Chapter 6
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Andrea woke up early, feeling relatively decent, so she got up, had a quick shower and got dressed. As she walked into the kitchen, Hayden and Trent were both sitting there, talking, nursing mugs of coffee. They looked up at her, and she greeted them both.
“Did you leave me any?” She reached for the coffeepot, but they’d drained the bulk of it. She emptied the last of it into her cup before leaning against the counter to study them.
Before she had a chance to say anything, Trent, his gaze going from one to the other, asked, “What’s up between you two?”
Hayden rolled his eyes. “We have a history, but she called herself Ann Baker back then. So, I didn’t know the woman from my past was the same woman noted in the file—Andrea Galanis.
Not until I found her skulking around, trying to hide from a madman down in the warehouse district, and I got a good look at her,” he explained, shooting her a glance.
She frowned. “Sure, go ahead. Tell him all my secrets. What do I care?”
“The secrets are long past being secret,” Hayden declared, “as you very well know.”
She shrugged, faced Trent, and shook her head. “Not that I need to explain anything,” she began, “but my father is not exactly a liberating influence, … especially when going off to college or even when I’m living on my own for the first time.”
He nodded sympathetically. “I rather imagine that would have been a hard sell for anybody.”
“A lot of people would never have recognized his name,” she noted, “but, if just one person knows, sure enough, they will shout it out somewhere at a party or even in a classroom and just make my life miserable.” She sighed.
“So, it was a prudent choice to use my mother’s maiden name and a shortened version of my given name to keep my father’s name mostly out of my college life and beyond. ”
Then Hayden added, “However, back then, not knowing the truth, I still figured something was going on, something dodgier than hell. I didn’t know what, and she wasn’t sharing. So, not trusting her killed our relationship.”
“Of course,” Trent agreed, yet with a smirk, watching the two of them. “That makes sense on both parts.”
She pointed out, “I have no idea how many people, even now, know who I am. It’s not something I advertise to anybody to this day.”
“Yet your true identity will be in the registrar’s office at the university, no matter its campus location, correct?” Trent asked.
Hayden asked, “And weren’t you doing an arts degree part-time from home or some such thing back then?” Hayden frowned at her in confusion, as if bits of their history were coming back to him.
“I’m surprised you remember. You were gone a lot back then, and then, when you were home …” Her voice broke off as memories flooded her mind.
He gave her a wolfish grin. “Yeah, we didn’t talk much back then, did we?”
She flushed bright red but shook her head. “No, we didn’t.”
“But your real name will be in your college files, correct?” Trent asked again.
“Yes, as I had to have ID to register, to pay tuition, to get into my classes. Yet I only ever told people that I was Ann Baker. I just didn’t want to be seen as some extension of my father, you know?
I wanted to be me. Do the things I chose to do.
Help the people I knew needed help. I didn’t go into any particular curriculum of classes.
I had no chosen career path. I just wanted to help people without being a licensed social worker.
My heart couldn’t handle that. So I’ve become a perpetual student, taking courses in different fields, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. ”
She could see from the expression on Hayden’s face that he was trying to match what he knew of her before and what he was hearing from her now.
Hayden nodded. “So, Arlene would have had ready access to your student files and could have easily figured out where you were at any given time because you clock in and out from class, correct?”
“No. We don’t clock in and out,” she corrected, “but we had schedules and had to show up for the most part, unless they truly were online classes. If we didn’t attend campus classes in person, then you better have a darn good excuse as to why.
I mean, these classes were neither a walk in the park nor easy credits or anything.
” She took a sip of her coffee. “As much as my father likes to make fun of or minimize everything I took in college, each of them were very serious studies to me.”
Trent didn’t say anything, just nodded as he glanced over at Hayden.
Andrea asked, “You think that’s how the kidnappers found out about me?”
“Yeah,” Hayden confirmed. “They contacted you, remember? I guess the question is why? As in, if you weren’t marked as one of their targets, why did they care about you?”
Her gaze immediately dropped to the floor.
He groaned. “What did you do?”
She winced, then shrugged. “Nothing much.”
“Sounds as if nothing much made you a target.”
She couldn’t help flinching, then groaned, her gaze going from one to other, then back to Hayden. “I might have written an article on the missing students for one of my classes and got it printed in the student newsletter.”
Both men resolutely stared at her.
She flushed. “What? I wanted to raise awareness that women weren’t safe on campus. I didn’t think it would cause this kind of trouble.”
Hayden pinched the bridge of his nose while Trent was busy texting, probably tattling on her to Mason.
Andrea groaned. “It wasn’t that big of a piece or that in-depth. So I figured it would be okay.”
Hayden snorted. “And now? What do you figure now?”
She didn’t need to answer that.
Trent added, “And, of course, they would have gone digging further into who you were, finding out who your father was. But then why not target you the same as the other women?” He turned to Hayden.
Hayden asked her, “Was this article published while you were in London or now here in New York City?”
“Here,” she replied. “Does it matter?”
He shrugged, considering this. “From what we’ve gathered so far, this kidnapping-trafficking outfit is big in Europe.
Plus, from what you overheard at your warehouse kidnapping event, the US arm is relatively new and still under scrutiny as to its true value.
” He turned to Andrea and shook his head.
“So, even if your byline for that article used your alias, Arlene could have easily sussed out your real identity.”
“Sure, and, yes, she knew me. I was friendly to her. Not overly friendly because she had a chip on her shoulder,” Andrea added. “I’ve been around people like that before, but it’s easier to be friendly than to be mean and then have to deal with that crap all the time.”
