Europe, the Middle East, Kuwait, Iraq, Japan, Africa. Here’s Ray with President Bush. Here he is with President Clinton.
Is that Springsteen with Ray?
The guy got around.
Graham set his mug on the desk, sat down and switched on the computer. As it fired up, he looked at his watch. The time was 10:20 a.m. He began reading every file he could access off the desktop, then searched the hard drive.
Much of it was in the same vein as the file Kate Morrow had given him-articles, reports, notes that made no sense to Graham. Then he looked at the history of Tarver’s online travels and the sites he’d visited, starting with the most recent.
As expected, airlines, car rentals, hotels, tourism sites, U.S. and Canadian travel requirements, passports, borders, online banking, credit-card use. Graham was surprised the passwords had been saved.
Credit-card and banking records offered nothing unusual. All travel and household related. Wait. What was this charge for Investigative Search Services? Graham noted that one before returning to Tarver’s online history.
Further along he’d seen that Ray had visited sites for finding people, located work histories, unions, associa tions, driving records, voting records, property records for various states. A lot of work on California.
He was searching public records for counties in Southern California.
Then the history ended. That was it.
Next Graham flipped through every hard-copy file of news reports, studies, notes, photocopies from text books. Nothing jumped out at him, nothing that con nected anything to anything.
It was nearly 5:00 p.m. when he finished.
He rubbed his eyes and neck and got up to leave when he glanced at the bunches of press tags.
Something among them, almost hidden, was beck oning from a chain.
A USB flash drive.
People used them to back up computer files. This one had a tiny handwritten label. LAPTOP.
Graham held his breath as he held the drive in his hand.
Do you believe this?
He inserted it into the computer port and as it loaded he wondered-no, hoped-that whatever files Ray had put on his missing laptop, he’d backed them up here before the trip.
And, here we go.
Files appeared.
Graham’s hopes wilted. They duplicated what he’d already seen. Before quitting, he ran a search for the term Blue Rose Creek, as he’d done before, expecting it to be futile. As the program searched he rubbed his eyes.
He’d buried his tired face in his hands and had begun considering returning to Alberta, when the computer chimed with the message.
One file located.
This was new.
He opened it. Tarver had made notes, a few weeks before the trip.
The FOIA records indicate one American driver among those in the convoy attacked in Iraq with links to the new weapon operation. Details on the driver were censored to respect privacy laws. A Pentagon source put the driver’s location in Cali fornia, near Riverside County. Further investiga tion with trucking associations and transportation sources confirm the driver’s address.
10428 Suncanyon Rise, Blue Rose Creek, California.
Homeowners: Jake amp; Maggie Conlin.
Bingo.
Graham steepled his fingers to think for a moment. Then he went online to check out flights to Los
Angeles.
41
Blue Rose Creek, California
Across the country, Maggie Conlin was losing hope. She felt it slip from her as Fatima Soleil was lowered into the ground of the Whisper Wood Cemetery, buried in a plot that overlooked an orange grove at the county’s edge where a small group had gathered for her funeral. One by one they dropped roses on her oak coffin. After the service Maggie went to the reception in the community hall of Fatima’s mobile-home park. Maggie didn’t know the mourners; most were older women,
Fatima’s neighbors.
But she felt obligated to be there.
Maybe because she’d been with Fatima at the end of her life.
Maybe because she needed to understand Fatima’s last words.
“Your son is alive…but he is in danger.”
Whatever Maggie was seeking, she didn’t find it at the grave site, or among the mobile-home widows wearing overapplied makeup, too much perfume and chewing sadly on egg salad sandwiches.
She couldn’t stay.
Maggie hugged Helga then left.
She drove fast but couldn’t escape her mounting fear, or the darkness that had engulfed her since Jake had taken Logan.
What did Fatima’s death gasp mean?
“There is a woman…fire, explosions, destruc tion…she is carrying a child…the child is dead.” Maybe it meant nothing?
Was it real? Maybe Fatima had hallucinated her vision? She had been sedated. An IV was delivering drugs into her system at the time.
Maggie knew about drugs.
On her passenger seat her open purse revealed the tip of the bottle of sedatives her doctor had prescribed in the weeks after Jake and Logan had vanished. Maggie didn’t take them often but when she did they numbed her pain.
Helped her rest.
Let her be with Logan and Jake in her dreams. A horn blasted. Maggie jumped. She had veered into the next traffic lane. She steered back safely and ex haled. Pay attention, she told herself as she came to the freeway exit for Blue Rose Creek.
She dreaded returning to her empty house, where the only thing awaiting her was despair. She still couldn’t escape her paranoia that something was gaining on her, couldn’t escape the raw, sick feeling that her hope of ever seeing Logan and Jake again had somehow been lost.
Buried with Fatima’s casket.
What if they’re dead?
Stop thinking like that.
She had to go somewhere. To clear her mind. Maggie brushed away her tears as she pulled into a large family restaurant with a gigantic U.S. flag waving in the breeze. She went inside to a table near the win dow, touched the corners of her eyes and searched the freeway traffic.
“Are you okay, dear?” the waitress asked. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“What can I get you?”
“Just tea, please. Whatever you have is fine.” “Coming up.”
Maggie struggled to think of something positive but it was futile. She’d heard nothing from police. The last contact she’d had from the private investigator was an invoice. No word from the courts. Nothing from the lawyer. Nothing from Logan’s school, his doctor. Re porters remained indifferent to her case. Her online searching had led nowhere. Support groups were sym pathetic and had worked hard to help but nothing had surfaced that would lead
