Page 36 of The Fix
“It’s hard to know what’s surrounding the house or cabin,” Rex said. “So I’m not sure.” To him, however, it looked like a room that was designed to hold captives. The windows were barred, but also, the door looked heavy and didn’t have a lock on the inside from what he could see. And there was obviously a camera to watch the person inside. So, either it’d been set up this way for the boy currently locked inside it, or it was used regularly to imprison victims.
Cami was right to be chilled by this. He was too. He sat back and ran his hand over his jaw. It was strange to feel the stubble there after going years shaving every morning at sunrise. He thought back to what Cami had said as they watched the boy feel along the walls and investigate the corners. He was afraid for the kid, his heart beating with an urgency to help him. Cami had mentioned the threat of the video being cut if she went to the police. Which assumed that the person or people who’d contacted her would know somehow if she’d reachedout to the authorities. He glanced around at her place. There were a hundred ways she might be being spied on.
Their reach—whoevertheywere—might be a bluff. But it might not be. And if it wasn’t, and they contacted the authorities and this “room” on the dark web suddenly disappeared, what tools would they have to find the kid? None. They’d have zilch except for a short video recorded from Cami’s phone that told them nothing other than there was a kid with ill-fitting clothes locked in a room somewhere. “We won’t risk calling the authorities yet,” he said. “There’s nothing they could do with this anyway except monitor it, and that’s what we’ll do.”
He turned toward her as the boy resumed his spot on the bed and tucked his feet beneath him. He didn’t seem cold, nor did there appear to be a vent for cold or warm air. Again, California made sense if they were looking for a moderate climate where central air wasn’t necessary and a fireplace in a main room somewhere would be adequate for cold winters.
“Would you be able to get any information from the adoption agency you went through?” he asked her.
“No. It was a closed adoption. They’re not going to give me any information. I only know his location by accident because I caught sight of it in the family’s file.”
He paused, noting the sloppiness of a mistake like that. And if the agency was careless in one area, it stood to reason that they might have been careless elsewhere. “Even anonymously, though?” he asked. “Would they virtually check on the boy and then just let you know he’s fine? You could say you only want to know that he’s doing well. No information, just his well-being.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I agreed to the terms and signed away all rights, even the right to discuss his well-being. If I tried to get information now, they’d think I’d lost it or was trying to pull off something dishonest.”
He turned back to the screen. “Okay.” When Cami was quiet for a moment, he glanced at her. She was tapping her bottom lip withtwo fingers and appeared to be considering something. She looked at the clock. “The woman who facilitated the adoption gave me her home number, though. She was concerned about me because of ... the circumstances and what I’d recently gone through. I think she kept assuming I was going to change my mind.” She was quiet for another moment. “I could give it a try. Maybe if I catch her at home, she’d be willing to help. What else is there right now?”
He looked at the clock to see that it was a little after nine a.m. As he’d thought, the glow of the sunrise was just beginning to show through the boy’s window, the room growing ever lighter. Cami had left the kitchen, and he heard her somewhere down the hall, likely her bedroom, where he assumed she was locating the number of the woman who’d helped her find a good family for her baby.
“Cami, what’s the name of the adoption agency you used?” he called.
There was a beat of silence as though she’d had to pluck it from her memory before she said, “Open Hearts Adoptions.”
He pulled up a web browser and typed in the name, scrolling down the hits for a moment before clicking on a news article that spoke of the agency’s closure six and a half years before. He skimmed through, gleaning that a lawsuit had been brought against the owner for neglecting to fully vet applicants, confirming his previous thought about carelessness, at the very least. There weren’t a lot of details other than that, but even that knowledge had Rex on high alert. He didn’t like the fact that the adoption agency Cami had used had filed for bankruptcy and folded after being charged with poor vetting practices, and now—possibly—the child she’d turned over to them might be in a world of trouble. There was nothing concrete to connect the two events, but he couldn’t help feeling like there was no way they were isolated.
Cami came back into the room, her cell phone in one hand and a business card in the other with what he could see was a handwritten number on the back. She put it on speaker and held it up as it rang.After a few seconds, a woman answered, the sound of something frying loud in the background.
“Yes, hi. I’m trying to reach Elora Maxwell.”
“Elora doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh, okay. Do you know how I can get ahold of her?”
“I don’t have her current information. But last I heard, she took a job in the Virgin Islands.”
“I ... see. Okay, well, thank you.”
“Are you a lawyer for one of the families she worked with?”
“No. I was a client.”
“Oh, a client. Well, I don’t know anything about all what happened with her agency, but I know my mom spoke well of Elora. She said she was too soft for her own good. Doesn’t sound like it worked out very well. Anyway, have a nice day.” And with that, the person on the other end, a relative maybe, hung up.
Cami stood there, her gaze shifted to the side, her face growing paler by the second. Her eyes moved to the screen in front of him, clearly making out the article headline about Open Hearts Adoptions being shut down. She sank into the chair next to him. “Toosoft? What does that even mean? They seemed competent. Their office was nice. Elora was ... oh God.” She put her head in her hands.
“It doesn’t look good, I agree,” he said. “But it’s still not proof your son isn’t okay. It’s still not proof this boy”—he enlarged the screen where the live feed was playing—“is the baby you put up for adoption.”
Cami leaned in, her mouth forming a small O. “Oh my God, look, the door is opening.” The boy had seen it, too, and had turned to face the person entering. Rex and Cami both leaned in, their heads almost touching as they waited to see who would appear.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cyrus scooted toward the wall next to the bed and plastered his back against the solid surface. The door opened, and a man stood there, staring blankly at him. He was holding a bag in his hands, and Cyrus smelled the scent of fried food. His stomach rumbled, and the man let out a small harrumph as he took a step inside as if he’d heard Cyrus’s body’s admission of hunger, and it’d spurred him to deliver the food. He placed the bag on the floor and then glanced over at the bedpan that Cyrus had used a few hours before but made no move to retrieve it.
“Who are you?” Cyrus demanded, attempting to keep the quiver from his voice. The man was tall, but kind of fat, and he reminded Cyrus of his school bus driver, the one who picked his nose when he thought no one was looking and wiped it on his pant leg. “And why am I here?”
“Better not to ask questions,” the man said. “Just eat your food.”
“I want to leave.”
