Page 49 of The Fix
“Yes. It hadn’t been forwarded, but I’d think staff would at least alert Hollis to a message like that.”
“You’d think. And if they did print it out for him or something that doesn’t have a digital trace, I guess he might have answered from a more personal account. Or been planning to. But even if he was aware of it ... I wouldn’t be surprised if he just decided to ignore it completely.”
“It gives him a motive, though,” Rex said. “For the kidnapping. A kid that he denied and never stepped up for would be inconvenient right now. It’d take the focus off his campaign and put it on his personal life. It’d speak of character, or lack thereof. He’d want to avoid that, I’d guess.”
“Agreed,” she murmured, troubled once again by the question of Hollis’s possible involvement in Cyrus’s kidnapping.
“I called the number listed on his website and left a message with the receptionist who answered, but I haven’t heard back from Hollis yet,” she said.
“If I don’t, I’m going to go there. He’s giving a speech in DC tomorrow, so I’m leaving Cyrus with my dad for the day. ”
Cyrus had specifically asked to spend the day with Pops, and her dad had seemed happy to do it when she’d called and asked.
He’d mentioned miniature golf, and she was sure Cyrus would like that—she remembered loving it as a kid.
And Cyrus needed some kid-like normalcy right now.
But even more than the activity, she was glad she had her dad to offer Cyrus some male attention after he’d been deprived of a dad figure in his life for too long and obviously craved it.
Rex nodded slowly. He looked concerned and like he wanted to say something but was holding it back.
She didn’t prompt him because she was pretty sure she knew—he was worried Hollis would be dismissive at best and cruel at worst. Or maybe he’d refuse to see her altogether.
She was prepared for any and all scenarios, however.
And her only goal was to get a feel for whether Hollis was capable of attempting to harm Cyrus.
Beyond that, she didn’t hope for, nor expect, much.
She’d given up on Hollis a long time ago.
“Just promise you’ll call if you feel unsafe at any point. ”
She was about to say she wasn’t worried about that, but if Hollis was part of the network who’d kidnapped a child, who knew what else he might do? Meeting him in a public place was important. “I promise,” she said. “And I’ll text you as soon as I’ve left.”
Rex put a roll in his mouth and chewed, appearing to have trouble getting it down.
He followed it with a swig from the beer and then wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“One other thing,” Rex said. “Something odd happened while I was looking around Hollis’s campaign site. It was like someone else was there.”
“There? What do you mean?”
“Inside with me.”
“You mean like a web designer or administrator making edits to the site?”
“No. It was like someone was following me around.” He looked off behind her as if even he—knower of all things cyber—was having difficulty explaining what he’d experienced.
“Every time I went to a specific email, a reply box opened within it and a string of random letters and numbers was typed in.” He shook his head. “It was weird.”
“I call unexplained computer stuff a glitch, but if it seemed off to you, it probably was. Could it have been another hacker in there trying to communicate with you?”
“I thought about that. But how did they know I’d be there? There are very few safety barriers. Someone would have to be monitoring that space continuously and for what reason? And if they wanted to communicate with me, why type gibberish?”
She had no answers. But she did have a possibly connected question.
“If whoever sent that video of Cyrus in the room isn’t connected to the people who arranged his kidnapping, that unknown person would have had to hack into the monitoring camera, right?
To be able to post it on the dark web for me to see? ”
He nodded. “The police said the monitoring device was in the main room of the cabin, most likely used to watch Cyrus without constantly entering the room.”
“Yes. But could the feed of Cyrus have also streamed to someone else? Say the people that man who brought Cyrus food kept referring to who were on their way? Or even a bigger boss of a kidnapping ring of some sort?”
“Sure. Any of that is possible. You can monitor footage from anywhere remotely if you’re granted log-in access.” He inclined his head backward. “Like the one at your door.”
“So the woman who called and gave me access to the live stream is either a hacker, or someone related to the crime. Someone who maybe went rogue or whose conscience got the better of her.” She thought for a few seconds.
“Or someone who wanted to torture me,” she murmured.
But something about that didn’t feel quite right, and she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.
Maybe it was that the voice on the phone had been eerie, yes, but now that she thought about it, almost . .. helpful.
“The other question is,” Rex said, “even if any of those guesses are accurate, how did that person know you’re Cyrus’s mother?”
“That I have no idea, unless Cyrus’s full history was known to the people who took him. If Hollis was involved, that might be the case, right?”
He was silent for a moment as he picked absently on the bottle label. “Either way, I don’t believe it was a random kidnapping.”
“No,” she agreed. “It couldn’t be.”
They each focused on their food for a moment, questions bouncing through Cami’s mind, loose strings flying in every direction, which she was trying so hard to weave into a coherent picture. But they were just missing too much right now.
“By the way,” Rex said, “what are the boxes?”
