“And yet they didn’t tell you that he had passed on or anything else?”
She shook her head. “No, nobody will tell me anything.”
The two men exchanged hard glances.
She sat up slowly. “What do you know that I don’t know?”
Nico drummed his fingers on the table, waiting to see what Keane would say.
Keane looked at Nico and said, “It might have something to do with him.”
“What might?” she asked.
“This kidnapping,” Nico said.
“Only if he’s alive and if he’s some prominent businessman that I don’t know about,” she said. “Otherwise who’d care?”
“Nobody said anything to you at all, huh?” Keane asked.
“I told you,” she said, as she stifled a yawn. “Nobody told me anything.”
Keane asked, “And you just automatically put down your kidnapping to your activism?”
She shrugged. “It makes sense. I pissed off a lot of people. But all this killing? … None of that makes any sense.”
That part bothered Nico too. “Did anyone attack any of the rallies you’ve attended, bring weapons of any kind? Bombs? Something more organized?”
She stared at him in surprise. “No. Nothing.”
“Any of the organizers being blackmailed? Threatened in any way?”
“Not that I know of.” She shook her head. “Maybe you guys should be the ones to answer that question.”
“We’re looking into it, but a lot of people were here for this Australian rally.”
“Check the organizers because, like I said, they didn’t have any reason for me to come over here. But I ended up giving in anyway.”
“Was that you giving in or your assistant forcing you to give in?”
“Well, Maggie’s very good at coercion,” she admitted with a wince. “She doesn’t travel with me, but she was adamant that I came.”
“What’s her name?” Nico asked, hearing Charlotte’s response and typing in the name of her assistant. “Maybe this has something to do with her.”
“I doubt it. She’s like sixty-five years old and has nothing to do with anything. She’s only worked for me for six months, but she’s a godsend.”
At that, the two men exchanged glances and bent down to their laptops.
Her soft voice drifted toward Nico. “You can dig as much as you want,” she said, “but I’m telling you that you won’t find anything.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she’s the sweetest, nicest person I’ve ever met,” she said. “She’s the mother I never had.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“They died in a car accident.”
“And your brother?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “When you’re in foster care, you’re surviving day to day. I was traumatized when they split me and my brother up, and it’s always been in the back of my mind that he’s out there somewhere. But I didn’t know for sure that he is. It’s a sucky system where they don’t let you find your other family members.”
“I thought they did?”
“Then other people know what buttons to push that I don’t,” she snapped. “I couldn’t get any information out of anybody.”
“We might be able to take a look,” Keane said.
At that, Nico raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t for them to say anything without getting some actual word, but he could understand her wanting to know something about her family.
“Well, if you have any more pull than I do,” she said in surprise, “I’d really appreciate it.”
Nico kept his thoughts to himself, but just because Maggie was a nice old lady didn’t make a damn bit of difference in his world. He would like to see Charlotte reconnect with her brother, particularly if there wasn’t any reason not to. He quickly sent a message to his team. Find the brother. I think it’s time Charlotte got reacquainted.
The message came back with a question mark, meaning, they didn’t know but they’d make inquiries. Is it related?
No clue yet. Check on her assistant right now.
Name?
He typed it in and said, She hasn’t worked there very long.
Nico then glanced at Charlotte. “How long have you known Maggie?”
Chapter 5
Charlotte shrugged. “She was always there in the periphery of my world for the last couple years. I used to see her often, sit down, and have a cup of tea with her. Only when I needed an assistant, after my other assistant left, then I considered hiring Maggie. She was in a tough spot, down on her luck, and just needed to have something, even part-time.”
“What happened to your previous assistant?” Keane asked.
“From one day to the next, she disappeared,” Charlotte said in a harsh tone. “I contacted the police when she didn’t show up and filed a missing person’s report, but I never heard anything more.”
Nico sat back at that news. “That’s another major issue to have come up in your life in the last year then, isn’t that?”
“Well, sure,” she said, “but it’s not my issue. It’s not my world. I mean, obviously it was tough losing her. But I mean—” Then she stopped, her voice faltering. “Let me put it this way. I wasn’t terribly friendly with her. She was doing a job for me, but she wasn’t doing it the best that she could. I wasn’t sure how to fire her because I had nobody to replace her. She was barely doing what I needed done, so I was almost ambivalent.
“As it was, she didn’t show up for work one day, and I assumed she’d gotten another job. I had her new phone number, but she never answered. I did drive by her place and knocked on her door, and no one was there. Honestly, I figured she just had had enough of me and buggered off. She was always talking about going back East anyway.”
“Is that the working mentality of the youth these days?” Keane asked, his lips quirking.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “It was frustrating at the time mostly because, if she had just told me, it would have been fine. But to not show up from one day to the next, what was I supposed to think?”
“Did she have a
