Page 33 of Ground Truth

Hanna winced and cleared her throat, but her voice was husky when she replied. “I was, uh, at a frat party. It was a weekend thing. I didn’t find out about the accident for several days.”

Gaspar said, “That’s why you and your sister stopped talking? Because you weren’t there when your mother died?”

Hanna sighed and inhaled deeply, as if she were summoning the courage to talk about things she’d avoided for years.

“Mom wasn’t one of those nurturing helicopter moms you hear about these days. After Greta left home, she made it clear that she couldn’t wait to have me gone, too.” Hanna paused, sipped, cleared her throat again. “I obliged her when I turned eighteen. I didn’t see her much after that. I moved in with my boyfriend for the last year of high school. Then I went off to college. Then I left to travel the world.”

Flint understood her point, although Gaspar probably didn’t. Gaspar was a family man through and through. He’d never allow one of his daughters to leave home like that.

But Flint had lived on his own from the same age and so had Scarlett. Hanna’s choice didn’t seem so odd to him.

“When did you last see Greta?” Flint asked.

Hanna dipped her head and looked at her shoes. “When I left Mom, I left Greta behind, too. She tried to call me several times and I ignored her calls. I thought she could have helped me after she left home and I was a kid, and I guess I just didn’t have the maturity to deal with everything.”

“So you haven’t seen any member of your family since you were eighteen?” Gaspar’s incredulous tone suggested something close to horror.

Hanna sighed. “Right. Dad died when I was ten. Greta left home when she was eighteen and I was thirteen. I saw Greta a few times after that because she’d come back to visit. She helped Mom as much as she could. But we were never close, and I guess we just drifted apart until Mom died.”

“And then what happened when your mother died?” Gaspar asked. “Surely you attended the funeral and worked things out with Greta then.”

Hanna shook her head again. “No. I had answered one of Greta’s phone calls. She was furious with me. She said I shouldn’t have left Mom alone. She said lots of other things. And so did I, to be fair. After we hung up that call, we never connected again.”

“Greta didn’t reach out to Hanna while she was in prison. Hanna thought it was because Greta was still angry. But when Hanna was released, after a long period in the hospital to recover from TB, Hanna tried to reconnect with Greta.” Drake explained to Flint what Gaspar already knew. “And that’s when Hanna was told Greta had died.”

Flint scowled. “Guys, I’m sorry. My head is just not on straight here. Is Greta Reed dead or not?”

“Based on what we’ve found so far, we don’t know,” Gaspar responded. “Could go either way.”

Gaspar pulled up the video of the crowd at the royal wedding that Hanna had seen from her room. “Here’s the first video Hanna saw. We’re interested in this woman in the crowd.”

He stopped the image and circled the visible portion of the woman’s body. Next was a still image, enlarged and enhanced, of the same woman.

“I ran the image through our specialized face recognition software. No matches were found, even though I checked the passport files and the driver’s license files,” Gaspar said.

“Did you feed those images into the software and try to match them?” Flint asked.

“I heard you’ve got brain damage,” Gaspar replied dryly. “Of course I did. We have several issues with the available images that make the software twitchy. So the results are not conclusive, but they’re close enough to warrant a harder look. Point is, Greta Reed could very well be alive.”

Hanna heard the news and began to weep silently, head bowed. Drake put a big arm around her shoulders.

“What else do you have?” Flint asked. “Like is there somewhere on the globe to actually start looking?”

“My suggestion is to start with the husband,” Gaspar replied.

“The husband? Why?”

“He was older. Established professional. More places to look,” Gaspar said. “You can start in Atlanta. He was a hotshot transplant surgeon there for several years before Greta.”

Flint sat up in his chair, ignoring the nausea and the headache. “Sounds promising.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too.” Gaspar smirked.

“Guys, I’m gonna run Hanna back to the hotel. She can’t help with any of this. I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Drake said. “Feel free to keep going without me.”

When Drake and Hanna walked out, she was still weeping. Whether she was happy or sad or just exhausted and sick, Flint couldn’t tell.

“There’s something else.” Gaspar had waited until the front door closed behind them to speak again. “I called in a couple of favors and reached out to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. He said the official final disposition on both deaths, Greta and her husband, was accidental drowning, lost at sea. But privately, the guys were not so sure.”

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