Chapter 6 Malibu Road Is Private for a Reason #2
It confuses me, all the same. Any decision like this—any large shift—would have to be approved by the head of the organization, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t just need to be approved by him, but also ordered by him.
Francis Campano Pointe II, or Frank, as Nicholas referred to him, has run the organization for decades (his father before that, his maternal grandfather before his father).
Frank brought Nicholas into the organization in the first place.
He was Nicholas’s most important client for most of his career.
And the person—most importantly—with whom Nicholas arranged to secure Bailey’s and my safety.
Didn’t Nicholas believe that we could count on Frank to keep his word? Didn’t Nicholas say they were like family to each other? Why, even in Nicholas’s absence, would that shift so dramatically? And so quickly?
Get out of the house. Now.
“Mom…”
I turn to see Bailey walking into the living room.
She is in a tank top and ripped jeans, her long hair still wet from the shower, her eyes red and bright from crying.
I wonder what she knows about her grandfather already, about what is happening.
What has she learned in the last hour since her life started to unravel all around her?
My eyes dart to the television screen. Her grandfather’s face is no longer splashed across the screen, thankfully, but the chyron is still going, the words still ticking by for her to read. In whole, in part.
NICHOLAS BELL, LAWYER FOR THE ORGANIZATION CRIME SYNDICATE, PRONOUNCED DEAD AT TEXAS HILL COUNTRY HOME
“Grady, I’m going to call you back.”
“No, you need to listen to me first, okay? The doorman at Nicholas’s condo in the city says that someone who identified himself as Nicholas’s son-in-law came to see Nicholas late last night.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The doorman didn’t let him in, but I’ve got two guys watching down the security tapes.
I’m trying to confirm if it was really Owen.
And if it was, we have a real problem here unless I can stop it from breaking.
Because if it breaks, people are going to connect the dots to suggest Owen may have had something to do with Nicholas’s death. ”
I take that in, trying to make sense of it. Could it have been Owen at Nicholas’s condo? Why would Owen have gone from the showroom in Los Angeles to downtown Austin to see Nicholas? But I don’t offer that question out loud. I don’t say anything that suggests I know where Owen was last night.
I’m looking at Bailey, Bailey who is looking back at me. Bailey who is about to find out that her grandfather is lost to her.
“But I thought… didn’t you just say that Nicholas was found out at the lake? At The Sanctuary?”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is this is the first legitimate claim of someone spotting Owen in five years. And Nicholas is found dead that night? In the same city? Does that sound like a coincidence?”
The flash drive grows heavier in my pocket. Owen’s skin and eyes and hands last night so close to my skin.
Bailey is looking more and more scared. Her eyes are wild, goose bumps covering her skin. It probably isn’t helping that my face is giving away that I feel the same.
Which is when I let myself know what I don’t want to know.
This is why Owen showed up last night.
This is why I got those texts this morning.
It was Owen warning me about what he had to do, or what he was still doing. Even if I don’t know why he’s doing it just yet.
That’s the job now. To start to figure out the why.
I hold Bailey’s gaze, wiping the fear off my face. Behind her the news report has switched again. Nicholas is back on the screen. I look between her face and his, the similarity too close to be comfortable.
And I’m already starting to piece together what I need to know. Why the grief of Nicholas’s loss feels riddled with something else—something urgent and incoming—that I need to understand. Something I feel certain that Nicholas would want me to understand, if he were still here to tell me.
But Bailey starts to turn around. She starts to turn around and see for herself that her grandfather is gone. I need to tell her first—not just about her grandfather, but also about her father. About what needs to happen now.
“Hannah,” Grady says. “Are you listening to me?”
No, I’m not. I’m only listening to myself. I’m only paying attention to what I know I need to do now.
“Not anymore,” I say.
This is when I hang up.
“So Dad was there last night?” Bailey asks. “At the design center?”
We’re standing in Jake’s garage, the trunk to the Jetta open. There are several large suitcases and duffel bags inside—clothes I packed for Bailey, clothes for me, and, hidden beneath them, a gray computer case, which I pull out now.
I nod. “He was.”
“How could you not tell me?”
I unzip the computer case, trying to figure out how to answer Bailey—and answer her quickly. It is a fine line, figuring out how to tell Bailey what she needs to know while not entirely overwhelming her.
