Chapter 2 #2
She frowned at him, trying to hide the gnawing fear in the back of her mind. “Ann is just a shortened version of Andrea.”
Hayden snorted. “And is Baker, the last name you were using with me, also a shortened version of Galanis?”
“Okay,” Andrea relented. “So I was using my mother’s maiden name. I opted for some generic American surname as using my father’s last name didn’t work for me. Ann Baker was not a fake name. It was an attempt to just be me—not my father’s daughter.”
“Right. So while you were giving me the starving artist routine, working as a store clerk over that initial summer we had together, you had your father to fall back on, just one of the richest men in the world. Yeah. Struggling. Right.”
At the tic in his jaw, she felt the frustration wafting from him. “I guess that’s not quite what you expected me to say, huh?”
He frowned at her and shrugged. “In a way, it makes more sense.”
“What does?”
“The reason why I broke up with you,” he replied.
“Something was off, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.
You weren’t truly sharing with me, and I just couldn’t trust anything I saw.
I didn’t know what I was feeling, and I didn’t trust what wasn’t being said. I knew that something was very wrong.”
“And you didn’t even wait around to find out.”
“I waited nine months. That was about six months too long, in my opinion. I’ve always been one to trust my instincts,” he muttered.
“It’s saved my life in many situations. So my instincts in reaction to our relationship was no different.
When you wouldn’t come clean, I didn’t stick around.
I don’t like people who keep secrets. Those kind of people lie. It’s just that simple for me.”
“I couldn’t come clean,” she stated, frustration in her tone. “My real name, at least in some areas, is not exactly one that people want anything to do with, and yet, with others, they just want to use me to get to him.”
“I don’t know why you couldn’t have told me that, just been honest with me.
You could sleep with me but couldn’t tell me who you really were?
” He shook his head. “I didn’t even know who your father was back then,” he added.
“I do now obviously because, yay, … I’ve been assigned this job to babysit you. ”
She stared at him and then winced. “Babysit? Me?”
“Yeah, you. Your father is breathing down my boss’s neck, hoping we can stop you from getting into more trouble.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Of course he would,” she muttered. “We don’t exactly get along well.”
Hayden snorted. “I don’t know about getting along, but he seems to think that working with the homeless on the streets of New York City and dabbling in journalism—where you go by yourself to warehouses in the dark of night—will just get you into trouble. And, right about now, I agree with him.”
She stared off into the distance and whispered, “I admit that what I did tonight was probably very foolish.”
“No probably about it. It was foolish.”
“Okay, yeah,” she agreed. “I spent a semester in a London university years ago, before you and I met that summer. In fact I remained in London for years, only coming back to the States recently. I heard about Cleo going missing from that same London campus.”
Hayden interrupted her. “You never told me that you went to uni.” He was frowning big-time at her now.
She sighed. “I told you that I was taking some online classes.”
“That doesn’t mean to me that you graduated from college, that you were on campus. God, is there anything about our past relationship that was real, was true?”
She hesitantly added, “I shared how I had one class to attend in person.”
“Which to me was something you were auditing, like an art class or something. … I didn’t know you at all back then, did I? I still don’t know you.”
“Look,” she began. “I had my reasons, valid ones for many people. However—now, looking back—I wish I had handled it differently. Not for everyone, but with you.”
Hayden seemed skeptical.
She continued. “I’m sorry. I handled things so badly with you that it led to our breakup.
If I could go back in time, I would change all that.
” Hayden’s dismissive snort was all she got.
“Right. Words are useless when it comes to the past. Yet I’ll do better now.
You’ll see that I’ve changed. You just have to watch what I do.
My words and my actions will align now because I trust you. ”
His silence was the biggest argument to everything she had just shared. “Right. I should have trusted you all along. I was so wrong on so many levels. Yet I won’t give up on us. I will prove to you who I really am.”
Hayden’s glare didn’t dissuade her.
“I want this to work between us, whether it’s just about helping you on this one op or for us to have a second chance at a real relationship, I’ll take either. … Let me just say though that I want both.”
