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“General.”
“My plane has landed, though I’m still on the tarmac.” Graham’s clipped tone told Bit to keep his responses short and to the point. The man had a way of getting his point across without additional instructions. “Has anyone heard from her?”
“No.”
“Did Brook stop by her condo? And don’t give me the runaround, Bit. I know you’ve already checked the building’s security cameras.”
“No, Boss hasn’t gone back home.”
The pause on the other end of the line told Bit that he should offer up more information before he was barraged with an endless string of questions. It wasn’t that Graham didn’t trust Bit’s abilities, but the man’s entire career had been spent in the military. His level of expectancy was set to a completely different dial.
Bit could only assume that Graham had spoken with Theo or Arden at some point to even know that Brook had gone AWOL. Bit was just glad that he hadn’t been the one to break the news.
By this time, Nannette had quietly left the room.
Bit’s gaze once again landed on Sylvie, and he studied her pale features. Nothing had changed since she’d been brought into the room. He rubbed his chest to ease the tightness that had settled behind his diaphragm. Maybe he was getting an ulcer.
“Boss hasn’t gone home, hasn’t used her credit cards, and not one of the city’s cameras has caught her out in public. She knows what she’s doing, and she doesn’t want to be found.” Bit’s laptop began to sound an alert from some parameters that he had programmed earlier this evening. He quickly wheeled the tray toward him. “Hold on a second, General.”
Bit hadn’t gone into specific detail with the team about some of his applications, but he had spent the past year refining his facial recognition software program. The backdoors that he had plugged into specific social media sites were nowhere near the legal line that the justice system had put into place. He’d been mindful as to when he used the application, and this was only the second time that he had initiated the program. Well, third. Maybe four if he counted the test sequence, but he wasn’t going to allow guilt to weigh him down. Besides, the alphabet agencies already had their foot in those doorways.
“Lorena Dobbs.” Bit couldn’t believe they had a name. He must have raised his voice when announcing the information. Even Agent Lynn had glanced over his shoulder to make sure nothing was wrong, but Bit waved him away. He stared at the woman’s photograph that matched the footage obtained from Sylvie’s apartment building. There was no denying that he had been given a match. “Lorena Dobbs.”
“Context, Bit.”
“Lorena Dobbs is the name of the woman who stabbed Little T.” Bit had already plugged the woman’s name into several systems. He had to stand from the chair to expend some of his pent-up energy. “Dobbs is a twenty-four-year-old woman from Idaho. She’s listed as a missing person from a 2017 investigation involving the deaths of her parents. They were stabbed to death on Dobbs’ eighteenth birthday. Police believed at the time that the killer abducted Dobbs, and both the missing persons cases and the murder investigation are ongoing.”
“I’ll be at the hospital in forty minutes.”
Bit would have replied to the statement, but the line had already disconnected to the point of deafening silence. He immediately forwarded the information to Theo and Arden.
There was relief in being able to put a name to their unsub, but to what end? They had no idea where Lorena Dobbs had been for six years, how she had been supporting herself, or how she had come to cross paths with Jacob. They were in complete darkness when it came to the woman’s intentions and whereabouts.
Not knowing the woman’s objective—Jacob’s objective—made it difficult for the team to maneuver through their routine investigative process. Then again, there was nothing routine about this case. Lorena Dobbs had spent the past two months infiltrating Sylvie’s life. The woman could have attacked Sylvie well before last night, but Lorena Dobbs had chosen to remain on the sidelines.
Why?
One man had the answer—Jacob Walsh.
Chapter Six
Theo Neville
February 2024
Friday — 7:27 am
The coffee machine sputtered and hissed, testing Theo’s patience. The appliance was one of those new machines that was supposed to make one’s life easier, but the only one who could get the damned thing to work properly was Arden. The dark droplets fell into the carafe one agonizingly slow drip at a time. If a piece of equipment could be cruel, it was the heap of metal sitting in front of him.
Theo rested the palms of his hands on the counter as he impatiently waited for enough coffee to be poured into the carafe so that he could fill his mug. He wasn’t asking for a miracle, because those were being reserved for Sylvie. It was then that he realized what had been missing since he’d walked into the offices of S&E Investigations—the sweet floral scent that usually hung in the air after Sylvie had steeped a cup of her favorite tea.
Both the disinfectant odor left behind by the cleaning crew and the resounding silence of being alone in the offices clawed at Theo’s senses. He had been alone on the fourteenth floor of the building many times over the past couple of years. Never once had he experienced the sense of isolation as he did in this moment. It was as if he were inside a tomb with echoes of past conversations, and he could have sworn that he heard Sylvie’s laughter drifting down the hallway.
Twenty-six hours had blurred into an endless stream of dead-end leads.
He had been in constant contact with Bit and Arden for various reasons. Theo would need to catch a few hours of sleep soon, but Graham had wanted an update on the investigation. What Graham truly wanted to know was if Brook had been in contact with Theo.
Unfortunately, the answer to that question was a resounding no.
