Page 84 of Savage Beauty

Erik

Sloane Watson’s name is suddenly popping up everywhere on our searches. Rumors circulating that she’s bipolar.

Knox

Can you call me? Sage can’t reach Sloane. She’s worried. Something was wrong earlier. Sloane wouldn’t stop crying.

On our team server, I open the Interpol report. It’s an updated version of what we originally read. Sloane Watson is a person of interest as an employee of Origins Laboratories. Only, the report has been amended to include photographs that have surfaced of her on location over the past two years. The photographs included in the file are grainy and appear to be taken with a long-distance lens. The photos themselves strike me as odd. An incoming call interrupts my review of the material. It’s Knox. I answer through my earpiece. “Hey.”

“How’s Sloane?”

“I’m not with her. If you’re asking how she’s taking these revelations, when I saw her last, she was unaware.” My voice strikes me as a helluva lot calmer than how I’m feeling.

“What do you mean? Where is she?”

“She’s staying here. Said she ran into her boss and her old job is hers if she wants it. Which seemed weird as fuck to me, but now that I’m seeing all this?—”

“She’s not coming back with you to meet with the CIA and NSA? She thinks she can just blow them off?”

“Wasn’t presented as a mandatory meeting. Although…I mean, has she broken US laws? She’s working from the Caymans.”And she’s not my problem.

“Sage says it’s all fabricated.”

“Erik sent me a text saying they found Cayman Islands bank accounts. That doesn’t exactly scream ‘innocent.’” Knox has to expect a sister will claim innocence.

“Sage says the bipolar rumors are completely off.”

“I haven’t gotten that far in the report. But you’ve got to admit, everyone describes her as strange.”

“Yes, but she’s even-keeled, right?”

“She could be on medication. Look, I’m not saying the woman is evil. I know she’s not. She’s disciplined, and if she suffered from something like bipolar disorder, I’d expect she would stay on her meds. Who cares if that’s the truth? But come on, she’s obsessed with organs. I could see her rationalizing the illegal organ trade and being a part of it. Knowing what I know about Sloane, she’d justify it as helping others like her sister. But…” I scratch my jaw, thinking about the alleged bank accounts. “I saw that apartment of hers. If she’s stashing money, she’s doing so with a noble goal of opening a research facility or something like that.”

“None of this adds,” Knox says. “If she’s involved in something like that, why come after her? Why come after Sage?”

“Maybe she pissed the wrong guy off. I don’t know.” My head hurts. I just want to get on the plane and put some distance between me and this case.

“Why couldn’t our team find these bank accounts a month ago when we were searching high and low for any information on Sloane Watson? Now, suddenly, information is coming out of nowhere. The concerns about erratic behavior are dated from almost a year ago. If those posts had existed when we were doing our research, we would’ve found them.”

A smear campaign?

I flick back over to the photos that struck me as odd. There’s Taiwanese writing on a sign in the background, but it’s blurred, and I don’t know Taiwanese. But there’s something else. The shadowy figures in the background all appear taller than Sloane.

“What are the chances a five-foot-ten woman is going to be shorter than all the other people at an Asian airport?” I enlarge the photo. One of the shadowy background figures is missing an arm. Another figure hovering near her on the sidewalk appears to have one foot. “This is an AI-generated image. How the hell did Interpol not pick up on that?”

“Click to the photos in Cambodia. They’re real.”

“Yeah, well, we know she was there. And we also know they didn’t have a gun on her.” The Cambodian photos could be legit.

“But then there are the bank accounts,” Knox says under his breath. “And she chose to stay.”

“I take it Sage isn’t with you?”

“No. She had to go back to the school for parent-teacher meetings. I’m torn.”

“About?”

“None of this has made sense. We’ve been assuming she had information someone didn’t want exposed. But maybe this has always been about either trying to control her or force her hand at something. I can’t think what would be in it for her to bring us into this, though. Unless it’s a distraction of some sort.”

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