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Because Paigelynn has less than two weeks before she heads to her new home. I need to make sure I’ve crossed every T and dotted every I before making my next move.
Here I am, now, at seven forty-two, and the code is a wall of blur.
So is what I’ve learned.
Our project is so close, Debbie and Newman are about two days away from figuring out Paigelynn’s location. A closed-circuit camera from a local gas station caught her in profile during a fill-up. It was right in front of the intersection where her bodyguards clipped me, and I’m damn lucky the camera didn’t catch our interaction on camera.
That profile pic was enough for the database to catch the image and inform us. Alarm triggered. Target even closer than suspected.
If only these bastards knew.
Two days at best, I have before the triangulation matrix closes the loop and they find her, and I’m such a fucking idiot for telling her to try everything she can to get more freedom. Once her image shows up on someone’s Ring doorbell while she walks the dog, that’ll make this all even harder.
I have to act. Now.
As dawn breaks, I realize I need time more than a plan. An orgasm wouldn’t hurt, either, but beggars can’t be choosers.
“Hey,” Debbie says as I rest in front of the screen, elbows on the table, hands covering my face. “Anything new?”
“No.”
“We’re so close, Cam.” She’s fresh from the shower, hair still wet, but dressed in a crisp T-shirt under a navy suit. No matter what, Debbie looks like a fed.
When she was born, she was wearing sunglasses.
“Yeah. But we might not get there in time.”
“Who turned you into Newman with the pessimism?”
“Being a realist.”
“We can get this one. I know it. Hardest part is beating the billionaires to the punch.”
“I still don’t get why they separate them like this. Get the families into the cult through preachers. Get them to do the DNA tests off the books for ‘ancestry’ purposes. Convince the parents to hand over the special ones. I know what the research says – they do it to distribute everyone evenly geographically, to increase the chances of success, and for plausible deniability, but it doesn’t add up.”
“Neither did Jeffrey Epstein, but everyone pretended it did and had a grand old time.”
“Except for the girls.”
She smacks the top of the table. “Exactly. Look, Cam, I’ve been on cases like these since before Gaia was broken up. I wasn’t there when your parents were taken away, but shit like that never leaves you. If this is cutting too close to the bone for you, you might want to reassess whether this is the right work for you.”
“Huh? You’re the one who twisted my arm to come here. I’m on parole, remember?”
“I know. But I can’t have you screw this up. Your head has to be on straight. Catching the first one means catching so many more. Once we have her blood we can run so many tests.”
“I told you none of them are related to each other. It’s all de novo mutations.”
“You assume that. We have a lot of medical data we need to get from her to make comparisons.”
Paigelynn’s face, her graceful hands, how she looks at Winnie, all float through me then, rising inside like a sudden summer squall.
“You sound like the other side. Like you just want to harvest her in a different way.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Debbie snaps, smacking my shoulder. “That does it. You are out of your mind. Go for a run.”
“A run?”
“Yeah. At least you showered yesterday and don’t reek, but you need to go think a bit.”
