was when he heard Riley’s threat to round up his family. Good thing he hadn’t been there within grabbing distance of the agent’s neck. It would have been over in seconds.
By the time she was done, though, he was back to his usual easygoing self. “Eventful,” he said. “So. I guess we’re not backing off. ”
