Chapter Twenty-Two
Sara
Weeks passed. The raw, gaping wound of my last encounter with Ashen didn’t heal, but it scabbed over, protected by a return to the one thing I knew how to do: work.
We were at O’Dooley’s house, in a spare room she’d converted into our unofficial war room.
A huge, digital map of the United States was projected onto a glass wall, glowing in the dim light.
Dozens of pins of light dotted the map, each one a cold case, a Jane Doe.
Each one, we were beginning to realize, was one of Simmons’s victims.
Slowly, painstakingly, we were putting names to the numbers.
O’Dooley’s place was a mess of takeout containers, empty coffee mugs, and stacks of files, both digital and paper.
We worked late into the night, fueled by caffeine and a shared, grim determination.
The real breakthrough came when we dug into the victims’ finances.
They’d all been paid, we discovered. Small, regular payments from a constellation of shell companies, easy enough to overlook unless you knew to look for them.
Once we knew the pattern, we were like bloodhounds on a scent.
We ran their financials through a program, and with each confirmed payment, the trail grew hotter.
Stage two required calling in favors—old friends with access to sealed records, a gray-hat hacker O’Dooley knew from a case in Baltimore.
We followed the money as it snaked through local banks, vanished into offshore accounts in the Caymans, then reappeared, washed clean, back in the States.
The first time a trail led back to an account in Roland Gravestone’s name, I felt a jolt of pure, cold adrenaline.
He would have been a toddler at the time.
The Gravestones hadn’t just paid Simmons’s blackmail; they’d used their own son’s inheritance as a firewall.
And then we found it: direct payments from Roland’s trust to an account under Simmons’s name.
But it didn’t make sense. Why pay these women to act as surrogates only to kill them off?
And where had all the children gone? We were reasonably certain we knew of seven of them now: Thane, Zachary, Jesse, Scott, Mark, Dylan.
And Ashen. But who was he? Did he have a twin out there somewhere?
The Gravestones obviously hadn’t wanted him, so why take him in the first place?
I didn’t want to consider the possibilities. All of them made me a bit sick.
O’Dooley broke the silence, switching on a lamp that cast a warm glow over the chaotic room. “You’re looking more like yourself lately, Linde.”
I turned away from the glowing map, rubbing my tired eyes.
“You were right. I felt worse doing nothing than doing something. I can’t go back and change what I did to him, but I can find out what happened to these women.
” My voice dropped. “This is what Max was uncovering. I know he’d want us to follow this to the end. ”
O’Dooley’s expression was grim. “This is also what likely got him killed.”
My head snapped up. “So, now you believe that too?”
“If he had shown me any of this at the time,” she said, gesturing to the web of connections on the wall, “I would have never let him work it alone. This is big, Sara. No one pulls off something like this without having people in place who are paid to let it happen. And some of those people are still alive.”
A cold certainty settled deep in my bones. “The Gravestones had Max killed. I’m going to prove it, and then I’m going to take them down.”
O’Dooley held my gaze, her own eyes filled with a familiar, weary wisdom. “Careful,” she said softly. “A lot of bad things happen at the corner of justice and vengeance.”