Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(64)
“This morning. She was still asleep when I left for a final. When I came home the first time, she wasn’t here, and I didn’t think anything about it because she had finals today, too. When I got back later this evening, her purse was here. . . .”
“It wasn’t here earlier?”
“No, so I thought she might be somewhere in the dorm, maybe visiting someone or doing laundry, but then, as it got later and later, I started to worry.”
“Why?”
“Because I was afraid she might have done something to hurt herself,” Jenny answered. “She’d had a terrible weekend. I’m pretty sure she and Ron are in the process of breaking up, and she’s taking it really hard. In fact, I was going to try calling Ron to ask him straight out about what was going on, but that’s when I remembered the Find My Phone app, so I did that instead—I went looking for her phone.”
Detective Weatherby returned looking decidedly unhappy and spoke briefly to his partner, whispering something in Detective Hunter’s ear.
Scowling, she turned back to Jenny. “Your mother is Sheriff Brady from Cochise County?”
Jenny nodded.
“And you already spoke to her about this before you spoke to us?”
“She’s my mother,” Jenny said, pointing out the obvious. “Why wouldn’t I talk to her?”
Detective Hunter turned off the iPad and stowed it in her purse. “Well,” she sniffed, “it would appear that she’s run the situation up the flagpole to someone at the FBI, and they’re evidently taking over the cyber part of the investigation. We’ll still be trying to locate Beth, but that’s it. The feds will be doing the forensic analysis of Beth’s devices, but we’ve been advised to take them into custody. So tell us, please, which of those two computers belongs to her?”
Jenny’s and Beth’s virtually identical computers sat side by side on Jenny’s desk. Jenny retrieved the latter and handed it over. Clearly Detective Hunter was pissed about this turn of events. She took Beth’s computer and stalked from the room without a word of thanks and without bothering to say good-bye either.
It was close to eleven when the detectives departed, leaving Jenny alone. She crawled into bed, not because she expected to fall asleep but because she needed the comforting warmth of her covers. She lay there in her cocoon of blankets and thought about Beth Rankin outside and alone in the frigid cold and dark. It was enough to leave Jennifer Brady feeling empty and broken.
Chapter 28
Most of Gerard Paine’s neighbors in the town houses along West Placita Del Correcaminos in Tucson’s Starr Pass neighborhood were retirees who spent their daytime hours playing golf or tennis or bingo or bridge. He did not. They walked or jogged or rode bikes. He did not. They did their shopping at grocery stores. He ordered most of his goods online, including some fresh items he had delivered from a local Safeway. They had pals and friendships. He was a loner.
They were all married or widowed or divorced. He was divorced, but if asked, he claimed to be a lifelong bachelor, because he didn’t want to be cornered into mentioning the specific reasons behind his very rancorous divorce. Some of his neighbors were snowbirds who were half-time Arizona residents and half-time somewhere else. They all wore their home state’s sports teams’ colors and drove cars with out-of-state license plates. If asked, Gerard claimed he came from Tornado Alley—without specifying where—because he hated tornadoes. He didn’t mention his years of teaching school in Oklahoma City because someone might have looked into the history of just why Gerard Paine had left the Sooner State with his tail between his legs.
So his fifty-five-plus neighbors lived their lives during daylight hours, while he inhabited the night shift. While they did their Google searches with Safari or DuckDuckGo or Firefox, Gerard was a denizen of Tor and the dark web. If his neighbors were good, Gerard was evil.
His two-bedroom condo had once belonged to his mother. Bernice Paine, a social butterfly and a killer at bridge, had maintained an open-door policy with round-the-clock guests and out-of-town visitors. Once she passed away and Gerard moved in to take her place, that open door slammed shut. Other than delivery people, no one came or went from his door—absolutely no one—and even the folks from UPS and FedEx never ventured any farther than his front porch.
Gerard Paine was a recluse, and he liked it that way. Obviously, he had enough money. Every two years he leased a new Lexus that he barely drove, but as far as anyone could tell, those biyearly new cars were his only extravagance. He didn’t travel. He was not a cruiser. He was an odd duck, enough so that people were more than happy to leave him alone.
Had anyone ventured inside his home, they would have been astonished and probably more than a bit puzzled by the sheer amount of computer equipment scattered throughout. The kitchen and master bedroom were relatively free of electronics, but every other available space in the house was covered with either computers, scanners, or printers. The walls were filled with outsize monitors and screens. For Gerard the overwhelming tech presence made perfect sense because, as far as he was concerned, that’s where he lived his life—in those computers and on those screens.
There were plenty of people outside the immediate neighborhood who knew of his computer presence. Some thought they knew him, or at least a version of him. For Beth Rankin in Flagstaff, he was Ronald Cameron of Washington, D.C. For Teresa Talbot in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he was Carl Draper, an IT guy from San Diego, California. For Samantha Toon of Billings, Montana, he was Leonard Cooper, a cybersecurity expert from Tampa, Florida. He was all of those and many more. What he really did for a living—his real life’s work—was to run one of the most successful porn sites on the planet.