Finn nodded, but Ethan joined up the dots rapidly and said, “Oh God, you think this might have something to do with you, with Gibson and the whole thing.”
“I don’t know. I hope not. But Jonas left a note under my door early on Thursday morning, saying he’d found out who Gibson worked for. I’d intended to tell him to forget about it as soon as I got back. It’s probably nothing more than a coincidence, but for my own peace of mind, and perhaps for his family’s, I’d rather be certain.”
Though he wasn’t sure what peace of mind would come to the family from finding out that Jonas had been a murder victim rather than a suicide. And if it proved to be the former, he didn’t expect them to feel too well-disposed to the person who’d inadvertently set Jonas on that path, but he still had to go.
He hadn’t voiced it, but there was another family’s peace of mind at stake here, and again it was Ethan who immediately saw the tangential but very real risk to his own daughter’s safety if Jonas had been murdered.
He stood up urgently and said, “I’ll make the call.” And he left the room.
Hailey looked astounded by her father’s sudden capitulation, but then the reality of the situation hit her, too, and she said, “If he was killed, then I could be in danger, too.”
Debbie looked from her daughter to Finn with increasing levels of fearfulness.
Finn shook his head. “I don’t think so, and I hope I can rule it out even for Jonas.”
Debbie didn’t like his response and said, “But what will you do, Finn, if he was killed and it was these associates of yours? We can’t just go from day to day wondering if they might come after Hailey. If he was murdered, it would be the result of your mess—”
Hailey interrupted, full of self-reproach as she said, “No, it wouldn’t be Finn’s fault. It would be mine. If I hadn’t encouraged Jonas to hack Gibson’s network, if I hadn’t run away, none of this would have come out. Jonas wouldn’t have gone searching. I’d never have done it like this if I’d known, but we thought Gibson was just a nobody.”
Gibson was a nobody, thought Finn—that was the whole point.
“Look, I don’t think it helps anyone to start apportioning blame. Chances are, he killed himself, and that’s no less tragic, but I want to be sure.”
Ethan came back into the room and sighed heavily before saying, “You can go over whenever you want.” Debbie looked up at her husband, surprised. He looked back at her and said, “Sam thinks it’s suspicious, too.” Ethan glanced at Finn then, a look that seemed to warn him to tread carefully, to appreciate the fragile state of the people he was dealing with.
Finn said, “I’ll go over right away, if you could give me the address.”
“You won’t need it,” said Hailey. “I’ll come with you.”
Debbie looked disturbed by the change of heart and said tentatively, “Honey, I’m not sure that’s a wise thing to do.”
Hailey looked at her mother and said with conviction, “Mom, it’s the wisest thing I’ve done in a long time. I have to go.”
There was no further objection, just a lost look in Debbie’s eyes, as if she were wondering if their daughter had really returned, if that little girl of memory would ever truly return to them, or if this headstrong young woman was who they’d have to deal with from now on.
Finn stood up, glad that Hailey was coming along. It would offer a distraction from his business there. And Hailey might have as much of an idea on how to access Jonas’s computer as he’d had about cracking her virtual world. That was what it all came down to for Finn—what Jonas had been doing with his computer these last two days, and what that might suggest about the way he had died.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Once they were in the taxi, Hailey said, “I’ll never forgive myself. It was my fault.”
She sounded overly dramatic but he knew it was a front, a way of concentrating on some hypothetical tragedy as a way of not thinking about the simpler truth of Jonas being dead.
It occurred to him, too, that Hailey might well be able to blame herself whatever the truth of Jonas’s death. She’d already outlined her culpability if he’d been killed, but if they got into his computer and found that he’d looked at her Facebook page a hundred times in the hours before his death, she would feel equally responsible.
And she would be wrong on both counts, so Finn said, “Whatever happens, it’s not your fault and it’s not mine. If it was . . .” He hesitated, conscious of the taxi driver. “If it was suspicious, then the only people responsible are those who thought they had to silence a fifteen-year-old boy. We all make mistakes, we overlook things that could have prevented this or that, but that doesn’t make us responsible—other people have to take that guilt.”
Involuntarily, his mind skipped back to Tallinn, to Kaliningrad, Sparrowhawk, Harry Simons, to all the things he could never quite leave behind.