Page 41 of Savage Obsession

I peer at the images for the next ten minutes, watching the throng of commuters come and go. No one looks familiar until?—

“There. That’s her.” I point to a small figure in the corner of the screen. “There she is.”

Everyone leans in to study the girl in the image.

“Are you sure?” Casey asks. “The images are a bit blurred.”

“That’s her,” I assert. “Definitely. That’s her duffel coat, and her backpack.”

Casey takes over the mouse, drawing a search area around the image of Lily and lifting that portion to place it on another screen. She mutters to herself as her fingers dart across the keyboard.

“What are you doing?” Baz wants to know.

“I’m feeding this data into the individual recognition software and setting up a search,” she explains. “Then I can get the system to scan all the available footage and alert us every time that specific individual appears.”

“Available footage? Do you have more?”

“Oh, yes,” Frankie informs us. “I was able to identify all the possible international train journeys available from Warsaw that morning and I accessed the footage from every railway station on all the routes. Now it’s only a matter of running the scan and waiting for the results.”

I’m impressed, and I can tell Baz is, too.

“How long will it take?” he asks.

“Depends how many sightings there are. Maybe half an hour…”

“Then what?”

“Once we have a confirmed destination, I can repeat the exercise, tracking her movements until she actually leaves the rail network. It gets harder after that.”

“Why?”

“CCTV coverage probably becomes patchier. Lots of different systems, harder to hack. There are dead spots, and not all systems are even on the internet, so the tapes can’t be accessed online. You’d have to physically go and retrieve them…”

“If it comes to that…” Baz mutters.

CHAPTER 10

Baz

There seems to be little point in hanging around to watch the cogs whirring, so we leave the IT geeks to it, and we proceed on to the third floor to locate our room.

Julia pads along beside me. “You should have told Casey that we’re separated,” she whispers. “They’ve given us a double room.”

“We were separated,” I reply, marching along the stone-flagged corridor.

She punches my arm. “Just because we…”

“Fucked?” I offer, by way of being helpful. And clear. “Twice?”

“It was more than twice,” she corrects me. “Even so, we shouldn’t just?—”

I halt and swivel my heel. “If you feel like explaining to Ethan why you don’t want to share a room with me, please feel free. I’m getting some sleep.”

We arrive at the door as per Aaron Savage’s directions, and I turn the handle.

Despite her protests, Julia follows me inside. “I was just saying…”

The apartment is compact but well laid out. It consists of a bedroom, a sitting area, a bathroom and shower, and a small kitchenette with a microwave and a kettle. Some basic provisions have been left for us, presumably courtesy of the housekeeper, and a note on the counter tells us to help ourselves from the chest freezer in the main kitchen. I recall from conversations when the Savages were on Tenerife that, unlike most Mafia bosses, Ethan Savage doesn’t employ many domestic staff. His crew are expected to look after themselves. There’s a communal breakfast for those who want it, and cooked meals at lunchtime and dinner time, again for those who feel like helping themselves and taking the meals back to their own cottages or apartments. There are occasional shared meals in the Great Hall, but even those are informal.

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