She gave him a moment to reply, but he didn’t. “So, let me explain about my own missing friend in London. … Back then I had been looking for my friend, Jennifer, who disappeared from my college. I finally found her. She’d had an ugly breakup and had gone home to hibernate.
“Then I heard about another one who went missing from that same London college—Cleo, whom I’ve never found.
I also heard recent rumors of three more missing students.
As an interested alumnus, I went to the graduate offices in London to ask questions.
I accidentally overheard Arlene in her private washroom talking to someone on the phone about a Tricia whom they’d collected.
I got very suspicious. I left before Arlene found me in her outer office.
Then Arlene went AWOL from both campuses.
Yet now she’s all over the news, even here in New York City. ”
Hayden shared, “My team is picking up Arlene now. And the three most recently kidnapped, that we know of, were Tricia, Sam, and Shirley.”
Andrea quickly turned, facing him, and asked, “Oh my God. Do you know where they are?”
“Yeah, we just got Tricia back. She had been kidnapped by a group of people who worked with Arlene, who, as administrator, got her victims from among the students of that London graduate-level semester-abroad offering.”
Andrea stared at him and then shook her head, still trying to shake off the shock. “Oh my God, I was right.”
“Yes, you were right,” he confirmed. “Tricia was found in Kazakhstan.”
Andrea took that in, her frown growing. “Is she okay?”
“Yes, she’s fine for now. Two other women were kidnapped from the same London campus, at the same time as Tricia Forman. Sam Hicks was injured, and one, Shirley Boston”—he sighed—“didn’t make it.”
Andrea’s eyes welled up with tears.
“Sam was severely beaten, her arm and her leg both broken. Shirley had been killed and left behind. Both families have filed a lawsuit against the London campus. If you want more information, I can try to get that for you,” he offered. “So what was the name of the student you were looking into?”
“Cleo Thornton. She’s the first one who went missing, I think. No one has any details, so we’re not sure whether it was a kidnapping or she just chose to disappear. She doesn’t fit the same wealthy profile of the other girls that we know of to date.”
“Yeah, we have no line on Cleo yet. Tesla’s working on it.
Seems Cleo went missing separately, and some time has passed since then.
Tricia, Sam, and Shirley all went missing at the same time and more recently,” he shared, his head cocked as if listening intently for traffic in the hallway outside.
“They were picked up off the campus grounds at the same time, mostly because they were in the same area where Tricia had been at the time. She was the target, but Sam and Shirley were collateral damage. Because Tricia’s father is a US senator with a pending vote happening, Tricia was targeted to influence his vote.
That whole nightmare has now been concluded.
You, on the other hand, were not targeted, until you made yourself a handy victim by getting involved. ”
She glared at him. “That’s not fair. I was trying to help these women.”
“While admirable,” he replied, “you don’t have the requisite skills to deal with this.”
“And so whom should I have called?” she asked. “Really. Who would know what to do?”
“I understand you took a couple journalism classes. Surely your professors in one of those two classes made clear to you that some things you should never do solo, and also would have drilled down on the reality of self-preservation. Even without their input, you should simply hand over the matter to the local authorities. Hopefully now you may get an understanding of who these authorities really are. Instead you phoned Lena.”
“Yes, I called Lena … because she was working with Tesla, who gave a knockout talk at the university that set so many woman on fire. We felt … seen. Validated. Inspired,” she declared, with a lofty hand motion.
“I was lucky enough to connect to Lena, and we’ve been friends ever since.
As soon as I realized I was in trouble, the two of them came to mind before the police. ”
He laughed. “Tesla is an absolute sweetheart, and we all love working with her.”
“Yeah, that would be Tesla,” Andrea agreed. “What would you say to her if she had been the one to go into a warehouse alone to save Cleo? I don’t think even you could find anything wrong with Tesla.”
“That sounds a bit like poor-me syndrome. To address your other comment, Tesla would have been smart enough to not go in alone. She would have told Mason at the very least.”