“My dad’s cases, going back five years from the murders. I have no access to the digital files, so that’s what I’ve got.” The thought of leafing through dusty papers looking for who knew what was already giving her a headache.
“You said the police looked into his recent cases,” Rex said. “They looked there first for a connection to the crime, right?”
“They did, and they hunted for any online threats and things like that. They found a few general ones and followed those, but nothing came of that line of research.”
Most of Rex’s bottle label was peeled off now. “What about ... not the cases themselves, but what happened in the aftermath?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your dad didn’t just sentence people, he let them off, too, right? Sometimes he dismissed their case entirely and set them free.”
“Of course.”
He tore the remainder of the label off and began folding it, over once and then again. “So what if someone he set free victimized others in a similar way?”
She thought about that, those loose strings still taunting her.
But it felt like, because of him, she’d just grasped one.
“Okay. Yes. So, he let someone off, and that person victimized a family in the same way we were.” She blinked and shook her head.
“And then what? That family, or someone within it, blamed my dad and hired two low-life criminals to come exact vengeance?”
“Blame and hatred make people do really dark things.”
She tapped her chopstick on her plate for a minute.
The police had looked for a person or someone related to that person who had felt wronged because of a sentence her father had imposed.
Which made sense. He’d taken freedom away from many—years, whole lives.
It was a strong motive for revenge. But .
.. Rex could be right. This could very well have to do, not with the taking of someone’s freedom, but with the granting of it.
Opportunity that was then used to harm others.
“Maybe they didn’t hire those men to kill us,” she murmured.
The recollection of their words chilled her, even now.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I admit things got out of hand, and we made some stupid moves.
“Maybe they were just meant to scare us. But it went too far.” Her eyes widened.
This felt right. “That would account for the comments about my father seeing his family tormented being the whole point. And the other comments, at the end, about how it wasn’t supposed to go that way.
Those two men, Trig and AJ, they went off script, maybe because of the drugs, maybe because they were simply evil and couldn’t control themselves once they got some power over three helpless women. ”
He thinned his lips, and she knew he’d tightened his muscles, too, by his sudden stillness. She was beginning to know him so well, not just his mind, but the signals of his body. It scared her. And it thrilled her, too, in ways she was both tempted to lean into and run from.
“As far as researching your father’s cases, that would narrow things down a little, right?
We’re looking for a man who your father determined could be let off, rather than convicted for his crime.
Once we collect those, we look into what happened after that, and if he committed a similar crime against a different family. ”
We. There was that we again that she wanted to cup in her palms like a treasure, afraid that it’d be taken from her if she didn’t protect it. Knowing it wouldn’t be hers for long, no matter what.
“What if it happened the way you described, but the man my father let off wasn’t caught for the crime he committed against that unknown family?”
He folded the label again, and now it was a tiny little square that couldn’t possibly be folded again. “He’d have to have been for the person—his victim—to know his name and why he was out on the street when he perhaps shouldn’t have been. For them to assign blame to your father.”
She took a minute to unravel that. God, her mind was beginning to twist like a pretzel with all this supposing. “My dad didn’t let criminals go lightly, though. He wasn’t that type of judge.”
“There could have been a technicality that tied his hands. But also, everyone makes mistakes, Cami. The best judges on the planet make what turn out later to be bad judgments sometimes. Hindsight and all that. No one can predict the future or see into someone else’s mind.”
She conceded his point with a nod. “It’ll also narrow down our pool of possibilities. Many of the people in those files who showed up in my father’s courtroom will have been in prison when the crime against my family was committed.”
“Yes, true. Also, I think we can narrow the time frame down as well.”
“Okay, why?”
“Five years seems too long for that type of hate to fester.” He dropped the piece of folded label on the table.
“The wound was fresher, I think. I’d say two years.
We’ll go back three because it had to have taken some amount of time to plan the revenge, gather the money if any was paid, et cetera.
Revenge for hire isn’t something you just order up on Amazon. ”
She let out a small chuff. Three years. Okay. She pressed her lips together. “Rex, I ... I would love it if you stayed and helped me look through some of the cases, but I also don’t want you to feel obligated. I’ve asked so much of you.”
He looked at her as though he was trying to read her mind, and she felt bad about that because she wanted him to feel like he could know what she was thinking by her words, and he obviously did not. “I’m in it with you if you want me to be, Cami. I’m here to help.”
She let out a quiet exhale as relief flowed through her. “Great.” She stood and picked up her plate and his. “Let me put this away and then get Cyrus ready to sleep, and then we’ll start digging?”
He smiled and it looked completely genuine, like he was feeling some of that same relief as her. “I’ll clean this up,” he said. “You take care of your son.”
The words hit her, almost stalling her breath. She felt teary again and grateful. She never imagined, even in her wildest dreams, that she’d have this opportunity. “Okay,” she said, meeting his eyes, feeling her face move into a disbelieving smile. “I’ll go take care of my son.”