Killer Instinct (Instinct #2)(23)

Doug checked his email again. It hadn’t arrived the first time he looked. Two’s a charm. “There it is,” he said. “Got it.”

But there was still more to do before using it. After filming Elizabeth in the Louboutins, he also had to film her barefoot to create a baseline. After all, it’s not like our mystery woman would’ve worn her Malefissimas while doing her reconnaissance.

She did scout the hotel, right? She had to have done a walk-through before the night she returned with Darvish. Otherwise, we were wasting our time.

A lot of time.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home and get some sleep?” asked Doug as he began the task of singling out every woman who could be seen in the surveillance footage from the hotel, over a hundred hours’ worth.

We were hardly about to bail on him, though.

“We’ll sleep when you sleep,” I said. It was the least we could do. Or, at least, try to do. By about 3:00 a.m., Elizabeth and I had both dozed off on a couch behind Doug’s console. Had he actually known we were asleep he probably wouldn’t have yelled. But I’d never been so happy in my life to be jolted awake.

Doug had been at his keyboard for six hours straight and looked every minute of it. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair the full-on Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands. Yet all I could really see was his smile. It was the same one he’d flashed when we first met him. Only wider. Much wider.

“Well?” I asked.

“Impossible, my ass,” he said.





CHAPTER 30


IT TRULY was a thing of beauty.

In nerd terms, Doug had overlaid an algorithm onto every single frame of the footage, identifying and measuring all movement against an extrapolation of how the mystery woman would walk in every heel size using the baselines of Elizabeth both in the Louboutins and barefoot.

In non-nerd terms? He crushed it.

From over a thousand possible women, Doug had narrowed the field down to five.

The first two were white, albeit with either slightly darker complexions or tans—most likely the spray-booth variety.

“Is that one Hispanic?” asked Elizabeth, pointing at the third.

“Could be,” I said. “She could also be a Filipina.”

“What about the last two?” Elizabeth leaned toward Doug’s main monitor. “Can we zoom in on them?”

Doug punched some keys. The more he zoomed in, though, the more pixelated the image got.

“Hard to tell,” I said. “She could be South American, Indian, Middle Eastern, none of the above? Take your pick.”

“Not that it makes a difference,” said Elizabeth.

We all could agree on that. Knowing the woman’s ethnicity was a long way from knowing her name and address.

“What now?” asked Doug.

“That depends,” I said. “Porterhouse or bone-in rib eye?”

“Huh?”

“The steak dinner that I’m going to buy you.”

“Thanks, except you still don’t know who your woman is.”

“No, not yet,” I said. “If only she could’ve been your exgirlfriend with the Louboutin obsession, right?”

He smiled, but it was half-hearted. To say he was now fully vested in the outcome was an understatement. Who could blame him? He’d gotten us so close. Even if he’d narrowed the choice down to one, though, it wasn’t as if we could immediately identify her.

I was pretty sure that realization was settling over him when he suddenly snapped his fingers. He’d answered his own question.

“Facial recognition software,” he said. “That’s what’s next.”

I nodded. “Yep.”

The next step was seeing how many of these women we could identify through either mug shots or driver’s license photos. Both the NYPD and the FBI had the facial recognition software sophisticated enough to accomplish that.

But there’s a difference between taking the next step and being a step ahead. Already this was feeling like a chess match.

What were the chances that our mystery woman was really going to show up in either DMV records or a criminal database?

Sometimes the best covert agents and operatives are the ones who hide in plain sight. No one knows who they are because no one ever suspects that they’re anything different from what they want you to believe.

Other times it’s the exact opposite. The best are the ones who are so far off the grid it’s as if they’d never existed.

All I knew was that we had to allow for both possibilities.

Or maybe worse. Neither of the two.

What if this woman was a category all to herself?





CHAPTER 31


I HATED doing what I did next. But it had to be done.

Elizabeth and I cabbed it back to Tracy’s and my apartment. She was due at work in less than four hours and needed every minute of sleep she could get until then. “Is it weird if I wear the Louboutins to bed?” she joked before saying good night.

As far as she knew I was crawling into bed, too, equally as exhausted. I’d even said something on the way up in the elevator about needing to be quiet so as not to wake up Tracy.

But I never went into our bedroom.

After taking a peek at Annabelle—she looked so adorable snuggled up in her crib—I was back in the elevator and heading to the garage down the block for my motorcycle. I reattached my license plate with some tape. I hope it holds because it’s time to break some speed laws …