Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(120)

“I was about to. Until you annoyingly made me explain all of that.”

“Do it.”

“I’m doing it.” Her hands hover over the keyboard.

“What?”

Her tongue makes a hesitant clicking sound against the top of her mouth. “Of course, if the person didn’t want to be found, they could easily spoof this without trying too hard. It’s like a pay-phone analogy. Telecom can tell you the incoming number and where the phone is with that number as far as their records know. Doesn’t mean I can’t unbolt the pay phone and call from some other place in town.”

“How do we know if it’s a spoof?”

“I can tell you whether this IP exists or not, and if it does, you can tell me whether the location makes sense.”

She opens up a website called IP2Location and plugs in the address and a Starbucks in Tacoma pops up.

“That’s it,” Claire says. “That’s the right location.”

Andrea asks if Claire has anything more and Claire says not really. “Just a video.”

“Show me.”



Andrea downloads both the discs and converts and compresses them through a program called Prism and opens them in two small windows and watches them simultaneously, dragging her cursor across them—pausing, jogging back, jogging forward, pausing again.

When Puck’s hand appears in the foreground of the video and rakes the air, she says, “That’s really f*cking creepy.”

She asks repeatedly for more information and Claire tells her she can’t. Not because she doesn’t trust her, but because if she shared any more, they would both be in danger. “Right now, you’re just helping me decipher a video. Nothing illegal about that.”

Andrea stares at her for a long few seconds. “Look at you, all black ops and shit.” She readjusts her scrunchie. “Fine.”

She opens up Google. Plugs in “Tacoma, motels.” Dozens of listings pop up. She switches over to maps. The screen turns half-blue with Puget Sound, the Tacoma area fingering into it, lined white and black with roads. Orange dots indicate the many motels sprinkled throughout the city. “She’s near freshwater. So we can eliminate most of these.”

“How do you even know she’s near water?”

Andrea drags the bar at the base of the video and halts on a still frame of Miriam pumping out a set of pull-ups on the playground equipment. She jacks up the zoom 300 percent and drags the screen until it fills with a mass of sagging green branches, one of many weeping willows that edge the park. “Duh.”

Andrea says her aunt looks ripped but still probably wouldn’t run more than ten miles at a time, right? Not in this kind of weather?

Claire says she can’t say for sure. Her aunt is an unusual woman.

“We’ll start there anyway.” Andrea narrows the motels down to eleven based on their nearness to rivers and lakes, almost all of which butt up against parks. She switches over to satellite view and drops down to street level. Here is a motel called the Dew Drop Inn with a concrete porch and yellow-brick walls. Then the Tacoma Inn. The Rainier Inn. The Cascade Motel. No, she says. No. No. Nope. She rushes up to a cloud’s point of view and then down to a sidewalk so quickly, trampolining from address to address.

In this way Andrea eliminates every hotel except for three that don’t have satellite feeds. “Guess we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

She switches her iPhone to speaker and plugs in one phone number, and then another, asking the clerks how many rooms they have—seven the number she’s looking for—unless they have more than one building?

Claire realizes her teeth ache from steadily clenching her jaw. She is ready to give up when Andrea calls the last number, the Bigfoot Motel.

A voice clawed out by cigarettes answers and Andrea asks how many rooms they have.

“Available or total?” the voice says.

“Total.”

“Seven.”

Claire feels something come to life inside of her then, like those ink-wash clouds flickering with electricity that sometimes hung over Wisconsin and boiled into something significant or dispersed into a wash of gray tendrils.

“What does your motel look like?”

“What do you mean what does it look like? It looks like a motel.”

“Is it brown?”

“Yeah, it’s brown. What do you care what color it is?”

“I love brown motels, okay? They’re awesome. And you’re near some woods?”

“Yeah. You love woods too?”

“Yes, I love woods. Can you by chance list off who is staying with you presently? Pretty please?”

“No.”

Claire leans in to the phone and says, “Has anybody checked out on you unexpectedly? Like, in the past week or two?”

“That happens so often I can’t even tell you. You want a room or not?”

Andrea severs the connection and highlights the address. “That’s it. Bigfoot Motel.”

Claire reaches out a hand, open palmed, and Andrea slaps it. The sound hangs in the air and then they say, at the same instant, “Thanks,” and “You’re welcome.”

“You know I used to think you were dumb?” Claire says.

“You know I used to think you were a prude snob bitch monster?”