Hidden - Laura Griffin Page 0,24
city, and he wasn’t about to shrug his shoulders and let the feds take over and hope maybe one day they came up with an arrest. A woman had been murdered, and someone needed to be held accountable.
Jacob needed to be put on the task force investigating this thing. He’d pitch it to his lieutenant. They were going to need local help in order to move quickly.
Morgan was still watching him, debating whether to tell him more. She sighed.
“I don’t know for sure, but I heard something about Chicago.”
Jacob nodded.
“I could be wrong about that, and I could definitely get in trouble for giving you any of this.”
“Thank you.”
She shot him a warning look as she grabbed her coffee. “Don’t make me sorry I told you.”
* * *
* * *
BAILEY OPENED THE oven to check her dinner, but it still wasn’t ready.
“No hits,” Nico said over the phone.
“Which platform?” she asked.
“All of them.”
Bailey tossed the pizza box into the recycle bin. Her laptop computer was open on the bar, and she tapped the mouse to wake it up.
“What about Instagram?” she asked.
“I looked.”
“Facebook?”
“I looked.”
Thud.
Bailey glanced at the ceiling. Her upstairs neighbors had people over, and they were getting louder by the minute.
“How about Twitter?” she asked.
Nico said something, but she couldn’t hear him over the ear-grating guitar chords.
“What’s that?”
“I said, I checked everything, all platforms, even the ones no one uses anymore. Far as social media goes, it’s like she doesn’t exist.”
Nico was the Herald’s tech reporter. He knew a lot more about social media platforms that Bailey did, and she’d hit him up for help when her original search came up dry. She trusted his expertise but found it hard to believe there was nothing whatsoever about Dana Anne Smith, given that she was a twenty-five-year-old living in a tech-savvy city. Bailey clicked into the file where she’d been keeping notes about the case. Earlier today she’d added a name to the Victim section. Beneath it she typed social media—keep looking.
“Hey, are you having a party?” Nico asked.
“It’s my neighbor.”
“Your neighbor’s a Whitesnake fan?”
“He likes eighties hair bands.”
The music grew louder, and she glared at the ceiling.
“I need to get something,” she said, picking up her computer. She took it into the bedroom and closed the door, then sank onto the bed, where her cat was curled up beside her bathrobe. “Is she an undergrad? A grad student? Is she local? I don’t even know if this woman is from Austin. According to my police source, she doesn’t have a Texas driver’s license.”
“Can’t help you there.”
“Max wants a profile, but so far I’ve got crap here.”
“You sure she doesn’t have a nickname?” Nico asked.
“I’m not sure of anything except what we got at the press conference, and it was totally bare bones. All I have is her name and age. I don’t even have an address that would give me a place to knock on doors.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s my fault, not yours,” she said. “Thanks anyway for trying. I owe you a favor.”
He snorted. “I’ll add it to the list. See you tomorrow.”
Bailey tossed her phone on the bed and sighed. She scratched Boba Fett’s stomach, and he purred but didn’t open his eyes.
“This is pathetic,” she muttered as she scrolled through her notes. Tomorrow’s article would give the victim’s name and confirm that she’d been stabbed to death on Austin’s most popular hike-and-bike trail. She had a canned “ongoing investigation” quote from the police department spokesperson, plus some local reaction. But in terms of a follow-up profile, she had zilch.
Boba Fett stood up and stretched. Then he rubbed his chin on the corner of her computer screen.
“You smell something burning, Boba? Crap!”
Bailey leaped up and raced into the kitchen. She snatched a dish towel off the counter and jerked open the oven.
“Damn it!”
Her pizza was burned, and a glob of cheese had turned into a smoking cinder on the bottom of the oven. The smoke alarm shrieked as Bailey grabbed a spatula. She scraped the pizza off the rack and dumped it into the sink, then grabbed a flimsy folding chair from the kitchen table. She dragged it under the smoke alarm, taking care not to collapse the damn thing as she climbed up. She poked the button on the alarm, but the shrieking continued. Stomping overhead let her know she was disturbing the neighbors.
Bailey jiggled the alarm but couldn’t get it loose. Finally, she tore it from the ceiling and hopped down from the chair.
Stomp stomp stomp!
“Are