Chapter 29
Catherine didn’t want to leave Jacksonville before she spoke with Franklin Graves. She reached out again; again, no answer.
She wondered if he was avoiding her calls and if it would be worth her time to go to his office. She was about to ask Ryder
what he thought when Jim called her.
“Catherine, forensics came through,” he said, sounding excited. “I’ve spent most of the day going back and forth between Quantico
and the Florida State Lab. We took the rust samples, water samples, trace evidence, and lung samples from the victims, then
isolated common particles. I’m 99 percent confident they were all kept captive in a warehouse or factory that was flooded
during the last hurricane, and I’m 90 percent confident that the location is southern Georgia or northern Florida. It could
be farther out, but taking the entirety of the evidence I think I’m right.”
“That’s great work, Jim.” But was it already too late? Matt and Kara had been missing and presumably without food and water for more than forty-eight hours. They were drugged, and based on what Jim uncovered, trapped in a dangerous warehouse.
But between the two of them, they would figure a way out, wouldn’t they? Except they hadn’t reached out, they hadn’t called
anyone for help.
“The tech lab is currently running possible locations based on known flooding, but they might not have a complete list,” Jim
said.
“It would need to be remote and abandoned, but accessible by vehicle.”
“I agree. I gave them the parameters and they know it’s a time-crucial situation. We’re going to find them, Catherine.” He
sounded more optimistic than she felt. The more time that passed, the less confident she became.
“As soon as we get a list of possible locations,” she said, “we’ll bring in every FBI office, sheriff’s department, troopers—Tony
has already given law enforcement in the region a heads-up, so we can cover a lot of ground in short time.”
“We’ll have something more in a couple hours. I’ll call you back.” He ended the call.
A couple hours. Hope Davidson—Audrey Reid—Clara Dolan—whatever name the woman went by, was in the wind. Had she run . . .
or was she on her way to kill Matt and Kara? If the latter, they didn’t have a couple hours.
Ryder slid over a piece of paper. “Piper Dolan is Clara Dolan’s mother. Her father, Gerald, is deceased. Here’s her contact
information. She’s still in California, it’s eleven in the morning there.”
“Thank you.” She looked at the address. It was in Bel-Air, one of the most expensive and exclusive Los Angeles neighborhoods.
She cleared her throat, pushing aside her worries. She was usually the calm agent, the unemotional agent, the agent who didn’t snap or yell or demand when things got tough. And she certainly didn’t cry.
She called the first number on the list. A woman answered and, when Catherine introduced herself, said she would bring the
phone to Mrs. Dolan.
It took several minutes before Piper picked up the line. “This is Piper Dolan. To whom am I speaking?”
“Dr. Catherine Jones, FBI Special Agent.”
“Doctor?”
“Forensic psychiatrist,” Catherine said.
“And you wish to speak to me?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s about your daughter.”
A faint sigh in the background. Then Catherine heard Piper speak to someone else. “Marissa, please contact Mrs. Brockway and
tell her I’ll need to reschedule lunch.” A moment later, she said, “I assume you have bad news for me.”
Her tone reminded Catherine of her own mother. Charlotte Harrison thought she was superior to most everyone, and Catherine
had been a distinct failure in every way—from who she married (into a middle-class family, not the fact that Chris was a surgeon);
to Catherine’s career choice (that she had “wasted” her medical school education to work in law enforcement); to the worst
sin of all: that Catherine had brought violence into the family that got her sister Beth—the child who was perfect in every
way—killed.
“Your daughter, who has most recently been using the name Hope Davidson, is wanted for questioning in the kidnapping of a
federal agent and police detective.”
“Hmm,” Piper said shortly. “I see. I can tell you two things. First, I haven’t spoken to or heard from Clara in nearly eight
years. Second, Clara is capable of hiring her own lawyer, so I shall not be helping her in that way.”
“It would help if I understood Clara’s background and whether she has ever been in trouble with the law, or shown any tendency toward violence.”
“I do not know my daughter. I barely knew her as a child as we had nothing in common. She had no interest in school, books,
history, art. Frankly, she showed no interest in anything except herself. She was a beautiful child from the minute she was
born, and she knew it. She wanted for nothing. Gerald and I worked hard to educate Clara, to give her a solid foundation on
which to do something productive with her life. She threw it all away.”
“Have you disowned her?”
