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Talon pointed to a podium that showed at the upper corner of the shot. “Looks like a political rally. Damien Malik.”
Julius made a thoughtful sound. “This must be from when he was running for re-election a few years back.”
“Damien Malik?” I said. “Should I know who that is?” I was aware of the current president of the country and various other major figures, but that name sounded familiar only in the vaguest of ways.
“He’s a congressman,” Garrison spoke up from his spot on the other side of the room, where he wasn’t even doing a show anymore of not following our search. “Current majority whip in the House of Representatives. Kind of a big deal for anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock.”
I glowered at him, half-heartedly wishing I had a rock to toss at his head, and turned back to the screen. Unfortunately, I had to ask, “What exactly does a majority whip do?”
“He’s supposed to rile up the rest of the representatives in his party to pass the legislation the president wants,” Julius said. “Although there’ve been murmurs about Malik pushing his own ideas a little harder than people would prefer.”
That didn’t sound too ominous. When the household wanted to “push an idea,” they obviously knocked off whoever was standing in their way rather than just talking about it. I’d presumably helped them do so more times than I wanted to think about.
“Should we read anything into her being there?” I asked.
Blaze shrugged. “I wouldn’t think so. A rally would be a good place to blend into the crowd and carry out some kind of surreptitious transaction that has nothing to do with the purpose of the gathering. Can you see if she’s reaching out to anyone there?”
We squinted at the recording again, but the part that’d caught Noelle only showed her making that brief turn. We couldn’t even see what or who she’d been looking at. I blew out an irritated breath.
“Hey,” Blaze said reassuringly, “we’ve got lots more to get through. Those answers are in here somewhere.”
We checked out a few more photos, none of them very enlightening. Here was Noelle walking down a sidewalk alone. Here was Noelle exiting an organic grocery store with a shopping bag over her arm. Here was Noelle sitting at a patio table with a different man from the first picture, but one who was equally unfamiliar to me.
Blaze set that one aside for further investigation and opened the next file, which was another video. The three of us behind him leaned in automatically to take a closer look. But I immediately recognized the scene, so definitively that my heart skipped a beat.
It was a different day. Noelle wore different clothes, and the cast of the light was different, as if the sky had been overcast rather than cloudless. But there was no mistaking the signs and the banner by the podium.
She was at another Damien Malik rally.
Blaze hummed. “Well, that’s starting to look like a pattern.”
Julius’s forehead furrowed. “I’d say.”
I stared at the screen—at Noelle, who turned her head to stare straight toward the stage with her usual implacable air.
Was Damien Malik tangled up with the household somehow? And if so, what kind of part did he play in this mess?
