Page 54 of The Librarians
He comes over with his laptop, places it on the wide armrest next to her, and crouches down beside it.
Her gaze strays to his hair. Her fingers dig into the sofa’s cushion.
She wants to rub the inside of her wrist against his beautiful, bristly skull; instead, she wrenches her attention to the pixels he wants to show her.
The image is that of Astrid, smiling widely, her eyes shining.
The date indicates that the photo was taken during Perry’s first visit to Austin, back in spring.
Astrid, in a floral dress and a cute, matching coral cardigan, leans over the back of a chair in the library’s reading area.
Behind her, standing by the DVDs, looking over his shoulder, is none other than the man who tried to pass himself off as Tarik Ozbilgin.
Hazel grips the edge of the screen.
“Madeleine has been trying to find the fake Tarik Ozbilgin,” says Conrad, “but she says Google changed something and reverse image search isn’t what it was.
It used to be a piece of cake for her to figure out for her clients if someone they met online was catfishing; these days it’s a matter of luck.
Let me send this one to her and see if it gets her better results. ”
He takes the laptop and rises to his feet.
“Is—is he the one, then?”
The one who killed Perry Bathurst, and possibly two other people? The one they are trying to entrap?
Conrad does not answer her question. He only says, “When the time comes, I’ll stay with you.”
To distract herself from the onslaught of fear, Hazel goes back to watching clips recorded by Nainai’s motion-activated cameras. And deletes what feels like a hundred raccoon clips in a row—as if she can obliterate all the dangers barreling toward her by getting rid of useless pixels from the past.
A much longer video coming up the queue snares her attention.
Usually the clips are three to five seconds—wildlife don’t stay in frame very long—or ten to twenty seconds—the amount of time needed by most delivery personnel to move into camera range, set down their loads, and move out of range again.
But this one is over a minute in length.
In the clip a lithe, tanned blonde woman approaches the house holding a stack of paper. She spies the camera and studies it for a moment. Then she reaches out a hand to press the doorbell, just out of view.
Hazel pauses the clip and plays the next one, from inside the house, which shows an unhurried Nainai, coming out from the kitchen, looking at her phone.
From her phone app, she can get live feed from her cameras and would have seen it was a woman outside, and presumably she was in the mood to speak to someone.
That clip ends quickly: Nainai moves out of camera range when she reaches the door.
Hazel goes back to the previous clip. The woman waits some more and then her mouth starts moving.
She speaks enthusiastically for fifteen seconds or so and hands Nainai a piece of paper.
Hazel can’t gauge an unseen Nainai’s reaction.
The woman starts talking again, this time pointing to the camera.
As she listens to Nainai’s reply, her face is alive with interest. She then waves at Nainai and leaves, driving off in a small SUV.
The woman looks vaguely familiar, but Hazel can’t think where she might have met such a person, with a thick head of platinum blonde hair.
The next clip again comes from inside the house and shows Nainai going back into the kitchen, now holding a piece of paper—the one she received from the woman?
Hazel has a vague recollection of such a piece of paper on the formal dining table that is hardly ever used. It was about a fundraiser of some kind.
She pulls out her phone and dials. “Nainai, do you remember a blonde woman who came to our door”—she double-checks the time stamp—“Monday last week and gave you a piece of paper?”
“Was that the first day you went to work? Yes, a woman came and said her son was fundraising to go on a class trip to DC next spring.”
“Do you still have the paper?” Hazel asks.
“I put it to recycle—and I don’t want to hurt my back fishing it out of the bin.
But I checked out the link and my browser might still remember it.
Hold on, let me type in GoFundMe and see if it brings anything up.
Yep. Johan Schweiger is the kid’s name, and only one person donated twenty dollars.
That was the reason I threw away the paper.
If the kid won’t hustle for his own funds, and the mom can’t get people to donate, then I’m not going to bother either. ”
Hazel asks Nainai to send her the link and hangs up, half expecting Conrad to be listening in on her conversation.
But he’s on the phone too. He hangs up, a grim look on his face.
“That was Madeleine. She said she couldn’t obtain a good match from reverse image search.
But she was able to feed the new image of the fake Tarik Ozbilgin, which is high-res enough, through a program she just got for beta testing. ”
“What does the program do?”
“Match people by eye shape alone, even if they wear cosmetic lenses that can fool biometric iris scanners.”
Hazel tenses. “And?”
“And according to her program, the fake Tarik Ozbilgin was at Game Night.”
Hazel feels like a set of train tracks, reverberating with oncoming disasters. “Can you do me a favor? I’m going to do a screen grab. Will you send it to Madeleine and ask her to also run this woman through her beta software?”