Page 110 of Nobody's Fool

“Yes.”

“But she has questions about her past.”

“Something like that,” I say.

“I have a private database, but it’s huge. Do you know how the Radiant Allure agency operated?”

“Tell me.”

“Our agency mostly worked out of kiosks in malls. Young girls would walk by—boys too—and we’d approach them and say that they were attractive and had a great look and maybe they should consider modeling. Really lay it on thick with the false flattery. Then we would try to sell them a modeling portfolio. Basically a photo shoot. Some people called it a scam, but our prices were competitive and hey, we weren’t the first business to sell a dream.”

“Did you work in the agency?”

“Yep. All four of us kids did. It was our after-school job. Good training for life. The agency had kiosks in dozens of malls throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

“You said you have a private database.”

“Yes. I can’t make it public for privacy reasons. It would lead to many false claims and lawsuits. Do you have a photo of what Anna looked like back then?”

I realize that I don’t. There are still a few grainy photos of Victoria Belmond from that time period, so I google them. Not many. I see Anna in Victoria’s face, especially the eyes, but that might be mind games. I find the few photos taken right after Victoria was found, the paparazzi ones with no hair and shot from a distance because the FBI and her parents protected her privacy—these are slightly more accurate. Jennifer Schultz tells me to AirDrop them to her. I hesitate.

“Can I trust you to keep her identity a secret?” I ask.

“Of course.”

I AirDrop the best photo. She studies it on her phone. I don’t say Victoria Belmond’s name, and I can’t tell whether she’s figured it out.

“I have a team working with me,” I say to her. “They can do AI on this photograph and put hair on her head and de-age her, maybe clean up the image a little.”

“That might help,” Jennifer says. Then she looks up at me. “What’s going on, Mr. Kierce?”

“I have a tougher question for you,” I say.

She waits.

“Could your parents have been involved in a kidnapping?”

She blinks. Then she says, “In what way?”

“I don’t know. The obvious, for one—would they ever just kidnap a girl?”

“It would be easy for me to say, ‘Of course not,’ but…” She doesn’tfinish the thought. She doesn’t have to. “I don’t think so. They needed the self-justification, I think.”

“Did your parents ever help move someone?”

“Move someone?”

“Like maybe someone brought your parents a girl to hide overseas?”

She frowns. “You think someone brought my parents this girl so they could hide her in Spain?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Okay then.” Jennifer places both hands on the table and pushes herself to a standing position. “I’ll start going through the database. Oh, and a more innocent possibility, Mr. Kierce.”

I turn.

“The girl you’re looking into—you think she was kidnapped.”