Page 96 of The System

“That’s how you met Dylan,” Kieran recalled what Dylan had shared with her.

“She showed up looking like the woman who would find my brother and knew how to do it. I was young and naïve and didn’t understand how it all worked. She made a promise, though, and when she didn’t keep it, I hated her, and I couldn’t forgive her.”

“And now, you’re married. Happy ending,” Kenna offered.

“You did that, asshole,” Ada said with a little laugh.

“Hey, all I did was ask you both to appear on my show. You two fell in love.”

“Yeah, we did,” Ada said with a coy smile. “She kept her promise by finding Oliver.”

“Um… New to the party here. Who’s Oliver, again?” Kieran asked.

“My brother.”

“I thought Noah was your brother.”

“Noah and Oliver were switched at birth. It’s a whole thing,” Kenna explained. “Dylan figured it out and found Oliver, who is Ada’s biological brother.”

“He’s a big-time doctor with a family,” Ada shared. “Lives in New York now. Noah might not have been my brother by blood, but he was in every other way; in the ways that matter. We didn’t have the best childhood, but it got so much worse when he disappeared. I always knew someone had taken him, and I blamed Dylan for not finding him, but I had no idea she’d been looking for him the entire ten years we weren’t talking. She found Oliver and told me that she’d never give up trying to find Noah. She never had. When she found his body, it was really hard. I mean, I always had this understanding that he was gone, but there’s just this little hope that he’s out there still and maybe dealing with some bad shit that happened to him, but still alive. When Dylan found him, he was bones, and they couldn’t tell us much.”

“That was probably a good thing,” Raleigh chimed in. “Better to not know the specifics, yeah?”

“Yeah, I know you get it,” Ada said to the woman whose daughter had gone missing for about a year not all that long ago. “I guess it’s better not to know what, if anything, was done to him. Besides, this guy is a known pedophile. The FBI even had a file on him… Shit.” Ada shook her head then. “That’s how she did it.” She laughed a little. “My genius wife got the FBI file on him and used their case against him to get her damn warrant. God, she’s good.”

“He’s a…” Ripley faded out.

“Yeah. He doesn’t have a record because he runs this child porn ring but doesn’t actually keep any of the files on his devices. He just built the thing and has protected himself behind firewalls, servers, lawyers, and a million other tricks. He’s smart. Anyway, Dylan said she heard him on the wire.”

“Telling someone about Noah?” Kenna asked.

“He saw us at the lake; claims that he’s never touched a kid himself and hadn’t ever attempted to take one before. He just saw the money in it and likes the pictures and videos. Disgusting.” Ada took a long drink of her beer. “He’d been looking for someone a little younger, but when he didn’t see anyone else there, he decided to take Noah while I was underwater. I guess he didn’t want a girl. Lucky me.”

“Neither of you was lucky,” Carina offered.

“He said that he took Noah and put him in his car, which was parked somewhere, I don’t know, and that he’d knocked him out first to get him in there because Noah was putting up a struggle. By the time he’d gotten Noah to his friend’s property, though, to be transported to someone who would’ve done unspeakable things to my brother, Noah was dead. He’d hit him too hard with something to get him to shut up, and he couldn’t even remember what it was. Probably a rock. I don’t know, either. Anyway, Noah died about five minutes after I came up for air. Maybe not even that long.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Hollis said.

“The only good thing is that no one else hurt him,” Ripley added.

“Yeah, I guess. He’s still dead, though.” Ada swallowed. “They buried him there and had the car cleaned. Dylan said it was a rental, so they couldn’t have tracked it if they wanted to.”

“It’s over now,” Kenna suggested.

“Not yet. Dylan still has to arrest him, and someone has to put him behind bars and keep him there. How many other kids has he kidnapped since he took my brother?”

“Maybe none,” Kieran said.

“What?” Ada asked.

“Just that you said that he’d never taken a kid before that, and Noah died, so I don’t know if he’d risk that again. It didn’t exactly work out the first time.”

“Right,” Ada said.

Just then, the door opened, and Dylan walked in. She stood there, after tossing her keys and phone on the table, and looked only at her wife. Ada stood up and handed her beer to Carina almost absently.

“Babe?”

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