Meryl Sawyer - Play Dead

“The Joint Terrorism Task Force includes the FBI, local fire and police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as well as Homeland Security. That’s tremendous manpower focused on this crime. They’ll solve the case.”

“They’re not you.” Determination was etched on every time-worn line on his father’s face. “This isn’t personal to them.”

Something inside Ryan clicked, a painful echo of the larger than life man his father had once been. Back then, Conrad Hollister would never have begged anyone for help. A host of conflicting emotions warred inside Ryan. It wouldn’t be long, he realized, before he lost the only other person he loved.

“You know I’m not an investigator. I’m a computer jock.” He said this more to Meg than his father. Meg knew what he did; they’d discussed it the first time he’d met her. But she looked so stricken, as if she’d keel over any second, that he felt he had to explain.

“I don’t trust them,” Meg said in a surprisingly firm voice. “They were here to interview me. They don’t have a clue. The car bomb has thrown them. The police think there’s some foreign connection. I tried to explain Hayley designs clothes. She doesn’t have foreign connections, but they wouldn’t listen.”

“Can’t you just look through Hayley’s things?” his father pleaded. “See if the police missed something.”

The tone of his father’s voice triggered a raw ache in Ryan. He’d miss his father as much as—if not more than—he missed Jessica. “The police won’t let me waltz into her place—”

“My place,” Meg corrected him. “I own the loft. The detectives who interviewed me said they would be through with it this afternoon. I asked because I need to find one of Hayley’s dresses for the funeral.”

Ryan struggled to hold in a gasp. After a bomb, what could be left? He couldn’t imagine a coffin with nothing in it but a dress.

Meg rose and walked with surprising agility across her suite, returning to where they were sitting with a photograph in a sterling silver frame.

“This is my Hayley.” Meg’s voice cracked. “She’s all I have.”

Kicking himself for getting into this, Ryan gazed at the girl in the photo as Meg handed it to him. It was a candid headshot obviously taken at the beach. Tousled brown hair shimmering with coppery highlights. Clear hazel eyes blazing with happiness.

Pretty. Healthy. Sexy. The typical California girl.

Except for the arresting smile that hit Ryan like a sucker punch to his gut. She had a mysterious glint in her eyes that made him wonder just what she was thinking. Something told him that there was nothing “typical” about Hayley.

He studied the photograph more closely. Those full pouty lips. Did they taste as good as they looked? And that skin the color of honey. Would it be silky smooth to the touch? His pulse kicked up a notch.

Annoyed at the direction his thoughts had taken, Ryan realized he felt some sort of connection with this woman, which was totally unexpected. Since Jessica’s death, not one brain wave had focused on sex for over a year. Why now?

“All right,” he said, feeling like a cat who’d just horked up a hairball. “I’ll check her place. I’ll also make a few phone calls and see what I can find out.”

This was like dancing on eggs. He didn’t want to give them false hope that he could personally solve this. “It may be hard to tell much at her place. I’m sure the task force has removed a lot of evidence.”

“Thank you, son,” his father said in a low-pitched voice that couldn’t hide his emotion.

“Bless you,” Meg added. “Bless you.”

Doing this small favor that meant so much to his father wasn’t a big deal, he assured himself. Still, he had the disturbing feeling that he shouldn’t be doing this. His sixth sense kicked in, telling him that Hayley Fordham was nothing but trouble.

“WHATDAYA THINK?” Ed Phillips asked Ryan.

“Too soon to tell, but so far I’m not finding much.”

Ryan had arrived at Hayley Fordham’s loft to discover the authorities were still there. He wasn’t surprised. He’d thought releasing the crime scene as early as Meg indicated was unlikely. His bad luck had not run out when he’d agreed to help Meg. The first person he saw when he walked up was Phillips.

The special agent worked with Ryan in the L.A. office. Phillips was a senior criminal intelligence analyst while Ryan was in cyber crimes, but they knew each other from previous cases. Phillips had been sent to represent the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force that Ryan had predicted would investigate this case. A car bombing so close to an airport was a huge red flag for a terrorist act.

Phillips had immediately enlisted Ryan to check Hayley Fordham’s computer and introduced him to the local detectives investigating the murder. He also spoke to the ATF guys, who were still called ATFers even though their official title was now Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“This is the computer guru who cracked the Rosier case,” Phillips announced to the team gathered in the makeshift command post set up in the ground-floor garage of Hayley Fordham’s loft. This introduction wowed the group. The Rosier case had been a fraud scam that made headlines early last year. The information that hung Carleton Rosier had been encrypted and buried on his corporation’s computers. Ryan had figured out how the con artist had created two sets of books on his computers.

“What have they got?” Ryan asked as he kept punching keys and concentrating on Hayley’s twenty-one inch screen. Phillips was standing behind him, watching. This was annoying but Ryan didn’t say anything because he needed to find out as much as he could about Hayley.

“Nothin’ unless ATF finds out something.”

ATF bomb experts spent so much time training that even though the FBI had their own team, they took a backseat to ATF. They would be looking for bomb-making equipment, although Ryan thought it was unlikely that Hayley made the bomb that killed her. Yet stranger things had happened. The bomb could have been intended for someone else and she’d accidentally detonated it.

“Nothing like this case on VICAP,” Ryan said, referring to the Violent Crimes Apprehension Program that maintained a massive database on crimes at their headquarters in Quantico.

Phillips shook his head. “Whoo-ee, this is one for the books. We get two, maybe three car bombings a year, most of them along the border. Mexican cartels have a buncha’ crazy muthafuckers who rig bombs.”

Phillips had grown up in Alabama and his roots could be heard when he talked and in the expressions he used, which was unusual at the Bureau. They encouraged the neutral cadence of newscasters. Accent aside, Phillips was one of the sharpest guys Ryan had encountered at the FBI.

“Could Hayley Fordham have been involved with drugs? Should I be looking for something like that on her computer?”

Phillips shrugged. “I doubt it, but shee-it . Who knows?”

“Are we sure that it was Hayley who was killed?”

“Ninety-nine percent sure. She used her credit card just minutes before her dadgummed car blew sky high. The license plate flew off or we wouldn’t have been able to ID the car. No body parts. She was vaporized.”

Ryan imagined the dress that Meg was coming to pick out tomorrow. Evidently, the poor woman had no idea her niece’s body was dust. “What about the security cameras? What do they show?”

“The camera at the entrance nearest the car was on the fritz but the ones in the restaurant clearly show the woman Trent Fordham identified as his half-sister, Hayley. She had drinks with an unidentified female friend, then got in her car and yow-zer. That’s all she wrote.”