“I wouldn’t say something so common as disowning a child. She received her trust fund when she was twenty-five, and we wrote
her out of our will. The Dolan estate will be split in quarters between my niece, nephew, the Getty Museum, and UCLA, where
I am a tenured professor.”
“What do you teach?”
“I have doctorates in sixteenth-century English literature, European art history, and Russian literature. I’m currently teaching
a graduate class in sixteenth-century English literature.”
“Your husband was also a professor?”
“Yes, though I don’t see the relevance. Gerald passed five years ago.”
“What is Clara’s trust fund worth?”
“I only know what it was when she was given full access to it. Ten million dollars. It was established by her grandparents.
I would not have been that generous with a child who showed apathy in everything except seducing men.”
Ten million dollars was a tidy sum. It explained the house and resources that Clara had. It could have grown quite substantially
over the last ten years.
“Who manages her trust?” Catherine asked.
“I will text you the law firm who established it. I wouldn’t know if Clara still uses them. I doubt it. She wanted to cut
ties with us, and that suited my husband and me just fine.”
“Do you care at all that she’s wanted for multiple felonies?”
“No,” Piper said bluntly. “Clara was a beautiful child, as I said. On the outside, you have never seen such an exquisite beauty.
I assure you, the cliché ‘beauty is only skin deep’ could have been coined to describe my daughter.”
There had to be more here than a mother who hadn’t seen or spoken to her daughter in years and showed absolutely no interest
in what she has done since.
“Do you know a man named Garrett Reid?”
“No. Dr. Jones, I may have canceled my lunch, but I am a busy woman.”
Catherine ignored the clear message that Piper wanted to end the call and asked instead, “Clara left Los Angeles for Scottsdale
more than seven years ago with a man named Garrett Reid.” That was a guess on Catherine’s part, but she felt she was right,
or close to it. Though initially they believed that Garrett and Clara had connected at one of the resorts where they’d worked,
now they knew both of them were from the Los Angeles area and they’d married five years ago, and if Piper hadn’t spoken to
Clara in nearly eight years—which was around the time Garrett had left—it reasoned that they left together. “They were married
in Las Vegas two years later.”
Another irritated sigh. “What do you want to know, Dr. Jones? Just ask me. If I know, I will tell you.”
“Did anything unusual happen in the months before Clara left town? In your last conversations with her, did she say anything
that gave you pause?”
“I suppose salacious gossip is what psychiatrists are more interested in,” Piper said derisively.
“I rarely saw Clara after she moved out of the house when she received her trust fund. I rarely spoke to her when she lived here. Gerald and I traveled extensively, including spending two years teaching in Oxford. Sometimes, I wish we had stayed.” She sounded wistful at the memory, then she cleared her throat and said, “I have never seen Clara react violently with anyone. She took pleasure in hurting people emotionally, not physically. She was wicked, Dr. Jones. Purely Mephistophelian. That means—”
“I know what it means,” Catherine interrupted. She detested being talked down to by anyone, especially someone who reminded
her far too much of her own mother. “Did you witness or hear of anything that Clara was involved with in the months before
or after she left?”
“She had an affair with her co-worker’s father and, as I learned from someone I trust, made sure the woman knew what had happened
at the most inopportune time: less than a week before the girl’s wedding. The revelation that Clara and Richard Masters had
been involved in that way put a damper on the entire wedding, and, ultimately, the marriage quickly ended in a divorce.”
Masters . . . “Was Clara’s co-worker a woman named Emily Masters?”
“Yes. They had been friends, I thought. Though when Emily won a promotion over Clara, I should have seen something like this
coming. Clara does not handle failure well at all.”
“And this happened about eight years ago?”
“Seven and a half years, I believe. Sometime during the holiday season. Clara left town shortly after—maybe a month or two
later. I can’t be certain. We saw her on Christmas Eve when she came to get her most treasured belongings because she said
she’d found her ‘one true love.’” She said it with such contempt and derision that Catherine was a bit shocked, though in
hindsight she shouldn’t be, considering the whole of the conversation.
“Do you have a name?”
“No. Perhaps it’s that Garrett Reid you mentioned. But I didn’t believe it. Clara has been in love many times, and it’s always
her one true love, the one man who sees through her beauty to her brains.” Piper laughed and Catherine got a chill.
“What happened to the other men in her life?” she asked.