Seeing Hayden’s expression, she raised both her hands.
“Yet that’s not what I’m supposed to do either, right?
However, when you’re caught between a rock and a hard place, you don’t really have a whole lot of choices,” she told them.
“I took the path of least resistance in order to have a somewhat normal life, and that worked for a good share of my time in college.” She glanced again at Hayden, an odd look crossing her face.
“In Hayden’s case though, it blew up in my face,” she admitted.
He didn’t say anything, but his gaze was intense.
She shrugged. “That was a long time ago though.”
“Sure,” Trent acknowledged, “but sometimes memories hang on where that stuff is concerned. It requires closure too.”
Andrea shook her head. “No need. We haven’t seen each other since then, and I’m not exactly the person he wants to spend time with now, especially when he sees me wandering alone and barefoot in the dark around warehouses,” she quipped.
“Then again, I’m not sure I want to be around him all that much when he’s taking down bad guys on his coffee runs and being shot at by psychos in police stations,” she muttered.
“At least Hayden took down the Hulk, your bad guy,” Trent pointed out on a humorous note.
She frowned at that and then reluctantly agreed. “Okay, I’ll give you that. He did at least take him down. That’s a plus in this mess.”
“So, you can’t be mad at him if he did his job.” Trent raised one eyebrow.
Andrea rolled her eyes. “It would have been nice if his job weren’t needed in the first place.”
Trent studied her, amusement in his gaze. “I’m pretty sure Hayden would say that exact same thing.”
She flushed. “Right. So, we’re right back to me, fleeing a madman in a warehouse when, according to Hayden, I should have been tucked up safe and sound in bed.”
“I think we all would have preferred that,” Trent admitted, “but it didn’t happen and so far, so good. Let’s not dwell on it.” He glanced over at Hayden, who was trying to hide a smile.
Andrea knew what that curl of his lips meant. “Right. So I’m not allowed to do my job if it entails your doing your job. I’m not trying to get in the way of what you’re doing, but, when I realized these women needed help, what was I supposed to do? Sit back and do nothing? Not happening.”
*
Suddenly Hayden’s phone rang. He picked it up and noted, “It’s Mason.” He put it on Speaker and asked, “What’s up?”
“You all awake?” Mason asked.
“Yes, and you are on Speaker,” he shared, “unless you want me to take you off.”
“No, that’s fine,” Mason replied, sounding tired and, to a certain extent, pissed off. “Your prisoner is dead.”
A shocked gasp came from her, but a knowing look was shared in silence between Trent and Hayden.
“We’re not surprised,” Hayden noted.
“How can you not be surprised?” she asked. “I mean, who was there in jail to take him out?”
Mason answered, “That will be the next question, followed by many more after that. We requested an investigation into the matter, so the cops will be doing that for us. It looks, … looks,” he repeated, with a heavy emphasis on the word, “to be a suicide.”
“That’s the only way they would do it though, isn’t it?” Hayden asked. “Anything else will make the entire police force look compromised.”
“Now they just look stupid,” Trent added.
“Exactly,” Mason confirmed. “So just be aware, there’ll be no more questions today on that particular front.”
Hayden sighed. “So, now we need to dig through the Hulk’s life as much as we can and see if we can come up with any path forward.”
“Tesla’s on it,” Mason replied. “We’ll share if we find something.”
“And what about Arlene Cuddy?” Trent asked Mason. “Any update on her? Could she have had something to do with our dead prisoner?”
“The team did capture her at the hotel. She came in without much of a fight and was handed off to the locals. However, on the way from jail to prison, she killed one of the transport guards.”
Andrea gasped, a look of horror taking over her.
“So, armed and dangerous in all cases,” Hayden stated.
“Remember that. And she could have been the one who sent the kill order on this Hulk guy too. Presumably these kidnapping crews have boots on the ground, so will be doing as much damage control as they can.”
“I would think so,” Hayden grumbled.
“And part of that damage control will be cleaning up loose ends,” Mason pointed out. “So, you know what that means.” And he abruptly ended the call.
Andrea stared at the men, who were eyeing each other. “What does that mean? What does that mean exactly?” she cried out, glaring at them when they didn’t answer.
Trent nodded, and Hayden turned to her. “It means that you’re in danger until this is resolved,” Hayden stated.
“Cleaning up loose ends means the bad guys will be going after anybody who could identify them or who could in any way cause them damage. … This is all about damage control now,” he concluded.
He glanced at Trent, who was turning his coffee cup around in a circle, obviously lost in thought. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m just curious as to where all this is going. Is it going anywhere else, or is it limited to just this group of criminals, using extortion to target female students from rich, influential families?”
“I don’t know that it has to be female,” Andrea interjected. “I know of a couple male students in my classes who didn’t show up, for instance. Plus, almost everyone in my university has come from an influential background of some kind.” She shook her head.
Trent noted, “We know this kidnapping group has gone after several women, but I don’t know if they would have gone after the men in the same way.”
Hayden nodded. “Which is one of the questions we must answer. Good point.”
“So, we need a list of every student who’s gone missing in the last couple years,” Trent suggested.
Hayden frowned, as he shook his head. “Let’s double-check Arlene’s work history and go by that hire date to the present date for the London-based campus. That’s somewhere to start at least.”
Trent nodded. “I’ll get on that right away. I’ll tap Kane or Rubin to help as needed. Then I am heading out to relieve Oakley.”