Chapter 29
29
Nathan
“ I cannot believe you played along with Christa’s plan,” Cassius concludes once a teary-eyed Teagan tells us about the events of last night.
We’re still in River’s office. Still scrambling to find Christa. At least we now have new information to work with, more than twelve hours since we last saw her.
“It made sense. It makes sense, even now,” Teagan insists. “I got home last night, and I left my phone on silent and crashed. Cass, I had no idea she’d gone missing. I texted her to let her know I was okay, and that was that. I figured we’d catch up this morning.”
“Instead, she’s gone,” River scoffs.
“Do not fault Christa for trying to do the right thing with minimal damage,” our sister says. “I trust her and Spike on this. I really do.”
“Something happened,” I reply. “She tried to hide it, but we know she was here last night. We have a lead.”
I get River out of his seat and take his place so I can log into my security account from his computer and tap into the Hawthorne CCTV system.
“We need to track her movements through the building,” River says.
“I’m already on it.”
Teagan sighs loudly. “Christa said she was going to use cloned credentials to move through the building, that she was going to be careful about the cameras. It was all meant to protect you guys from the potential legal fallout.”
“But she was in her office. And judging by the activity records from last night, the camera in her office wasn’t disabled,” I mutter, going over the logs before I pull up the footage in a separate window. “Here she is…”
“What about Spike?” Cassius asks. “Have you heard from him since last night?”
She shakes her head. “He left a text on our group chat, I think,” she adds and takes her phone out, checking her messages. “Yeah… He left a… I don’t get it.”
“What?” River replies, inching closer so he can see her screen. I notice his frown deepen. “It’s a string of letters, numbers and symbols. It doesn’t make sense…”
“Hold on, I found her,” I say, prompting my siblings to gather behind me while we comb through the security footage. We see Christa coming into her office. I hit the fast-forward button all the way up to the point where she’s about to leave.
Teagan gasps. “What the…”
The office door opens, and in walks Alexandra Jones.
“What the shit?” I gasp.
“She said she hadn’t heard from Christa since yesterday,” River mutters.
“Is that a gun?” Cassius points at the screen.
I pause the video for a few seconds and zoom in to confirm. “It’s a gun,” I say, then hit play again. We watch as Alexandra takes Christa out of her office at gunpoint. But as I try to follow them through the building, the image turns grainy. “This isn’t right…”
“What is it?” River asks.
“Someone tampered with the security footage,” I conclude, going over the activity logs again. “Someone edited out some footage.”
“But not the sequence from Christa’s office,” River says.
“Knowing Christa… she must’ve… hold on,” I reply and open another activity log linked directly to her servers. I would need an expert’s eye on this, but at a glance, I think I know what Christa did. “She tapped into her office camera and rerouted the footage recording on a mirror drive. That way, if anybody ever tampered with the Hawthorne CCTV, whatever went on in her office would be saved separately.”
“So, if someone wanted to alter the CCTV footage to keep us from finding something out… like Alexandra probably did,” River says, “we’d have Christa’s office camera to rely on.”
“Christa was always a tad more paranoid in matters of surveillance,” Cassius concedes. “In hindsight, it may just be that quirk of hers that might save her.”
“Might, if we find her in time,” I groan and run a hand through my hair. “Goddammit, Christa.”
River takes a deep breath and a step back. “Can we find Alexandra and Christa anywhere else in that footage, Nate?”
“No.”
“Okay. So, Alexandra Jones is involved somehow. We need to figure out what she wants,” River says. “I think we need to look into her again. Her profile, her company, her financials.”
“I think we also need to bring in the police,” Cassius adds. “It’s time.”
Teagan gives me a terrified look. “That will blow the whole thing wide open. It will give the Mancinis time to cover their asses. The whole point was to hit them before they could see it coming. They thought they had Christa cornered—”
“We need Christa to survive,” I remind her. “Everything else will work out, one way or another. But we have to find her. We need a plan.”
Cassius nods in agreement. “I’ll follow up on the law enforcement side of things.”
“Go straight to the FBI with this,” I tell him. “Do not run it through the Portland PD first because we don’t know if any of those cops are on the Mancinis’ payroll.”
“I’ll dig into Alexandra Jones again,” River says. “I’ll make some calls. We’ve got a good network of information officers to work with.”
