Page 59 of The Fix

Rex stepped out of the shower and quickly wrapped a towel around his waist when he heard his cell ringing from the bedroom.

He gave the rumpled bed a glance as he reached for his phone, a bolt of heat shooting through his chest when he remembered what Cami had looked like splayed across those sheets.

He glanced at the screen before he answered. “Erik.”

“Hey man, I got that geolocation data you requested.”

“Fantastic. Anything good?” Rex dropped the towel and pulled on his boxer briefs.

“Maybe. There wasn’t much activity recently.

I figure most of it was from the device used by the dude splattered at the bottom of a cliff.

” Rex winced but breathed out a chuckle as he pulled on his jeans.

“But I went back. There was a visit a few years ago from a phone that also shows up at an interesting location later.”

Rex leaned against the dresser and crossed one arm over his stomach and held the phone out in front of him with the other.

“The Kiss family estate in Spring Valley, DC.”

“DC? Seriously?”

“Yeah, I thought that’d catch your attention.”

Yes, it did. It was the first thing that brought Cyrus’s kidnapping in California and Cami’s home state of Virginia close together. Geographically speaking anyway. “The Kiss family?” That didn’t ring a bell.

“Yeah. I did a little digging, and here’s the interesting thing about the Kiss family.

They’re known as professional fixers. But it’s long been rumored that their crisis management operation extends far beyond lawfare and political dirty tricks.

In fact, it seems to be something of a well-known secret that they employ methods that, shall we say, wouldn’t be categorized as on the up-and-up. ”

“Murder for hire?” he guessed. “Convenient disappearances?”

“All of the above. I’ve only started digging, but I’ve already found some sloppy work that points to at least a few law enforcement payoffs.

No legitimate investigation would have missed shit like this.

And from what I can tell, things seem to have gotten especially sloppy since Anton Kiss took control of the empire. ”

“When was that?”

“Mid-nineties, when his father died and left everything to him, including the business.”

Sloppy work. Botched jobs? It made him think about what Cami had told him about hearing her attackers lament things going afoul.

Had this family—the Kisses—been hired by someone to torture and kill the Cortlandts?

Was that who’d sent those two men? If so, who was behind it?

And how did the call to Cami from the unknown female fit in?

Cami had ruminated on whether that someone might have had an attack of conscience because, ultimately, the call had helped Cami get to Cyrus.

If so, it’d have to be a person on the inside.

“Any women in the Kiss family?” he asked.

“Yeah, actually. Josephine Kiss. Apparently, from the little I could find about her, she’s a bit of a savant, off-the-scale intelligent with numbers and computers but socially impaired.

Yet she hasn’t been heard from in decades.

She was in an accident where she was flung from the car when she was eighteen and became a quadriplegic. ”

“That’s awful.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t get much worse.”

“And she hasn’t been seen since?”

“No public appearances anyway, whereas her brother, Anton, seems to be quite the man about town.”

Interesting. “Anything else?”

“That’s it for now. I’m leaving on a job in a few hours, so that’s all I’ll be able to dig up.”

“It’s very appreciated. I meant it when I said I’d like to—”

“Don’t even. I don’t take money from friends.”

“All right. Next time you need a favor—”

“I know just who to call.” Rex heard the smile in his buddy’s voice.

“Hey, be safe, man.”

“Always.”

Rex hung up and then grabbed a T-shirt from his duffel before heading for the kitchen, where he’d left his laptop on the table.

He didn’t bother to look up more on the Kiss family.

He knew very well Erik had just given him any and all pertinent information available, at least in a basic search.

And he didn’t have time for more than that right now anyway.

But he did take a moment to google their name, purely to get a visual.

Like Erik had said, he found a plethora of photos of Anton Kiss at one social event after another, the latest just days before. He was handsome in a hawkish way. Large forehead, sharp nose and cheekbones. Eyes that seemed to challenge the camera even while his mouth was shaped into a smile.

There were far fewer photos of Josephine Kiss, and like Erik had said, they were all from the nineties. She had a direct stare as well, evident even from behind her glasses, but whereas her brother’s appeared mildly threatening, Josephine’s simply looked candid. And almost ... guileless. Almost.

Rex paused on the most recent photo, though it wasn’t very recent at all.

Josephine was standing next to an older man, identified in the caption below as her father.

His hand was resting on her shoulder protectively, and he was smiling down at her with affection.

Rex’s gaze held on the young woman. She looked like one of those old-fashioned Kewpie dolls.

Dark hair to her chin and bangs that stopped just above her arched brows.

Round, heavily lashed eyes and full lips but a narrow mouth.

There was something very compelling about her face, and Rex lingered on it longer than he’d meant.

Who are you, Josephine Kiss?

And what exactly happened to you?

He truly wanted to know.

The questions made him remember what he’d been intending on doing right before he’d received Erik’s call.

He minimized that browser and opened another, typing in the address to Hollis’s campaign site.

Once again, it took Rex all of two minutes to hack in.

He went back through the emails and found that the one from Cyrus had been deleted.

That was fine. Nothing was ever really deleted, and Rex had already saved a copy of it anyway.

He wasn’t surprised to find it gone now that Cami had visited Hollis and alerted him to the fact that the message had been from the boy, and that she knew about it.

Hollis might be covering his tracks, or he might simply be deleting evidence that he’d ignored a child’s plea for help.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what Cami had told him about flashing that mirror at Mrs. Willoughby through the window as he’d held her in his arms in his bed.

The vision had nagged at him, repeatedly running through his mind even before he was fully awake.

At first, he’d thought it was just his nervous system reacting to the picture his mind had conjured of Cami tied to her bed, mouth taped as she tried desperately to signal for help.

