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Jason slid off the fender. “It’s worth a shot.”
“Good. But I don’t want to do this on my phone. We need a computer.”
“You want to go back to Granny Mabel’s?”
“I had somewhere else in mind.”
26
The New Orleans Public Library was right across the street from the Tulane Medical Center. It was a massive building full of books, newspapers, computers, and just about any resource they might need.
Cassie made a beeline for the bank of computers near the front entrance and snagged a station at the end. There weren’t too many people milling about, but she didn’t want to risk anyone seeing them cyber stalk a dead woman.
Jason pulled up a chair and watched as Cassie’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “What are you looking for?”
“Anything.” She tapped a few more buttons, then clicked around on the page. “First, we start with Facebook.” She gestured to the computer in front of him. “You start with Twitter. Then we go from there. Instagram. YouTube. LinkedIn. Yahoo Answers.”
Jason’s fingers hovered over his keyboard. “Yahoo Answers?”
“Just kidding. Kind of.” Cassie never took her eyes off the screen. “We need a last name and the names of her relatives. If she has the same username across all her social media accounts, like most people do, then we might find her in other places where she hasn’t attached her name.”
Jason took his instructions like a champ. But answers wouldn’t come easily. Cassie couldn’t find a single Charli on Facebook who lived in New Orleans and had worked at either Tulane or Pete’s Bar. She’d even checked everyone’s profile pictures, in case Charli hadn’t put that information on her page. But she came back with nothing.
They kept digging. An hour passed. And then two. They couldn’t find a single Charli that fit the description they’d gotten from either Alan or the bartender at Pete’s. No social media presence. No work history. There wasn’t even an obituary.
“It’s like someone erased her,” Jason said.
Cassie stretched her arms over her head. She saw Jason looking at her out of the corner of her eyes, but she found she didn’t mind. “It’s like she never existed.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s not. Even if she had no online presence—which is pretty impossible these days—there’s bound to be a relative who has one. You’d think she’d be in a picture somewhere. Some photo with all the cousins barely tolerating each other just so Grandma can hang it on her fridge.”
“Which takes me back to her being erased.”
“That would be difficult to do.” Cassie thought for a moment. “But not impossible.”
“The real question is why.”
“The question is always why.”
Jason continued to think out loud. “What did she know that was so big someone felt the need to erase her from the internet?”
“Something that could connect both hospitals and dozens of patients.”
“Something doesn’t add up.” Jason had rolled up his sleeves at some point during his search, and Cassie liked the way his muscles flexed as he worked out the problem. “It’s
not just that we can’t find her. It’s that we can’t find anyone even related to her. No one is talking about her being dead.”
“No one we can find.”
“Maybe she didn’t have anyone. Maybe she was all alone.”
Cassie bobbed her head. “That would make sense. She’d be an easier target to get rid of if that were true. But we know she had a sister or a cousin who picked up her check.”
“Or someone who pretended to be her sister.” He shook his head. “And if that’s the case, then it puts us back at square one.”
“Another wrong turn.” Cassie echoed his words from earlier. “Maybe we went down the wrong fork in the road.”
