Last Girl Ghosted(99)

He had forgotten about the client. All he thought about was the ghost. And Wren.

“Get over this and come back home,” Nora said, then hung up in the silence that followed.

But he hadn’t stopped. He’d tracked down Jax, agreed to help her gratis. Now, here they were, six weeks later.

“Not you,” Bailey says now. “He’ll know you. Obviously, he knows everything about her.”

Ben comes to sit beside Jax, takes her hand. They’re mismatched, Bailey thinks. She’s all wild energy, high passion, ass-kicking. Ben is mellow and pale, graying—khakis and sensible shoes. She reacts, hot, fast. He’s all slow nods and chin rubbing. But something works. Yin and yang.

“Then what?” asks Ben.

“We create a person, one who fits his criteria—young, gorgeous, rich, and tortured by some childhood trauma. If he takes the bait, we set a date. When our fake person doesn’t show, we follow him from there,” says Jax.

“What are the odds something like that even works?” says Jason from the table. He’s a tall, skinny guy with a mop of dark hair and a beard, bespectacled, pasty and slouched from too much screen time.

“About as good as our odds just going over all the same information we’ve been looking at for the last week. We have nothing. Well, almost nothing,” says Bailey.

He fishes the folded white paper from his pocket, hands it to Jason.

“What’s this?”

“The Bitcoin account where Wren had her money transferred. Can you do anything with it?”

“The whole point of Bitcoin is that it’s untraceable.” Jason nods thoughtfully, looking at the mostly blank page. “Maybe. I’ll need to see a guy.”

He rises, moves quickly toward the door with a wave. “I’ll call you later.”

“Be careful,” Jax says, eyes following him. It’s what she says to everyone when they leave the town house. Ben rubs her shoulder, and she leans into him.

“How do we create a person?” she asks.

“I know someone who can help. Who might help. We might not have to do it from scratch.”

“Do it,” says Jax. She is the unofficial client, the ringleader of the team that has been assembled to find Wren. “Do it fast. We’re losing her. I can feel it.”

Bailey nods, pretends not to notice that she’s crying. He walks away to make the call.

“Hey,” a smoky voice answers. Sabrina. “You are in the shithouse around here.”

“I know.”

“Let me guess. You’ve gone rogue. And PI work is not as easy as it is when you have a whole tech team at your disposal, a bank of millennials who live for the screen. Some of whom will sleep with you when they’ve had too much to drink after the office Christmas party.”

“Sabrina.”

“And who you casually hook up with from time to time.”

“It’s not like that.” He makes his voice soft, smiles.

“And then don’t call for months.”

“Stop.”

“Until you need something.”

“Wow.”

“Am I wrong?”

“No,” he admits. “You’re not wrong except that you left out the fact that we’re friends. That we go to the movies, we play pool, we had a picnic that time. It wasn’t just hookups.”

She clicks her tongue twice. “There’s always a polite preamble to hooking up. True. You’re good like that. I never feel used.”

He can almost see her twirling at a strand of her hair, which was violet the last time he saw her but could be any color now. Those heavily lidded eyes, that knowing smile of glossed lips. She’s almost twenty years younger than Bailey, lush and full, funny, sexy, smart-ass.

“How are you?” she asks. “Really.”

“I’ve been better.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“That sounded like a lie. I’d have thought you’d be a better liar.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, just you know, there are all these layers to you. You’re complicated. Anyway, let me guess. You found out our guy is back on Torch.”

“You knew.”

“Of course, I’ve been watching for him. I want him as bad as you do.”

“I need you to create a profile.”

“Way ahead of you.” His phone pings; there is a link in his texts that he clicks with his thumb. A grainy image of a girl with big eyes and ombre hair, bleach blonde with copper roots. It’s Sabrina’s face, but the name is Angel. Likes: solitude, darkness, rain storms; Dislikes: stupid people, haters, litter; Favorite band: Bauhaus; Favorite Film: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Poet? Rilke, of course.

“She already has a history. I gave her an Instagram—fuck Facebook and Twitter, they’re for tools and oldsters.”

“What’s her background trauma?”

“Parents died in a car crash when she was thirteen, picking her up from a party that she wasn’t supposed to be at. I found some news articles first, about a real incident. That’s how I created her. If he hunts for info on the Torch Angel, that’s the background information he’ll find. Also, the real girl is loaded; and she looks a lot like me. I copied her hair. If he doesn’t look too closely, dig too deep, it would be easy to think that Torch Angel was the real girl from the articles. The character of Angel, bait for the ghost.”