Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
“It’s downloading now.” Maizie sat facing her at the table in the RV.
Kenna had headphones on, and she could hear Maizie through those, rather than from the passenger’s seat that she’d rotated around so she could sit up. She couldn’t easily get between the table and the back of the seat, not if she was going to sit there for a while. She even had a footrest set up.
“Whoa.”
Thank You. Kenna had been about to lose her mind if they didn’t actually get a lead they could move on. “What is it, Maze?”
Zeyla had turned down the request to wear a camera, but she was on comms. She’d picked the lock on Sylvia Caughton’s high-rise apartment and searched the whole place until she found an external hard drive in the wall safe.
Instead of leaving, she’d connected it to the tablet she had in her backpack and gave Maizie access to the drive while she finished walking around.
“We’ve got some serious problems.” Maizie shook her head. “She has a ton of research on here, everything there is to know about Kenna and the rest of us. Ramon’s FBI personnel file. All of it.”
Kenna looked at her own computer. She had Sylvia Caughton’s social media and her profile at the newspaper she worked for open in her browser. “Maybe Jax could pass on to the FBI that they’ve had a security breach while he’s there talking to them.”
The investigation into the disappearances of Crystal and her two children had become a federal case, and Ryson had gone with Jax to confer with the feds on everything they knew about it. Hopefully, the feds could find some use for their tech to find the family. Kenna was running out of ideas.
She wanted to find Sylvia Caughton herself and interrogate her about where they were, but the woman hadn’t shown up recently.
Zeyla said, “This place is a wash otherwise. There’s nothing here that’s personal. It looks like it’s been staged. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the furniture has the retail tags tucked out of sight.”
“You’re going to get out of there?” Kenna said into the headset mic.
“On my way out.”
“Copy that.” To Maizie, she said, “Anything else?”
“I’m not sure you want to know.”
“Just tell me.” Kenna might need to lie down, but she could handle the hard news. This woman was a Dominatus operative, according to Wallace. He had nothing to do with this; he was only a victim. If she believed what he’d said, this woman had to be the key they’d been looking for.
“Newspaper articles all written and ready to be sent.”
“So she really is a reporter?” Kenna hadn’t expected that. “I thought it was just a cover.”
“Maybe this is Dominatus weekly news or something,” Maizie said. “Do they do that, Zeyla? Put out updates to the whole organization?”
“Huh.”
Maizie looked at Kenna, probably thinking the same thing.
Was that really all Zeyla was going to tell them?
The woman was downtown, at a fancy high-rise.
It might be a cover or the address that had been secured to keep her cover intact or some kind of bolt-hole.
A place to do business under the guise of it being her home.
“Zeyla?”
The other woman was quiet, then finally, Kenna heard her respond through the headphones. “I have that CD. Maybe it’s a thing, being raised as we were. This might actually be something personal.”
“Or the cover needed a taste in music, and she just picked what she knew.”
“Maybe. It’s telling, though.” Zeyla stopped abruptly. “Please hold.”
The connection crackled.
“There’s no one to back her up.”
Maizie asked, “Does she need it?”
“I don’t love the situation.” She tapped her foot in the air in a rhythm, her feet stacked on a small drinks cooler they usually kept in the car. “Part of me wants to call around. See who can come here and help us out. We need more coverage.”
“Like Amara and Bruce?”
Kenna nodded. “Maybe even Stairns.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.” Maizie shot her a look.
“Zeyla needs backup. So does Jax. Who knows what Preston is up to right now.” Not to mention the two of them were the only ones in the RV. Just a pregnant woman and a young adult with limited skills in protecting herself. “I’m getting my gun.”
Kenna set the laptop on the other front seat and slid off her headphones. She wandered to the bedroom closet and pulled out the small lockbox where she kept a loaded 9mm. She checked it but put the safety on before she wandered back to her seat.
“Are you serious?” Maizie said into her headphones.
Kenna passed her, glancing at her face so she could get a read on what was being said from her expression. It didn’t provide much insight. She grabbed the laptop, slid the headphones on, and tucked the gun by her leg on the seat. “What’s going on?”
Maizie reacted. Not quite a flinch, but it was close.
“Zeyla?”
“Fine,” the other woman said over the comms channel. “I’m in the stairwell now, by the way. I just mentioned Mom since you brought her up.”
“Last time I talked to her she was going to tell me something important. We never got to finish our conversation.” Kenna had called her back a couple of times since but had gotten no answer. “Do you know what she was going to tell me?”
“It’s not that Mom thinks you’ll hate her for it. It’s just that it’s bad. Maybe she regrets what she did, but I think she did the world a favor.”
“We have to find a family. Do I need to know this in order to do that?” Kenna figured she’d get what was being said. They had priorities and, right now, those leaned more toward finding this Dominatus asset and figuring out what she’d been up to.
“Maybe it’s connected, and maybe it isn’t. How do we know?”