God, it killed him inside to think of her that way.

And it caused an admiration that felt too immense to hold. Her grace under fire should be taught in military classes. Then again, that kind of courage couldn’t be learned. A person either had it, or they did not. He’d worked around enough soldiers who’d gone to hell and back to know that much.

So yes, he was overwhelmed with reverence for her, but he didn’t think that was the sole reason the image kept forcing its way to the front of his mind.

It was how, the last time he’d been navigating through the website currently open in front of him, reply boxes kept popping up.

There’d been a ... desperation that he couldn’t put his finger on.

The way the numbers had appeared, the cursor going backward several times as if they were being typed in haste and mistakes were being made.

He might be off the mark, but Rex had learned to follow his instincts anyway.

Sometimes he was wrong, but more often, he was not.

If someone was attempting to communicate with him through the back door of this specific site, that person knew he’d be there, or had suspected he would be and then waited for him to arrive.

And that would only be possible if that person knew all the ins and outs of his and Cami’s current investigation.

Further, that individual was either extremely nervous, a bad typist, or . .. impaired.

She was in an accident where she was flung from the car when she was eighteen and became a quadriplegic.

Could the person attempting to communicate with him be ... Josephine Kiss? The possible insider they’d wondered about? What kind of wild scenario would have led to that? He couldn’t begin to guess.

He clicked through the site. The two blog post drafts had been published, several inconsequential emails had been sent, many comments had been logged, some positive, some not. Rex figured that was pretty common for a politician running for any office, from president down to dogcatcher.

He stayed long enough to determine that no one was there with him.

He glanced at the string of numbers next to his computer that he’d written down.

They meant something. He’d input them into a browser in a few different ways, but nothing had come up.

He’d thought at first they might be a latitude and longitude, but they weren’t.

He’d gone on the dark web and poked around inside the site where Cyrus’s video had been playing but came up empty there too.

He thought again for a minute, something occurring to him. What if ... it almost seemed too easy. But he’d been inside this site when the numbers were displayed for him, and maybe they’d been meant to be used right here?

He went to Hollis’s inbox and spent ten minutes looking for what he hoped to find, letting out a frustrated exhale when that proved unsuccessful.

But he was onto something—he could tell by the strings of numbers he’d identified.

He hopped over to Hollis’s sent box and began digging again into the raw source of each message in order to find the identifier, numbers normally hidden away from the user because they’re not useful or necessary.

That’s where he hit pay dirt.

His heart gave a victorious thump, and he scrolled down the message with the same unique string of numbers that had been given to him by whomever had followed him around this site previously.

The person had been communicating with him, just like that flash of light had been a message to Mrs. Willoughby.

He didn’t know why or how or who might want his attention, at least on this matter.

But whoever it was had been pointing him to this particular email.

The message was a response from Hollis to a staffer who was inquiring about his fiancée Seraphina’s family history with violence. The staffer seemed to think it would play well to bring up her past as a personal connection to the very real effects of being lax on crime.

But Hollis responded that Seraphina was unwilling to speak on that issue, as the trauma was still too raw.

Violence? Crime? Trauma?

Rex’s senses were buzzing.

He opened a browser and looked up Hollis, speed-reading through the first article to find Seraphina’s full name. Seraphina Arnoult. He did a quick search on her, but the only hits were news pieces about Hollis.

Family history with violence.

Rex used a people search to find her closest contacts, forking out twenty-nine bucks to get the full report. This was amateur stuff, but without the backing of the US government—and all the high-tech tools it offered—it was the best he could do on short notice.

It was plenty, however, as the woman who looked to be her mother, if the age was an indication, had a different last name. “Glory Jacobson,” he murmured.

He quickly read through the entire report he’d purchased, but there was nothing else of real consequence. No record, no bankruptcies, no marriages or divorces.

He did a search on Glory Jacobson, his skin prickling when he read the headline of the first hit. Family Experiences Break-In.

As far as headlines went, it was pretty mundane. Still, that prickle didn’t abate.

He read through everything available, so the picture was complete.

Then Rex sat back in his chair for a minute, allowing all the information to swirl. This was it. This was the missing link. It had to be. Everything Cami and her family—and later, Cyrus—had experienced, all originated here.

Rex grabbed his phone, and when he went to call Cami, he noticed that he’d missed a call from her right before Erik’s call had come in.

“Damn,” he muttered as he listened to her voicemail.

She hadn’t left any information other than to call her back, but it sounded like she was in her car.

He dialed her number. “Come on,” he said, right before her voicemail clicked on.

“Cami, call me as soon as you get this,” he said. “I have some information.”

He turned back to his computer and did another quick search to corroborate what he believed to be true about the connection between the crime Seraphina’s family experienced, and the one committed against the Cortlandts.

Just as he’d surmised, Louis Swift, the man named in the news article who’d broken in and victimized Seraphina’s family, had been arrested six months earlier for breaking and entering.

Louis was from an “upstanding family,” and though it was a felony, it was his first offense, and self-reportedly fueled by drugs and alcohol.

The court had gone easy on him. He’d been ordered to do thirty days in a rehabilitation center and was then set free, back into the community.

There was no readily available information online about who the judge had been, but based on location, Rex was pretty sure he could guess. For now, a guess was good enough.

How in the hell Seraphina had wound up engaged to the man Cami was dating at the time of her own family’s crime, he couldn’t fathom. But he knew for sure it wasn’t by accident.

Rex grabbed his keys. He couldn’t sit around waiting for Cami to return his call. They weren’t meeting for dinner for another forty-five minutes, but he needed to find her now.