Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

“No,” Chloe said.

“I was going to drive out there. I’ve been trying him all day.”

“When’d you last talk to him?” Miles asked.

Madeline Cox turned her head. “Who are you?”

Chloe said, “This is Miles Cookson. He’s—”

Miles shot Chloe a stern not yet stare.

“—he’s a friend,” she said.

Miles extended a hand, which Madeline took with some hesitation. Her eyes narrowed as she took him in. “Do I know you?” she asked.

“No ma’am,” he said.

“Because you look a little familiar to me, like maybe we’ve met before.”

And that was when Chloe, figuring that Madeline must have seen something of Todd in Miles, studied his face in a way she hadn’t before. She quipped, “I don’t see it.”

“Excuse me?” Madeline said.

Chloe realized she had been thinking out loud and said, “Nothing. Listen, we were hoping to find Todd here, but—”

“You’ve been to his place?”

Chloe nodded worriedly. Miles, thinking back to how the trailer had been stripped of anything personal, asked, “How long has it been since Todd lived here, Ms. Cox?”

“Almost a year,” she said dispiritedly. “He had it pretty good here, getting waited on hand and foot, but he wanted to be out on his own.” She turned to Chloe and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Did you talk to him? About what he was up to?”

“I haven’t really had that much of chance,” she said.

Now Madeline turned back to Miles. “Did she tell you how she and Todd found each other? It’s quite a story.”

Miles nodded. “I’ve heard some of it.”

“Where do you think he got off to?” Todd’s mother asked. “It’s not like he hasn’t disappeared before for a day or two, but I could always get hold of him.”

“Can you think of any place he might have gone?” Chloe asked. “Someplace he’s always wanted to go?”

She thought a moment. “Africa. He’s always wanted to see giraffes and stuff.”

Miles shook his head. No one stripped their bed clean and bleached the kitchen before going to Africa.

“Well, if you’re talking to him, or hear from him, would you have him get in touch with me?” Chloe asked.

Madeline nodded. “You all want to come in or anything?”

Chloe caught Miles’s eye, as if looking for a signal. His look said not now . Madeline noticed the shiny black vehicle parked behind the Pacer. “Whose limo is that?”

“She’s with me,” Miles said. “Chloe, a minute?”

He led her back to the Pacer, and they got in. Chloe had her phone out, as if hoping Todd would get in touch, even though they knew he’d left his phone behind. She tapped, absently, on the camera app and started up some video she’d shot at Todd’s trailer.

“That’s kind of distracting,” Miles said.

“I want to get a shot of Todd’s house. For my doc. But I just wanted to look at this again.” Miles could hear his own voice and Chloe’s coming out of the phone. It was the video she’d shot when they were in the trailer. She muted it. “So what did you want to talk about in secret?”

“Something’s off about all of this,” he said.

“Yeah, I kinda was coming to that conclusion, too,” she said, glancing occasionally at the video.

“It might be time to bring in the police, report Todd missing,” he said. “But I didn’t want to mention that in front of his mom. She doesn’t know yet about how his place was cleared out. I can’t figure out why he’d do that.”

Chloe, still looking at her phone, said, “Neither can — SHIT! ”

She screamed so loud Miles felt his heart skip a beat.

“ Holy fucking shit! ” she said, staring at the screen.

“What?”

“Look!”

She turned the phone in his direction so he could get a good look at it. “This is from the trailer.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Fucking look at this.”

It was video Chloe took, walking down the hall, stopping at the bathroom, and finally, going into Todd’s bedroom.

“You see it?” she asked.

“See what?”

“Christ,” she said, using her finger to move the video back a few seconds. When it reached the part where she was entering the bedroom, she paused it, freezing the image.

“Now do you see it?”

“What am I looking at?”

“Right here,” she said, and pointed to the gap between the bed and the floor.

Miles squinted. When he saw it, his eyes went wide.

“Oh my God,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

It was a hand.

San Francisco, CA

Cheryl Howson, president and CEO of WhatsMyStory, author of the number one best seller Finding My Own Story — six weeks in the top spot on the New York Times nonfiction list — strolled into the office of her fashionable Mission District home before heading down to breakfast.

She could smell bacon.

Cheryl was strictly vegan, and breakfast for her was usually fruit and fiber, sometimes all-in-one in a smoothie, but her husband, Clifton, home this week from traveling around the world making business deals, was not, and neither was their seven-year-old daughter, Tina. So when Daddy finally had time at home, it was bacon at breakfast, burgers at lunch, and probably a T-bone for dinner. And what with Pauline, their full-time cook and housekeeper, taking a couple of days off, there was no stopping him.

Cheryl took a seat in her office and shook the mouse. The screen lit up, and she saw that she had more than a dozen emails, far too many to deal with before having her first coffee of the day. Most of them were from her assistant, who ran interference for Cheryl so she could actually do the job of running the company. But there was a request from the Wall Street Journal for a profile, a proposal from a competing firm that they share data, and some reports from her legal team about law enforcement requests to use DNA data from WhatsMyStory’s files to compare against DNA recovered from crime scenes across the country.

God, the headaches. You started an enterprise with one simple idea — find out who you are — and before you knew it you were buried under a mountain of shit. Moral and ethical issues and lawsuits coming out your ass. Look at Zuckerberg. Started off with a site that would rate college girls as “hot or not” and now he was accused of undermining democracy on a global scale. Which he was, of course, but that was his cross to bear, not hers.

She padded downstairs in her slippers, still wearing her silk pajamas and a robe, her cell tucked into the pocket. She entered the kitchen, saw Clifton blotting the grease from the rashers of bacon, and outside, on the deck, Tina watering the flowers with a small plastic watering can.

“Good morning, Tina baby!” Cheryl said through the open door. Tina waved and went back to watering.

There was a beelike buzzing noise outside.

“What is that?” Cheryl asked.

“Someone’s playing with another one of those damn drones,” her husband said.

Cheryl looked at the bacon and inhaled. “God, that smell.”

Clifton waved a slice of bacon in the air. “You know you want it.”

She snatched the bacon from his fingers, folded it over once, and shoved it into her mouth. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said. “I feel like a criminal.”

“Pancakes?” Clifton asked.

“Seriously?”

“She asked and I’m delivering.”

Cheryl raised a hand, crooked her index finger, as if holding an invisible mug, and said, “What’s missing in this picture?”

Clifton grabbed a special mug with a picture of her book emblazoned on the side, filled it with black coffee, and handed it to her. Cheryl took a sip.