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“President Randolph had prior plans with Senator Dubois.”
“Prior plans, my—” Lila bit off yet another curse, hoping rumors of Alex’s confinement had not yet reached her mother’s ears. “Fine. If I can’t think of decent excuse to get out of it, I’ll be back for breakfast. Has Chef bailed Alex out of Bullstow yet?”
Isabel shook her head. “She said she had to make breakfast first. She said it would serve Ms. Wilson right if she stayed in a holding cell all month.”
“She can’t stay in there. She’s our responsibility. Ask Chef to call Mr. Norris and send him to Bullstow, will you? He usually handles these matters.”
Isabel nodded, watching as Lila stalked from the great house.
Since she wouldn’t have much time for a workout, Lila jogged to the security office as a warmup in the muggy heat, hating her mother’s careless demand that she accommodate her whim and change her morning schedule. Chairwomen. All that power tended to go to their heads. Maybe her mother didn’t notice when she did such things. Perhaps she did and didn’t care.
Lila entered the security office, giving curt nods to her militia as she jogged downstairs to the basement, hoping she wouldn’t fall on her ass so much. That hope dwindled as she fell on her first jump across a platform and many times after. Her arms stung as she slapped the mats to spread out her weight, the stitches pulling on her gloved fingers.
After fifteen minutes, she gave up and ran the flat track instead.
She’d been about as successful in her workout as she had in her research the night before. Since Natalie needed a bank account and, in theory, a net ID to trade Oskar, Lila had focused on finding them first. She’d prodded into Natalie’s financial data but discovered that every bank account had been frozen, including her Burgundy account at the Liberté. Not only were Natalie’s accounts frozen, but she hadn’t used her net ID since the day she disappeared.
It was odd that Natalie hadn’t used the net, but she was in hiding.
Lila turned her attention to Natalie’s fake ID after that, the one that had started her troubles, the one Bullstow knew about because it had been included in her list of official charges, released earlier in the week. Natalie hadn’t used it either, probably fearing that Bullstow had been keeping tabs on it.
Which they most certainly were.
Once she’d gotten the obvious out of the way, Lila had fine-tuned some of her snoop programs to ferret out other IDs for Natalie, finally locating a badly faked ID that had once belonged to her. It was likely Natalie’s first attempt at faking a net login. It wasn’t hard to track the illegal activity attributed to it, but Lila hadn’t found anything recent. The account hadn’t been used in months, most likely abandoned when Natalie made a better fake that hadn’t turned out much better after all.
With no other ideas, Lila had reviewed Natalie’s bank account data from the previous case with her father. She opened the transaction history from the Liberté and pored over the data, as well as the data from three other bank accounts in Saxony. Natalie was staying somewhere, and Lila would use the data she had to find her hideout. She didn’t waste time focusing on properties Natalie had been renting, though she dutifully jotted down the addresses. Natalie wouldn’t stay anywhere with her name on the lease, even a fake one. Instead, Lila followed the people Natalie associated with, the people she gave money to, and the people who gave money to her.
Unsurprisingly, Natalie associated with a lot of unsavory people. Too many for Lila to get through in one night. She’d finally abandoned the task, promising herself that she’d pick it back up after a few hours of sleep.
Before she called it a night, she’d run Finn Nottingham’s name through the militia database. Her stalker had been suspected in two kidnappings in the last five years, but Lila was far outside his preferred age group. Mr. Nottingham liked little girls. Chief Quinn, Shaw’s counterpart in Bordeaux, had suspected him of kidnapping a five-year-old and a nine-year-old.
The five-year-old’s aunt was an oracle.
Why would the New Bristol oracle let someone like Mr. Nottingham near her and her family? Didn’t they do background checks on the rowers? Perhaps the woman believed her own hype, thinking she’d get a vision if Mr. Nottingham decided to act against her, her family, or her visitors. Or perhaps she wanted him nearby so that she’d get a bead on where the missing girls might be, assuming the kids might still be alive.
That was a dangerous game to play.
None of that explained why Mr. Nottingham had followed Lila. She wasn’t just some random woman who had visited the oracle; she was a childless militia ch
ief with the most secure compound in all of Saxony. She’d even been wearing her militia uniform, so there would have been no confusion as to her identity. Was he an idiot or did he have a purpose?
Or was he not working for the oracle at all? Perhaps he was connected to Reaper’s partner instead.
Lila didn’t have the time or the manpower to launch a surveillance operation against Mr. Nottingham and find the answers. Her spies were busy digging up what they could about Natalie and Oskar, and she’d have to send a few more to check out the properties that Natalie had rented under own name and her fake IDs, just to cross them off her list.
And Max? Not only was he busy digging into Reaper’s partner, but he’d be offended if she asked him to check out the bumbling Mr. Nottingham, just as he’d been offended that members of the Randolph family had used his minions to buy wine.
Regardless, Mr. Nottingham needed to be checked out.
Lila jogged to the great house, the air even warmer and muggier. Before she hopped into the shower, she sent Tristan a message. He replied as she dried herself off. Of course I’ll help. When have I ever said no? He’d added a smiley face at the end.
That smiley face made her feel like an ass.
Yet again, she realized that Tristan had always been there for her. He might have been a jerk or a grouch at times, but whenever she needed help, he’d always come through. Even now, when she’d ignored every message he’d sent the night before.
Why had she let a con woman she barely knew alter the way she thought about Tristan? The oracle had never even met him.
Lila had let the woman mess with her mind.