“It’s definitely connected,” Maizie said.
Kenna glanced over at her, frowning.
“I’m sending it to you,” Maizie said to Kenna. “Zeyla, tell her what you told me.”
Silence on the line echoed while Kenna opened the message Maizie had just sent. The attached document, a PDF, was an article…about Kenna.
Expert PI Unable to Locate Missing Child
“She wrote an article about how I’m failing to find Ellayna?
And she hasn’t posted it yet?” If the reporter wanted to rub it in her face, she was running out of time to do that.
As soon as they located Sylvia Caughton, they would find Ellayna.
“Maybe it’s still part of the cover. Just for fun. Or it’s a code.”
“It’s significant,” Zeyla said. “Because you’re the only Dominatus offspring in this generation who is able to have a child.”
She had only found that out because Dominatus wanted her to know why they thought she was special. Kenna didn’t care. The life she and Jax had created was theirs and didn’t belong to this dark group.
“Any information is information they’ll use as leverage. They don’t know how to do anything other than manipulate everyone around them.”
“So tell me how it was done?” Kenna wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but she had to ask.
“She’s the one who did it,” Zeyla said. “She introduced an anomaly in the gene sequence that sterilized every child conceived in our generation. Except her sister’s child.”
“Why didn’t she skip you, too?” Kenna swallowed against the lump in her throat.
“Part of the reason why it worked was because she allowed them to give her child the anomaly,” Zeyla said. “If she was going to do this to the children, she wasn’t going to save herself. She was going to hold herself and her child to the same standard.”
“I’m sorry.” Kenna swiped a tear from her cheek.
Zeyla cleared her throat. “We should talk about this when I get back. I’ll be there soon.”
The comms channel went dead.
Kenna peeled off her headphones. “Is she okay?”
Maizie looked at her computer, a sheen of tears in her eyes. She sniffed. “She’s on the sidewalk now, heading to where she parked the car.”
Kenna laid her head back on the seat. “We need to find Sylvia. She knows where Ellayna is.”
Maizie said, “I know. She hasn’t used her credit cards or her phone. Same for Marcus and Wallace and Crystal. She’s not using theirs either.”
“Hopefully, Marcus is the only one of them who is dead.” Kenna looked at the article.
“She was really raking me over the coals. According to this article, I’m basically inept.
” Kenna kept scanning, skimming what Sylvia had written.
“But then it mentions my skills and my aptitude? It’s more like a report on my performance than journalism, but it certainly has a flavor of that. ”
Maizie said, “There’s an article about the president battling health issues that might be affecting her job performance. It has the same part at the end that yours does, her aptitude and ability to function long-term while under stress.”
“Do you know if she actually has health issues?”
Maizie shrugged. “There’s nothing on a basic web search, but maybe they’re privy to information the general public doesn’t get access to.”
“That I believe. If this is a Dominatus news report.” Kenna sighed. “The more I learn about them, the more I’m disturbed and the less I’m surprised.”
“But if you told some regular person on the street, they’d think you’re some crazy conspiracy theorist.”
Kenna grinned. “Isn’t that the truth. To us, it doesn’t sound like such a crazy thing that they took Wallace Lofton’s voice and created additional podcasts after he said he wanted to quit. That they just…pretend to be someone.”
Huh.
She frowned.
Maizie asked, “What is it?”
Kenna shut the lid of her laptop and looked at the young woman. “You had access to that program at one point, right?”
“Yeah, when you were held captive and they were using Jax’s face on calls to shut down the former president. The president was trying to build a team to fight Dominatus in the US.”
But they’d killed him.
Kenna pushed the fear away as if she could hold it back by sheer force of will. “Is there a way to tell that a voice was produced by the program?”
“You want me to run the podcasts through it, see what was real and what wasn’t?”
“Maybe, but I was thinking something else.” Kenna jogged her knee up and down, wondering if she was right or if she was actually losing her mind and doubting everything she believed. “I want you to run the voicemail I got from Ellayna through it. I want to know if it was really her.”
Maizie flinched. “What makes you think it might not be real? We know they’re capable of capturing and hurting people. Why would they need to fake it?”
“Call it instinct, because I’m not sure I can put my finger on it exactly.” It was more like a culmination of a few things, like the way the articles were written and how this whole thing had gone down. And why Marcus Neerwood needed to die.
The reason why a software company in Pueblo killed a man about to expose them.
“Find out if it’s really Ellayna.”
Maizie said, “And if it isn’t?”
“They’re still missing, and we need to find them,” Kenna said. “But they might not be the victims we think they are.”
Her phone and Maizie’s phone started to chime simultaneously, but Maizie was quicker to look at hers and react. She tapped the screen, and Kenna heard it ring through the speaker.
“What’s up, Maze?”
Maizie had called Jax. Kenna looked at her phone and saw the alert just as Maizie said, “Zeyla’s phone pinged a Mayday. She’s in trouble.”