Page 93 of Her Dark Lies

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Karmen marks the time and date, swaps to the camera on the traffic light to see if she can do a better face capture.

She gets another angle. Then another.

Three points. That’s more than enough. Karmen plugs the still shots into the database. She traces out a jawline, an ear, the distance between the temples.

The software will do the rest. She has to trust the technology. This could take hours. She could have let one of the team in New York do this work, but it’s important that she, and she alone, discover this woman’s identity.

She should get some rest; she’s totally burned out. Instead, she turns to the internet, and does some more searching on Ami Eister.

Clearly, someone is playing an angle against the Comptons, and against Claire. The two situations—the break-in, the visitation—are linked, no doubt. Maybe this woman is dating, or married to, Shane McGowan, and he’s talked her into doing things for him.

She lets the thought sit for a moment. It’s possible.

Flip it. The woman talks a thug into doing some work for her. And to twist the knife a bit, chooses a someone designed to truly hurt the victim. Revenge is an excellent motivator.

Karmen has read the court transcripts; she knows Shane McGowan covered for his young girlfriend. His lies meant Claire didn’t go to jail for the robbery of the Mapco. But McGowan did.

Claire cost him five years of his life. His own stupidity landed him in jail for the rest of the decade since that first arrest. After ten years behind bars, it wouldn’t take much to convince him to screw over the girl who sent him there in the first place, right?

People’s pasts are interesting places. Even the most upstanding citizen has something to hide. Most unpaid parking tickets don’t lead to the capture of a serial killer, but sometimes, they become a catalyst of another sort.

She turns back to the computer, does a quick search.

Morgan Fraser, twenty-three, flame-red hair and a bod to match. Now, this woman looks like she belongs to the Comptons. Not a sweet, gilded butterfly like Claire, or lush like Harper; Morgan was a raging lioness. Karmen can practically feel the power coming off the woman through the screen. She was dynamic in photos. In person? She was mesmerizing. Mesmerizing enough to capture the eyes and heart of a rich young playboy.

Though Karmen knows the details from the inside, she reads more. About how the two met. How Morgan Fraser, the hot young engineer sweeping through Silicon Valley, had landed 120 million in venture capital funds to produce high-resolution microcameras for laptops. She’d approached Brice at the Allen and Company conference in Sun Valley. How she’d scored an invite was still up for discussion—the conference was one of the most private, most elite in the world. Brice couldn’t help himself—he bought out her nascent company over lunch. She’d already gotten her hooks into Jack at that point.

Microcameras. Morgan developed microcameras. Like what they’d pulled out of Claire Hunter’s house? Over twenty miniature wireless encrypted cameras had been stashed throughout the house, and Karmen still had no idea where they’d been transmitting to.

The computer dings. The facial recognition has a hit.

The program has two photographs side by side. One is the profile shot of the woman who visited Claire. The other...

No.

That’s impossible. They don’t even look alike.

There are things that you can’t change about yourself with traditional plastic surgery. The distance between your eyes. The depth of your eye sockets. The length of your jawline. The shape and set of your ears. It’s why facial recognition software is so accurate.

Though the two women don’t look at all the same, the program has found a match. And that means...

Karmen’s senses have come alive. Everything crashes together, and she grabs her phone. She has to warn the family, now.

The knife slams between her ribs and she falls forward onto the keyboard. The shock of the attack freezes her senses just long enough for the knife to be pulled out and slammed in again, and once more, so deep she knows this is it. She is done.

She tries to twist, tries to fight, but the knife has penetrated her lung, she can’t breathe. She collapses on the floor, facedown, the knife sticking from her ribs like a flagpole. Blood leaks from her mouth and back, puddling on the floor under her desk. She can feel it, taste it, sticky and iron sweet. It takes three minutes for her to die, the knowledge burning through her veins.

Karmen has failed in her most basic duty. She hasn’t protected the family.

When the woman is dead, the computer is wiped, the match declined, the request for identification rescinded. The files are deleted, the hard drive wiped. The text is sent.

The words, spoken with a snarl.

“Good fucking riddance.”

55

Bonny Lass Gone