“I think you wanted to ask me about Scooter.” Nat placed her legs on the coffee table and crossed them. When she smiled, she had a particularly devious look in her eye. “After all, I know where all the bodies are buried.”
Natalie laughed a little, but Kat just thought about the folders in Natalie’s father’s office. She wondered what the folder labeled Scooter might have had to say.
“So there are bodies, are there?” Kat asked.
Natalie nodded. “Lots of them. Poor guy couldn’t keep a pet if his life depended on it. That rose garden has got to have at least a half dozen gerbils.”
Kat smiled at the thought. She herself had never had a pet, unless you counted the time the Bagshaws’ father had needed her to dog-sit Queen Elizabeth’s favorite corgi.
“You want popcorn?” Natalie asked, standing up. “I want popcorn.”
“Sure,” Kat said, moving on to a bookshelf full of classics, eyeing every one in turn; but nothing about the books was fake. The prototype was small. Portable. Great for hiding, hard for finding. At least now that Kat had the security code she could always come back later.
“Butter?” Natalie called.
“Absolutely!” Kat said.
“Make yourself at home,” Natalie said, and Kat did as she was told, helping herself to the bathroom, joining Nat in the kitchen, then walking back to the living room, positioning it all within the framework of everything she knew.
Garrett was a meticulous man, and as a result, he kept a meticulous house. In the bathroom, the towels were perfectly straight. What little food there was in the kitchen was carefully labeled. The whole apartment smelled of Windex and Lemon Pledge, and Kat could imagine that he’d spent so much of life cleaning up other people’s messes that he didn’t know when or how to stop.
The only thing slightly out of order was a stack of papers on the coffee table. Kat could imagine him dropping them there after work one night. Some junk mail and a takeout menu, phone bill, bank statement…
Passport.
“Natalie,” Kat said, reaching for it, “are you going back to Europe already?”
“What? Oh that.” Natalie glanced at the passport and pushed the thought aside. “No. That’s my dad’s. Has some business trip tomorrow.”
“That’s cool. Where?”
“Hong Kong,” Natalie said, then crinkled her nose. “I think.”
And Kat couldn’t help herself: she peeked at the piece of paper tucked inside the small blue booklet, at the word Aviary circled in red. And the time: eight o’clock.
Chapter 25
Kat had never felt at home in Hong Kong. Sure, she and her father had lived there for eight months after her mother died. The two of them had spent hours walking through the massive tide of people that ebbed and flowed, beating like a pulse through the city’s center. But no matter what, her mother’s memory followed them everywhere. Despite their best efforts, they were never quite able to lose her.
That was the thought that kept pounding in her head that afternoon. Gabrielle was at her back, Hale fifty feet behind her, and the three of them stayed on the crowded sidewalk, following the man in the hat. She kept her eyes forward and her pace steady. Gabrielle split off and took the other side of the street while Kat stepped out of the way of a bicycle. She got jostled by a food vendor moving a cart full of very strange-looking oranges. But she kept the man in her sights until, finally, he turned off the busy street and into Hong Kong Park.
“Kat?” Hale’s voice was in her ear. “Where is he? Did you—”
“She didn’t lose him,” Gabrielle said.
“Where is he going?” Hale asked.
“We don’t know.” Gabrielle sounded annoyed. “That’s why we’re following him.”
“But—”
“Hale, does someone need to go back to the hotel?” Gabrielle scolded him as if he were a little boy.
But Hale didn’t answer, and Kat walked deeper into the park. Concrete gave way to mossy grass. She moved from the shadow of buildings to the shadow of trees, and a cool breeze blew across her skin, carrying with it a sound that was growing louder and louder with every step.
“What’s that noise?” Gabrielle asked.
“I don’t know, Gabs. I think…” But Kat trailed off as soon as she saw the massive net suspended within the trees and finally knew exactly what she was seeing.