It was close to midnight when Zach let himself into the Mudbug Hotel. He half-expected to find Raissa already in bed—or at least he hoped—but when he pushed the door open, it wasn’t exactly the scene he’d envisioned on the forty-five-minute drive to Mudbug. Raissa was in bed, but she was wearing more clothes than he’d imagined, and he hadn’t counted on her being surrounded by paper, either.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked, realizing she was so engrossed in whatever she was doing that she hadn’t even heard him open the door.
“Crap!” Raissa jumped up from the bed at the sound of his voice. “Why are you sneaking up on me?”
Zach laughed. “Are you kidding me?” He waved one hand at the rows of computer equipment. “You could have seen what I was wearing as soon as I drove into town if you were watching your security. Unlike your ghostly friend, I cannot walk through walls, nor am I invisible.”
“That’s a good thing, or you’d be dead.”
“True. Speaking of dead people, she’s not in here, right?”
“Helena? No, why?”
“Well, I was sorta hoping you’d have on fewer clothes, so I thought maybe she was here.”
Raissa laughed and jumped up from the bed. “I promise to have on fewer clothes later, but first I have to show you what Maryse and I found.”
Zach’s mind immediately shifted from carnal thoughts to the case. No way Raissa was this excited over nothing. “What did you find?”
Raissa grabbed a bunch of papers off the bed and sat at the table, spreading them out in front of her. Zach pulled up a chair next to her, ready for the show. “Maryse and I spent the afternoon going through the FBI files, trying to make a connection among the girls.”
Zach placed his hands over his ears. “I’m not hearing anything about hacking.”
“Wimp.” Raissa said and pulled his hands down. “I wanted to find the common denominator in the abductions. I’ve never believed it was on looks alone. It just doesn’t feel right, you know?”
Zach nodded. He thought there was far more to it than they had been able to discern. “So you found something about the girls?”
“No, their parents.”
“Like what? They lived in different places, had different jobs…No reason their paths would cross.”
Raissa smiled and handed him a stack of papers. “Unless they were all in the military. Check those papers. Three of them were stationed at Myrtle Beach.”
Zach looked down at the first sheet. “Facebook? You’re hinging a kidnapping investigation on Facebook.”
Raissa shrugged. “I wanted to hack the Social Security Administration. Maryse’s way was safer.”
Zach gave a silent prayer of thanks. “And legal. Remember legal?”
Raissa waved a hand in dismissal. “Forget that. Don’t you see—they were all at the same base. The last guy doesn’t have a Facebook account, but what do you want to bet he was stationed there, too?”
“Were they all there at the same time?”
“No, but within the same year, seventeen years ago.”
“And the FBI never caught that before?”
Raissa shook her head. “They wouldn’t have looked that far back initially, and when the lead investigator died, it got shuffled around a bit. There was a lot of terrorist activity going on then and most of the agents were redirected.”
“Then it went cold.”
“Yeah. They probably figured whoever did it was dead or in prison, and the reality is, the predators who don’t return kids alive are a higher priority than the one guy who returns them all seemingly unscathed.”
“So he got conve niently off radar and no one noticed a connection.”
“Until now. And guess who else just happened to be present on the base during that time?”
“Please don’t tell me it was the mayor.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you, but you need to check this bio we pulled off the City of New Orleans Web site. The mayor spent his last year of service as an instructor…”
“…in Myrtle Beach. Shit.”
“Guess who else was there?”
“I’m afraid to ask?”
“Our friend Dr. Spencer.”
Zach ran one hand through his hair. “Did he have that listed on his Facebook page, too?”
Raissa grinned. “No. We called and asked.”