The heartbroken brother had even been mentioned.
"I need to make sure Mikey is cared for,"Nadia had written."We need to make sure he has some kind of nest egg. He's not fit to work yet."
"You'll have to do that on your side,"the betraying husband had texted her back."Because if I do it, then they're going to trace that money, and they'll end up seizing it."
"Is your wife’s cash going to be enough for us?"Nadia had asked, clearly thinking of number one above all else, more than her poor brother.
"Yes, for sure, it'll be enough for us. We won't buy, we'll rent. There are plenty of great places in Namibia, and we're going to have a blast there. They won't be able to follow us. The Feds can't extradite from there. Aren't you looking forward to the weather?"
Cami swallowed. She was holding a lot of information in her hand, but it wasn't giving her what she needed.
Now, she saw why Nadia had run so desperately. Now, she understood the panic in the cheating husband's eyes. They'd been planning a major crime, and it had been taking a lot of their time and energy. Stealing your wife's money and vanishing overseas with your mistress was a serious felony.
But it wasn't what she'd been looking for.
Now, she saw that Nadia had created this hot yoga alibi to explain away her cheating. She'd been setting up a new life. Looking at her search history, Cami saw she'd been spending her time selling some items of furniture, buying warm weather clothing, and researching homes and hotels in Namibia.
She hadn't, to Cami's knowledge, been spending any time tracking down victims to avenge her brother—a brother she was now realizing that she didn't care for as much as Cami had thought.
With a sense of complete panic, she felt this case was falling apart again. This suspect was guilty as hell, but she was guilty of the wrong crime, and Cami could find nothing to link her to the one they needed. Perhaps Connor might still get a breakthrough, but Cami was feeling a lot less confident about it. Deep down, she had the strong feeling that this wasn’t their murderer. And Cami had no alternative to offer him. The only thing they could do was go all the way back to the drawing board.
Cami put the phone down and buried her face in her hands.
"I need a miracle here," she muttered. It seemed like nothing less could save them now.
As she sat there, in the darkness, she realized that there was only one loose end that could possibly provide answers.
That was the strange puzzle of the missing face. The fourth doppelganger who’d disappeared a year ago, seemingly vanishing without a trace.
Where was she now, and could her disappearance provide the clues that Cami so desperately needed?
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
"I want to know more about that disappearing face," Cami muttered to herself. "It’s literally the last of those doppelgangers, and why is it unaccounted for? I want to find out who it belonged to, what happened, and why it's vanished. There must be a reason. Maybe it’s important."
At any rate, seeing there was nothing to link Nadia to the crime, this was the only other lead she had. And the more she thought about it, the weirder she decided it was.
It had to be linked to what was going on, surely?
All the other close lookalikes had current identities and could be searched. But not that face. Why?
To look again at that disappearing face and try once more to search, she'd need to go back to Wave Management. There was nowhere else she could access it. Only on that computer, on the company’s premises, linked up to their mainframe.
And she was more than willing to go there. It was a hundred times better than going back to the interview room to tell Connor that she didn’t have anything for him.
"I have to try," she muttered. "I don't have a choice. I need the information. I need to see the stats. I need to know who that face is! It might be an earlier victim, perhaps it’s someone the killer hates, perhaps she kept her locked away." Theories now multiplied in Cami’s mind. Who cared if they were right or wrong at this stage? she thought. At least they were ideas, and one of them might just be right.
“Perhaps it’s the killer herself,” she said. “Perhaps she worked out how to disappear, and she’s killing people who look like her.”
That didn’t make enough sense, but it was intriguing all the same.
Now, she had to get back to Wave Management and see if any of the tenuous ideas made sense on a second look.
Cami didn't have a car. Truth be told, she hadn't done much driving at all. She'd taken a few lessons years ago, but she hadn't gotten her license. She'd never needed to because she was in central Boston and everywhere she had to go was accessible by walking or by cab. And also, lessons were expensive. She was a scholarship student and that meant her study bills and her accommodation were paid for, but not much else. She'd never asked her parents for money.
Extra funds and income she'd gotten from teaching or odd jobs had gone to buying equipment like her laptop, not to something unnecessary like taking driving lessons.
She couldn't go alone. Someone would have to take her. And right now, she couldn't ask Connor. This was just a theory. Connor's questioning might still yield results. It was possible that Nadia was guilty of more than one crime, and she’d just hidden the evidence well enough, or she had a burner phone stashed away somewhere. It wasn’t within her powers to find that now, and so Connor needed to continue interrogating her.