Page 138 of Filthy Lies


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“I got her when she was five. She’d been in there for two years.”

“And she just turned ten, right?”

“Yes.”

“So the crash her father was in would have been seven years ago.”

“There was nothing in her records aboutherbeing involved in a crash though, Conor. Just her father. Her mom died before the accident that killed her father. It doesn’t add up.” She shook her head. “I should never have said anything. It’s dumb.”

“Dumb, but do you want to leave it at that? Don’t you want to look into it?” I prodded. “You’ve just come across your long-lost grandfather, a man you didn’t even know was long or lost… Who knows what forces put you together?”

“Kismet between me and you is one thing. This is different.” Before I could counter-argue, she hunched her shoulders. “I used a fake ID to foster her.”

“Knowing you, it would have been as authentic as a real one.”

“Yeah, but…” She released a breath. “I don’t know why my mind fixated on those drawings of hers.”

“We have a story that’s conjecture from Eoghan. Sure, it was used as a cautionary tale, but isn’t that like a game of telephone? The agent Eoghan thinks isn’t sipping piña coladas in Cancun could have told their CO anything they fucking wanted to make sure that they didn’t get their ass killed—” My mind was racing a mile a minute. Too fast. But shit was starting to come together. “—and you said the front end of the car was smashed up in her drawings. Not the back.”

“Yeah.”

“What if she wasviewingthe crash from the car behind her parents’?”

“Why would that make a difference?”

“Because it might mean that her parents were in the car in front and she was in the back. Whoever was drivinghercould have squirreled her away, which kept her off the system until they put her into it.”

“Eoghan clearly mentioned the wife was strangled. That’s a key—”

“It could have been a girlfriend. Didn’t have to be the child’s mom.”

“This is stretching the truth,” she argued, her unease clear.

“Maybe,” I mumbled, scraping a hand over my head. “I’m going to look into it though. Just to knock it off the realms of possibility.”

She shoved her hands in her pockets. “I guess that’s smart.”

Another thought occurred to me. Without waiting to ask her, my fingers raced over my laptop as I drew up the server we used to communicate on.

“What is it?” she muttered, stepping over to me as I went to work on finding keywords in our many,manyconversations. She grabbed my shoulder when I didn’t answer. “Hey, you dragged that nonsense out of me, Conor. Your turn to pay the piper.”

“Don’t you remember?! The manifesto!!”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“You bought something else from that vendor. The login details that led nowhere,” I rasped, watching her eyes flare in astonishment.

“Oh my God, you’re right! It’s a long shot but we have to try.” She plunked her ass down beside me, watching as I flicked through the many mentions we’d had of the word ‘manifesto’ in our online conversations. “Wait,” she blurted. “I sent you those login details via email. Not on the chat.”

“Shit! You did.” Fuck, my brain needed to slow down if I was misremembering crap like that.

She woke up her computer and both of us were suddenly racing to uncover that information.

Moving over to the folder where I stored any and everything Lodestar had sent me, I rushed through the files and whooped when I came across it.

Opening it up, I grinned as I grabbed the phone Kuznetsov had left with us. When the screen switched off, I realized that it automatically kicked you out of the calculator after a set amount of time.

Tapping in the code once again, I found myself on the login page and I carefully input the username and the eighteen-digit passcode that was on my computer.

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