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NINETEEN
Blaze
I staredat my computer screen for a few seconds, processing what I’d found, before I lifted my voice. “I think I know who that little girl was.”
Dess immediately stood up and came over from where she’d been all but inhaling a chocolate bar from our stash of food. My setup in the foreclosed retail building where we were hiding out while we regrouped wasn’t anything to brag about, but I did have a chair, if wobbly, and a built-in counter, which was more than I’d had at my disposal in the warehouse before. I’d set my laptop where the cash register probably used to sit as I worked away.
“What?” Dess said, setting her hand on the back of my chair. “I didn’t even know you were looking for her.”
I savored the faint brush of her fingertips more than was probably healthy, but then, I’d never claimed I was a model of mental stability. “I wasn’t actually trying to, but it wasn’t even that hard once I started poking around in the right direction.” I grimaced as I mentally compiled everything I had to share.
Dess was peering at the photo on my screen which showed a girl in profile, her blond hair tucked behind her visible ear, her slim frame clothed in a private school uniform. “That’s her,” she said, sucking in her breath. “Or at least it looks a hell of a lot like her, and the uniform looks the same too. How did you find her? What do you mean about looking in the right direction?”
I motioned to my computer. “Well, what I wastryingto find was the Blood Hunter’s true identity. You seeing that girl made me think about the other girl, the one that was so important to him.”
“His daughter,” Dess filled in, her eyebrows rising. “But she’s dead—and that was almost thirty years ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “But thanks to the records the Maliks kept with their creepy parchment posters, we know the year and month the Blood Hunter’s daughter went missing. We know that she was going to school in or near DC, or they wouldn’t have had easy access to her. Once I put those pieces together, it wasn’t hard to scan the databases of attendance records and see when a girl of the right age had suddenly stopped coming to school.”
Julius came over from where he’d been reloading all our guns so they’d be ready if it came down to another shootout. Talon and Garrison looked over too.
“Did you get the Blood Hunter’s real name?” our commander asked.
I shook my head with an apologetic twist of my mouth. “He kept that under wraps. The name for parental contact was a woman who I managed to link to a shell corporation that’s also turned up in other threads of my investigation, but I haven’t been able to follow that chain any further to its source. I’m sure she was an employee, just a placeholder to keep his own identity secret. There are no other records about her either. But that did confirm to me that the girl I found was his daughter. Her name was listed as Brittany Banks.”
“Brittany,” Dess repeated quietly, as if honoring the tortured blond girl we’d seen in one of the photographs the Blood Hunter had arranged for us to find.
“But is thatherreal name?” Garrison demanded.
“I’m guessing it was a fake last name,” I said. “But I think the first name was correct. It’d be hard for a little kid to adjust to being called one name at home and another at school, and he wouldn’t have wanted to raise suspicions if she got confused. At the time, it was an incredibly popular girls name so it wouldn’t have seemed very identifiable.”
Garrison huffed. “So basically you got nothing.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” My stomach knotted a little as I thought about how much else I had to reveal. “I got something I didn’t expect at all. When I was running all possible searches to try to find out any other information out about the Blood Hunter’s family, I stumbled on a girl named Brittany—different last name—who’s going to a private school in DC. A private school with a uniform just like the one you described. A girl who matched your description too. And Brittanyisn’ta very common name anymore.”
Dess’s brow knit. “What are you saying?”
I dragged in a breath. “Well, I didn’t know what to think at first, but it was a lead I had to chase. I dug into her records as much as I could, and just like the first Brittany, the woman listed as her guardian is essentially a ghost, the bare minimum of records under that name, one of them linking her to another shell corporation. Probably another of the Blood Hunter’s employees, providing a front for him like the first woman did.”
“A front because… the Blood Hunter has another daughter?”
“Sort of.” I waved toward the photograph. “I compared facial structure and other factors between their photographs as well as I could. They look superficially similar, but they’re too different in the ways that indicate genetics to share a parent. I think he obtained her by the same methods he uses to gather all the women he sells. It’d be easier than waiting out an entire pregnancy, and he wouldn’t have known for sure how a kid he fathered naturally would look or even that it’d be a girl.”
“So he stole her,” Talon said solemnly.
I nodded. “He found a girl who reminded him of his former daughter in looks and either kidnapped her or bought her from desperate birth parents. She’s been registered at the school for four years, so he’s had her at least that long. I’m not sure why he’d have taken that step recently instead of decades ago. Maybe once he saw that you were fully grown, Dess, and he knew it wouldn’t be much longer before he sent you after your father, he felt at peace enough to want to start over. But it looks like that’s what he’s doing. He picked out a kid with similar looks, gave her the same name… She’s his replacement kid.”
Dess winced. “And he’s already involving her in his businesses somehow. That woman was going to bring her to the office. I don’t know how much they’ve told her, but she’s being exposed to it, with everything going on around her…”
“He’s grooming his heir,” Julius put in. “That’s another reason he might have decided to go for it now. He isn’t getting any younger—if he had a six-year-old almost thirty years ago, he’s got to be in his late fifties at least. He’d have realized that he needed to start raising another kid ASAP if he wanted to hand over the reins to someone he’d sculpted from that young an age.”
“Just like he had me molded to be what he wanted,” Dess said, hugging herself. Her eyes looked tormented as she took in the girl’s picture again. “Is there anything we can do for her?”
I shook my head. “Not right now. There’s no way to prove any wrongdoing to get Child Services or anyone else involved.”
She exhaled through her teeth. I stood from my chair, touching her arm, about to pull her into my arms. I wanted to be closer—close enough to soothe the rage that only seemed to grow the longer it went unchecked in her eyes. I wanted to hold her and show her that she wasn’t alone in her fury.
But I couldn’t do more than offer that brief touch before Talon’s head snapped around. He’d been standing closest to the shop’s grimy windows, and he eased closer now, peering past the smudges.
