Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,43
sister came home at all,” Pam said. “Someone else left the clothes and picked up the mail to make it look as if she did.”
It sounded preposterous. “I’ve left her a gazillion messages. On her home phone. On her cell. At work. She’s got the number of the cell phone I’ve got with me.” Diana slipped it from her pocket to make sure she hadn’t missed a call. “If she’s back, why hasn’t she called me?”
“And you think someone tampered with your security systems?” Pam paused to consider this, as if it were a completely rational possibility. Diana felt herself relax another notch. “Seems like there ought to be a connection. Think back. Did anything unusual happen before your sister disappeared?”
“Ashley broke up with the guy she was seeing. That’s pretty unusual. For Ashley. And he wasn’t too thrilled.” Diana told Pam about the scene Aaron had made in the bar. How he’d followed her to Copley Square to apologize, then backed off.
“You think he might be the person your sister’s neighbor saw in the hall?”
“He could be.”
“And you know for sure that your sister was at Copley Square three days ago?”
“She called me from there. And there’s video footage, posted online, that shows her at the improv event.”
Diana went over to Pam’s computer. The forum in the amphitheater on OtherWorld was still going on. Pam had left PWNED sitting on the stage, watching the speakers.
“May I?” Diana asked, her hand poised over the mouse.
Pam nodded.
Diana opened a new browser window and typed in the Spontaneous Combustion address. She clicked the “Up in the Sky” video they’d posted. As the opening music played, Pam rolled her wheelchair over.
“This was Friday,” Diana said. She fast-forwarded to the clear shot of Ashley. “And that’s my sister, Ashley. There are just a couple more glimpses of her.” She fast-forwarded to the next one, and then to the next.
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I could find in the montage they posted. But of course there’s got to be more footage. Lots more.” She told Pam about the different video cameras that had filmed the event. “I called, and they offered to let me examine the rest of the footage. But I’ve got to get over there to do it.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Pam said. “We can go right now.”
“They’re closed,” Diana said. It was nearly seven o’clock already. But Pam called anyway, hitting the speakerphone button so Diana could hear.
The phone rang three times. Then: “We’re here from 10 A.M. until 6 P.M.,” a recorded voice informed them.
Pam stabbed at the phone and disconnected the call. “First thing tomorrow we head over there.”
Over dinner—a meze platter and kabobs that Pam brought back to the apartment from a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner—Diana reconsidered Pam’s question: Had anything unusual happened before Ashley disappeared?
She explained to Pam the kind of work she and Jake did, resolving security issues for clients in health care. “The same day Ashley disappeared, another client blew up in our faces. As soon as we’d found the breach, before we could track down the hackers, they called us off. It’s the third time that’s happened. I was furious.”
“Can you tell what these hackers were after?”
“I can show you one of the files they took. It didn’t mean a thing to me.”
Diana connected her laptop to Pam’s wireless network and got into her e-mail account. She opened the data file she’d left in the drafts folder and turned her laptop so Pam could see.
All it took was a glance. “That’s a DNA profile,” Pam said. She scrolled through it. “A unique individual, somebody somewhere. If we knew what we were looking at, we could find out all sorts of things about him.”
“Him?”
“Him.” Pam pointed to a line of data. “But that’s just the beginning. An expert could analyze the genetic code and tell us something about this man’s ethnic background. Certain genes make a person susceptible to specific viruses and immune to others. Or deadly allergic. Or—”
“But what good is it? I mean, why would someone want to steal this stuff?”
Pam propped herself up, straightening her spine and shifting in the chair. It occurred to Diana how uncomfortable it could get, sitting in the same chair all day long.
“Assuming they could link the profile to a person, like through a Social Security number, I can think of lots of information in a DNA profile that someone wouldn’t want others to know—and that you certainly wouldn’t want your insurance company or your employer