Page 56 of Sinful Palace

“I know. I was being facetious, you idiot,” she snapped.

“Oh. Of course. Sorry, ma’am.”

Mom sighed and rolled her eyes. “Christ, couldn’t they just email me death threats like everyone else does these days?” She leaned forward, rubbing her forehead again. “This is terrorism.”

“I know, ma’am. Believe me, I’ve already got our best people working on it. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“Any word from my husband?”

Jamie shook his head. “He’s still missing.”

Mom let out a deep sigh. “Of course he is,” she muttered. “God, today couldn’t possibly get any worse.”

“At least no one was harmed in the incident at the parade, Madam President,” one of the other men with Jamie interjected.

My mother shot him a look so contemptuous that he shrank back and mumbled an apology without her having to say a word.

“We’ll be back later with an update,” Jamie said. “For now, I suggest you stay here.”

When he and his colleagues were gone, Mom, Jared and I returned to our subdued silence, too shocked and scared to talk. Jared eventually came to sit on the sofa next to me, and I squeezed his hand before giving him my new phone so he could distract himself with a game about flying cats. I amused myself by staring into space, losing myself in my thoughts again.

Jamie came back about an hour later. “I’ve got news on Stephen,” he announced, holding up a laptop.

Mom’s brows shot up. “You found him?”

“Er… no.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

He grabbed a cable from a nearby desk and plugged it into the laptop. A moment later, a large screen on the left wall lit up.

“We’ve been searching through parade videos posted on Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram,” he explained. “A lot of people managed to get footage of the incident.”

“Thank god for the internet and everyone’s relentless obsession with documenting every moment of their lives,” Mom muttered, brows pulling into a frown.

“This is probably the best angle we’ve managed to find so far,” Jamie said, clicking into a video. He fast-forwarded a few seconds and hit play. “There’s Willow and Stephen at the back of the float,” he said, pausing the video and pointing to the right side of the screen.

“Uh-huh.”

He changed a setting so that the video went in slow motion. “You can see him look up at the 1:21 mark, and he obviously notices the body being pushed out of the helicopter because he shoves Willow forward before dodging out of the way himself.”

Mom winced as the body dropped onscreen, hitting the float with a resounding thump.

“Now we can see Willow crouching down, right next to the body,” Jamie went on. He paused the video again and turned to glance at me. “You’re lucky your father pushed you. It almost landed right on you.”

I swallowed thickly. “I know.”

“This is where it gets tricky. He’s still next to Willow, standing right there behind her,” Jamie said, directing his attention to Mom again. “Then a Secret Service agent grabs him while another grabs Willow. Here we can see them being pulled off the float and ushered through the crowd toward the car.”

Mom frowned. “And that’s when he vanished?”

“Yes. See here?” Jamie paused the video and tapped on the screen before restarting it. “He got separated from the agent in the crowd. We can see a group of civilians frantically pushing through and accidentally shoving Stephen, causing the agent to lose his grip on his shoulder. The agent turns around to look for him right away, but as you can see, Stephen is already gone by then.”

“How is that even possible?”

“Well, it’s not like he dropped off the face of the earth,” Jamie said. “We just lost sight of him at this exact moment, that’s all.”

“So there’s no other angles from any other videos that show where he went?”

---