“The birth family was rebuffed by the boy.”
“Why would he do that?” Charlotte asked.
Keane shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s not something that we can really judge at this point because we don’t have any more information about that relationship.”
“Or what the adoptive family may have said to the boy,” she said quietly. “A lot of poison can be spread, and it may not have any meaning in reality.”
“Exactly. The adoptive parents are still grieving and angry and have had no contact with the birth parents. They presume that they know about their son’s death but haven’t seen or heard from them since.”
“So the contact must have been fairly recent if he died at eighteen and if the birth parents contacted him at eighteen.”
“January. They contacted him sometime just after his birthday. You had the rally in March.”
“So they didn’t even have a chance to establish a relationship or to try again.”
“Exactly.”
“But still, you’d think they’d be more upset at the adoptive parents than at the organizers of the rally.”
“Possibly,” Keane said. “But another interesting fact came up. That rally had two main organizers.”
“John and Sue,” she said with a nod. “We had lots of emails and phone calls back and forth.”
“Well, both of them died in a car accident after the rally. Did you know that?”
She frowned. “I remember hearing that they were in an accident. I didn’t think that had killed them though.”
“They both died in the hospital after succumbing to their injuries.”
“Was it a long time afterward?” she asked, puzzled. “Because I don’t remember hearing anything about it.”
“It didn’t garner much prominence in the newspapers,” Keane said. “And that was the last rally you went to over there until you attended this one.”
“Yeah,” she said. “After that death, it was not something I really wanted to promote anymore.”
“Understandable,” her brother murmured. He looked over at Keane. “Are you expecting that to be connected?”
“I think that quite possibly it is, yes.”
At that, she stared, comprehension slowly settling. “You think the organizers were killed because of the boy’s death? And by his real parents?”
Keane nodded. “That’s what I think.”
“Cause of accident?” Nico asked.
“No idea. Apparently there wasn’t a whole lot left of the vehicle. It went off the road, and, if it was run off the road, they don’t know. Both passenger and driver were thrown out of the vehicle, hence their severe injuries. But, even though they had technically survived the crash, they would have died from the burns anyway.”
“So, no way to open that investigation up or to access those files and take another look?” Charlotte asked.
“Our team’s already sending those records to us,” Keane said.
“And who are these birth parents?” she asked.
“We have Dave Mortimer and Ellen Flagstaff.”
“Neither name means anything to me,” she said.
“We’re getting images too. And of the adopting family,” Nico said. “Let’s see who everybody involved in this is.” He nodded and typed something back into the Mavericks chat box. “They’re getting it.”
Charlotte sat here, slumped in her chair, thinking about how devastating it must be to lose a child. But now that he had finally turned eighteen, and the birth parents had a hope of having a relationship, then he dies? “I wonder what the conversation was between the birth parents and Andy.”
“According to the adoptive family, he said he wasn’t ready for a relationship with his birth parents.”
“Ah,” she said with understanding. “If so, then basically his death caused by this rally lost them something they’ve been waiting a long time for, and what he had said could potentially happen down the road had been taken away from them.”
“That would be a motive, yes.”
She looked over at Nico. “So why did it have to happen in Australia though?”
“As a reenactment of Andy’s death?” Keane offered. “Everything certainly seems to be centered around Australia and what happened there.”
“Or,” Nico suggested, “if the Australian birth family wanted revenge, it would make sense because they would have connections there.”
“As in helicopters? Isn’t that a bit over-the-top?”
“It depends if they have money, and it depends on how badly they wanted you to pay for their son’s death.”
“And why am I to blame? A lot of our group was there.”
Nico reached out a hand and clasped her fingers. “That unfortunately I can answer. According to his adoptive family, he was all gung-ho about seeing you.”
Her eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “Seriously?”
Nico nodded. “According to the family, he was very impressed with you.”
She groaned and sagged back. “So here we have adolescent worship, and, for all the wrong reasons, he shows up to a local rally where I’m a spokesperson. I speak with him briefly, for maybe less than a minute, and he gets killed at the rally, and now I’m blamed for his death?” She shook her head. “And have you found a way to disconnect my assistant from all this?”
“No, not at all. Considering she’s the one who insisted you go, we have to consider that she is likely connected.”
“I don’t want to think of that,” she said quietly. “I really enjoyed having her around, but it wasn’t always easy.”
“If it was a friendship,” her brother said quietly. “It’s what I do too. For years I made friends, but they were all for a purpose—to get me the information I needed.”
She stared at him, her insides sinking. “And, of course, once she had her job done, she was done.”
“Yes, now we don’t have that name exiting through customs. She hasn’t left Australia yet, so she should be still there. She was confirmed on a plane to Sydney, and there’s no reason that she shouldn’t have disembarked there.”
“If she had a second ID, would she have been able to use that to get off elsewhere? So that nobody knows where the actual passenger is?”
“They’d be looking for her, in theory, if that was the case,” he said. “Because you’re pretty well tagged when you