Bailey, who is shaking before me. Her face red, her eyes averting mine. Overwhelmed and angry and shocked.
More than anything, I’m registering her shock. Her grandfather is gone, which I see her struggling to even begin to process. Her father is—inexplicably—back.
I have five minutes to calm her down before we need to be on the road. I have less than five minutes to calm her down and to open this flash drive. To study it. To do both of those things and to do them well.
Then I need us to be out of here, whether she is ready for that or not.
I need to be on the road, moving somewhere away from here.
“I couldn’t exactly talk to you about all of this in front of someone else, Bails,” I say. “And I needed a little time to process first. I needed to first try and figure out what he was doing there.”
“What did you come up with?” she asks.
“I’m still working on it.”
I slam the trunk shut and pull the laptop out of its case, resting it on the car.
This clean laptop that has never been connected to the internet.
That has had its wireless capability disabled.
This laptop that will be untraceable—the laptop and any information from the flash drive that I download onto it. Available to no one. But us.
The computer powers on. I plug the flash drive into the laptop, the two of us standing side by side as I click on the drive and a screen pops up.
The home page takes on a circle formation, a circle formation with arrows and edges. A marine compass.
“What the hell is that?” Bailey says. “Is that a compass or something?”
“A marine compass,” I say. “Yes.”
I shake my head, unsure why Owen has put this compass on here. It gives me pause though. It makes me wonder for a moment if Owen knows—how could he know?—my plan for how to get Bailey out of here. The plan I haven’t even told her yet. That I’ve said, aloud, to no one.
I lean in closer to the screen and click on the one folder in the corner—a folder labeled PHOTO ALBUMS. Several files pop open. Five photo albums in total. Owen has named each of them. Sausalito; O Baby Bailey; Family; Hannah’s Work.
No directions. No obvious message.
“What are we supposed to do with this?” Bailey asks.
I shake my head. I don’t know.
“Are they ordered somehow?”
“They don’t seem to be,” I say. “But that’s a good question…”
I open the finder and select date modified.
And I click on the album Owen created first. The photo album that he labeled Sausalito.
The album has several photographs in it.
Some of them are of our floating home and the docks, some of young Bailey and Owen racing down those docks, some are of Owen’s closest friend, Carl, and his wife, Patty.
Carl and Patty who—despite their long friendship with Owen, or maybe because of it—weren’t exactly kind to me after Owen disappeared.
Several of the photographs seem to include Carl and Patty, which seems odd. One of the photographs even includes Carl and his brother, Daniel. Owen standing between them, the three of them laughing.
“Why would he want us to have all these photos of Carl and Patty?” Bailey asks, confused.
“I was wondering the same,” I say.
I zero in on the photograph of Owen with Carl and Daniel. I zero in on Owen’s face, and I know there is a reason. If there are photographs of Carl and his family, there is of course a reason he is sharing them with me.
Because Owen isn’t just giving me photographs.
Owen is giving me messages. Private messages that only I can decipher.
Just in case the flash drive gets intercepted.
Just in case it gets into hands that aren’t mine.
I take another glance at the last photograph—the one with Carl’s brother.
Carl’s arm wrapped lovingly around Owen’s shoulder.
Then I look at the clock on the top of the laptop. The time is ticking down, ticking down in a way that’s making me anxious.
Two minutes. We have two minutes before we should be out of here.
Two minutes before I need to start getting us to where we are going next—before we start putting distance between us and our last known address.
Our last known city. And the people who are looking for us here.
They’ll be looking for us everywhere we have ever been.
My studio, Bailey’s boss’s office. Our friends’ houses.
They’ll crawl the airports—LAX and Burbank and Long Beach.
All public transportation hubs. Anywhere that gives us an easy exit to somewhere else.
Owen’s text races to the forefront of my mind: Get out of the house.
I slam the laptop shut.
“We’re out of time,” I say. “We’ve got to go.”
“What about the photographs? Shouldn’t we keep going through them?”
“That’s why you’re driving,” I say. “I’ll do it on the way. I have a lot of things to do on the way.”
“On the way to where?” Bailey calls out.
I open the passenger-side door, start to get in.
“Anywhere but here.”