Page 85 of The Fix
The questions made him remember what he’d been intending on doing right before he’d received Erik’s call. He minimized that browser and opened another, typing in the address to Hollis’s campaign site. Once again, it took Rex all of two minutes to hack in. He went back through the emails and found that the one from Cyrus had been deleted. That was fine. Nothing was ever really deleted, and Rex had already saved a copy of it anyway. He wasn’t surprised to find it gone now that Cami had visited Hollis and alerted him to the fact that the message had been from the boy, and that she knew about it. Hollis might be covering his tracks, or he might simply be deleting evidence that he’d ignored a child’s plea for help.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what Cami had told him about flashing that mirror at Mrs. Willoughby through the window as he’d held her in his arms in his bed. The vision had nagged at him, repeatedly running through his mind even before he was fully awake. At first, he’d thought it was just his nervous system reacting to the picture his mind had conjured of Cami tied to her bed, mouth taped as she tried desperately to signal for help.
God, it killed him inside to think of her that way.
And it caused an admiration that felt too immense to hold. Her grace under fire should be taught in military classes. Then again, that kind of courage couldn’t be learned. A person either had it, or they did not. He’d worked around enough soldiers who’d gone to hell and back to know that much.
So yes, he was overwhelmed with reverence for her, but he didn’t think that was the sole reason the image kept forcing its way to the front of his mind.
It was how, the last time he’d been navigating through the website currently open in front of him, reply boxes kept popping up. There’d been a ... desperation that he couldn’t put his finger on. The way the numbers had appeared, the cursor going backward several times as if they were being typed in haste and mistakes were being made. He might be off the mark, but Rex had learned to follow his instincts anyway. Sometimes he was wrong, but more often, he was not.
Ifsomeone was attempting to communicate with him through the back door of this specific site, that person knew he’d be there, or had suspected he would be and then waited for him to arrive. And that would only be possible if that person knew all the ins and outs of his and Cami’s current investigation. Further, that individual was either extremely nervous, a bad typist, or ... impaired.
She was in an accident where she was flung from the car when she was eighteen and became a quadriplegic.
Could the person attempting to communicate with him be ... Josephine Kiss? The possibleinsiderthey’d wondered about? What kind of wild scenario would have led to that? He couldn’t begin to guess.
He clicked through the site. The two blog post drafts had been published, several inconsequential emails had been sent, many comments had been logged, some positive, some not. Rex figured that was pretty common for a politician running for any office, from president down to dogcatcher.
He stayed long enough to determine that no one was there with him. He glanced at the string of numbers next to his computer that he’d written down. They meant something. He’d input them into a browser in a few different ways, but nothing had come up. He’d thought at first they might be a latitude and longitude, but they weren’t. He’d gone on the dark web and poked around inside the site where Cyrus’s video had been playing but came up empty there too.
He thought again for a minute, something occurring to him. What if ... it almost seemed too easy. But he’d been inside this site when the numbers were displayed for him, and maybe they’d been meant to be used right here?
He went to Hollis’s inbox and spent ten minutes looking for what he hoped to find, letting out a frustrated exhale when that proved unsuccessful. But he was onto something—he could tell by the strings of numbers he’d identified. He hopped over to Hollis’s sent box and began digging again into the raw source of each message in order to find the identifier, numbers normally hidden away from the user because they’re not useful or necessary.
That’s where he hit pay dirt.
His heart gave a victorious thump, and he scrolled down the message with the same unique string of numbers that had been given to him by whomever had followed him around this site previously. The personhadbeen communicating with him, just like that flash of light had been a message to Mrs. Willoughby. He didn’t knowwhyor how or who might want his attention, at least on this matter. But whoever it was had been pointing him to this particular email.
The message was a response from Hollis to a staffer who was inquiring about his fiancée Seraphina’s family history with violence. The staffer seemed to think it would play well to bring up her past as a personal connection to the very real effects of being lax on crime.
But Hollis responded that Seraphina was unwilling to speak on that issue, as the trauma was still too raw.
Violence? Crime? Trauma?
Rex’s senses were buzzing.
He opened a browser and looked up Hollis, speed-reading through the first article to find Seraphina’s full name.Seraphina Arnoult.He did a quick search on her, but the only hits were news pieces about Hollis.
Family history with violence.
Rex used a people search to find her closest contacts, forking out twenty-nine bucks to get the full report. This was amateur stuff, butwithout the backing of the US government—and all the high-tech tools it offered—it was the best he could do on short notice.
It was plenty, however, as the woman who looked to be her mother, if the age was an indication, had a different last name. “Glory Jacobson,” he murmured.
He quickly read through the entire report he’d purchased, but there was nothing else of real consequence. No record, no bankruptcies, no marriages or divorces.
He did a search on Glory Jacobson, his skin prickling when he read the headline of the first hit.Family Experiences Break-In.
As far as headlines went, it was pretty mundane. Still, that prickle didn’t abate.
He read through everything available, so the picture was complete.
Then Rex sat back in his chair for a minute, allowing all the information to swirl. This was it. This was the missing link. It had to be. Everything Cami and her family—and later, Cyrus—had experienced, all originated here.
Rex grabbed his phone, and when he went to call Cami, he noticed that he’d missed a call from her right before Erik’s call had come in. “Damn,” he muttered as he listened to her voicemail. She hadn’t left any information other than to call her back, but it sounded like she was in her car. He dialed her number. “Come on,” he said, right before her voicemail clicked on. “Cami, call me as soon as you get this,” he said. “I have some information.”
He turned back to his computer and did another quick search to corroborate what he believed to be true about the connection between the crime Seraphina’s family experienced, and the one committed against the Cortlandts. Just as he’d surmised, Louis Swift, the man named in the news article who’d broken in and victimized Seraphina’s family, had been arrested six months earlier for breaking and entering. Louis was from an “upstanding family,” and though it was a felony, it was his first offense, and self-reportedly fueled by drugs and alcohol.The court had gone easy on him. He’d been ordered to do thirty days in a rehabilitation center and was then set free, back into the community.
