Page 8 of Killer Lies (The Chaos Crew 2)

THREE

Decima

After a restless sleepthat stretched into the afternoon, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was that damned stuffed tiger.

The thing that used to bring me so much relief and comfort now felt like another lie that I would never be able to fully trust. I scowled at the plush creature even as my fingers itched to wrap around its soft, well-worn fur and pull it close.

Was it something that Noelle had gotten to soothe me as a child? No, she’d never cared about my emotional wellbeing, and I’d hidden the toy from her over the years. I’d always had the sneaking suspicion that she’d throw it away if she knew how much I treasured it.

Anna, the only emotional comfort I’d ever had at the household, had never said anything about the tiger that I could remember either. I’d caught a glimpse of it in a couple of the earliest childhood videos…

Did that mean it’d come from the life I’d had before the household? It could be a clue—or simply a tool my kidnappers had used to placate a distressed toddler in the moment.

I didn’t allow myself to dwell on the thought as I got up from my bed and quickly changed, but I couldn’t help brushing two fingers across the striped fabric of the tiger before I strode out of the room.

I found Blaze sitting at the dining table, a half-devoured plate of fettuccini alfredo poised at his left and his laptop propped open at his right. He rapidly typed with one hand as he forked pasta into his mouth with the other.

I suppressed a laugh. “You take multitasking to a new extreme.”

Blaze’s head whipped toward me. Rather than turning the computer from me or closing it, he gestured to the seat at his side. “Come and sit down. Maybe you can help me.”

Something in my chest tightened at the welcome with a startled pang. He trusted me enough to share whatever he was working on.

Of course, what he was working on was me. As I dropped into the chair, the window open on the laptop’s screen jittered with an occasional flicker of an image. As I watched, one of those flickers flashed into a folder at the bottom of the display.

“What’s all this?” I asked as Talon emerged from his bedroom and headed to the refrigerator behind us. “Who are you looking for?”

Blaze shot a smile at me, his knee bouncing with his usual frenetic energy. “Technically, I’m looking for you. Or anything that could lead us to your birth family.”

Talon grunted. “Why bother with your fancy software? Wouldn’t one of those DNA sites do the trick faster?”

I sat up straighter in my chair. “Is there a website that’d connect me to my relatives by my genetics?” I had a vague sense that I’d heard about something like that before.

Blaze studied me. “I keep forgetting how much you’ve been out of the loop the last twenty-or-so years.” He turned to include Talon in his answer. “Any of the public companies that run DNA matches come with too many problems. To start with, it’ll only help us if one of Dess’s relatives has already gotten a test with them too, so it won’t even necessarily turn up anything. And they are totally public. If the people hunting for her have set up flags in any company’s systems, we could inadvertently lead them right to us.”

“So do it privately then,” Talon said.

Blaze rolled his eyes. “I don’t happen to have the skills to sequence her DNA, so unless you took a secret course in microbiology, that’s not happening. There aren’t any significant private databases that I’m aware of that would give us a decent chance of finding a match anyway.”

I peered at the laptop screen. “What are you doing, then?” He’d clearly come up with some kind of solution. The tech genius seemed to have an answer for everything. Compared to my minimal computer skills, the stuff he could pull off might as well have been DNA sequencing.

Blaze gulped down another mouthful of pasta before answering. “I took a bunch of stills from the videos of you right after you were taken and now I’m having my facial recognition app run them against all the missing child reports it can dredge up from around the right time period for kids around the right age. Since we don’t know how much global reach this organization had, I’m taking them from all around the world. There are a lot—it’s going to be a slow process.”

My heart sank. “You haven’t found any matches yet.”

“Nothing definite. I’m having it pick out ones that are somewhat close in case they did something to your appearance before any of those videos were taken. And if this doesn’t pan out, there are plenty of other strategies I can try.”

His optimism took the edge off my disappointment. But after I’d plowed through a bowl of cereal, I found myself wandering through the apartment, desperate to hear a ping of an alert that might mean a match. When it didn’t come, I finally planted my hands on the other side of the table.

“I can’t just sit around and wait for something to happen. There’s got to be a way I can investigate too.”

Talon let out a doubtful sound from where he’d moved to the couch and dragged out his knitting bag. I was never going to get totally used to the sight of that musclebound killer weaving the needles back and forth with their yarn, as close as the movements might come to the jerk of a knife.

“Whatever bad idea you’re about to suggest, the answer is no,” he grumbled.

I made a face in his direction. “Who says it’s a bad idea?” Even as I said that, an actual idea occurred to me. One that had the potential to be dangerous, sure, but leaving the crew’s apartment would always be a risk. I wasn’t going to find the answers that’d reduce the danger if I stayed cooped up in here.

“I don’t know,” Talon replied in his typical impassive voice. “The last time you took off, you nearly got kidnapped again. Whether it’s bad or not, I’m pretty sure it’ll be hazardous to your health.”

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