“And Teagan and I will go talk to Spike. Chances are, he knows more about Christa’s online activities and where she might’ve stashed any information she had regarding the Mancinis,” I say. “If Cass is going to bring the FBI into this, then those suits will need some kind of proof to work with. Their organized crime division is under a lot of scrutiny these days.”
“Guys, I’m scared,” Teagan says. “I can’t get a hold of Spike either. I just tried calling him.”
My stomach drops. I think I know what we’re about to walk into.
I’m scared, too. I’m scared we won’t get to Christa in time. That we’ll lose her and our baby.
Upon reaching Spike’s apartment building, I turn to look at Teagan, now small and quivering in the passenger seat of my SUV.
“You need to stay put. Don’t come in unless I tell you,” I say.
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“I’m not a kid anymore, and Christa means the world to me, not just you. I can handle it.”
I shake my head slowly. “You, Christa, and Spike had a plan. You executed it last night, but Christa went missing, and Spike isn’t reachable. Hawthorne security footage was scrubbed. Christa’s cyberattack targeted the Mancinis. Alexandra took Christa out of the offices at gunpoint last night. We’re missing a connection here. On top of that, one or all three of you were probably bugged at some point. Someone knew where Christa would be last night.”
“They didn’t see me at the Mancini office building,” Teagan mumbles, her gaze drifting off to the side. “Do you think they knew we were coming and let us do what we planned to do?”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“Do you think we did it for nothing, that Christa might die and the Mancinis will get away with it?” She sounds horrified. The same thought has crossed my mind more than once since I saw Alexandra on the security footage.
“I don’t know how it will end. But I do know that if anything happens to Christa or the baby, we will burn that entire fucking family to the ground, and there’s no law enforcement agency in this world that will be able to stop us,” I reply. “In the meantime, I need you to sit tight. Please.”
“Okay.”
I leave her in the car and cautiously make my way into Spike’s apartment building. Relying on Teagan’s knowledge of the guy, I expect to find a hacker’s lair, except the front door is slightly ajar, and a subtle smell of iron hits my nose before I even step inside.
My worst fear has come true. I don’t need to see it. But I have to.
“Anyone in here?” I call out.
I hear the humming of a computer in a nearby room. The deeper I go, the more prominent the smell of blood. I notice the armchair toppled over in the living room, the glass-topped coffee table smashed, the torn sofa, stuffing spilling out. I see the beer bottles strewn through the hallway, which is dark.
The computer is on. A plethora of software runs on multiple screens. Blood is smeared over the keyboard and the desktop.
“Spike? It’s Nathan Hawthorne,” I call out again. “Just checking in on you, buddy.”
Looking around, I make a note of every detail that stands out. And plenty stand out. Something bad went down here.
The bedroom is at the end of the hallway.
“Are you here?” I ask, then wait for a response.
Nothing. Just the same eerie silence, weighing heavily on me as I walk down the hallway and push open the bedroom door.
“Shit,” I mutter.
Spike is dead. He’s been dead for a few hours, at least, hands and feet bound to the posters of his bed. There’s so much blood everywhere. He was tortured. And he’s staring at me, gone from this world yet with glassy eyes wide open. They made him suffer.
“Oh, my God!” Teagan exclaims from behind me.
Immediately I whirl around and get her out of the bedroom. “I told you to stay put!”
“Oh, God! Nate, was that… was that Spike?!”
I manage to push her back into the living room and hold her tight as she cries her heart out. There’s no way to erase what Teagan saw.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I really am.”
“They did that. The Mancini’s—” Teagan manages between heartfelt sobs.
“Most likely, yes.”
“They’ve been a step ahead of us this whole time.”
“We’re going to get through this, Tee; I promise.”
She looks up at me, and the pain in her eyes brings me back to the day my brothers and I were first deployed. It’s just like that. Her fear of never seeing us again, of losing the people she loves. It was always harder on Teagan. She never go to know Mom the way Cassius, River, and I did. And when we buried Dad, I felt the little girl inside her dry up with every inch of dirt that covered his coffin.
“I promise,” I say again, if only to see a spark of hope in her gaze.
“You’d better. Because I expect to be a matron of honor at Christa’s wedding when this is all over,” she replies.
“A wedding is going to be weird with three grooms. You know that, right?”
“I don’t care. We’ll make it work. Just get her back and be done with those Mancini fuckers, okay? Whatever it takes,” she says.
“Agreed.”