Hidden - Laura Griffin Page 0,80
is that again?”
“Stop asking me that. My source confirmed that Robin is in the database. Anyone looking for her could have found recent images of her.” She swiped at her phone and brought up a photo Seth had sent her this morning. It showed a woman with long dark hair walking across a busy intersection. In the background was the UT clock tower.
Jacob frowned at the image. “This is on campus.”
“Right. They’ve got a number of surveillance cams there. This was captured last month. I’m guessing she was going to meet Celeste Camden and her daughter, Jillian.”
Bailey had probably been captured by the same camera walking through the very same intersection just a few days ago.
“You think someone found her based on this surveillance photo?” Jacob sounded skeptical. “With the dark hair, it doesn’t even really look like Robin Nally.”
“That’s not the only photo. Look at this one.” She opened the second image Seth had sent. “The angle is straight on, and the facial features are clearer. This is her employee badge from Villa Paloma. Once someone had this, they could figure out where she worked. And once they knew where she worked, they could go there and wait for her to show up and then follow her around and learn her routines.”
Jacob looked tense, but he didn’t talk. He waited for her to fill the silence. It was one of those conversational tricks he used to get information from people while giving up as little as possible. Bailey knew his tactics because she used them, too.
But Jacob’s silence didn’t matter. She didn’t need him to confirm all this.
“I’m thinking maybe he learned that she ran at the lake every morning,” she said. “And he figured that would be a good time to catch her alone, with the added benefit that the crime might look like a random mugging or sexual assault gone wrong instead of what it actually was—a carefully planned hit.”
Jacob slid the phone back. “I need your source. And I’m not fucking around, Bailey. Whoever it is, I have to talk to him.”
“About Tabitha Walker, right? I already did.”
“And?”
“And it’s a freaking mess. The worst-case scenario. I submitted a photo of Tabitha to the system through my contact. He got multiple hits.”
Jacob rubbed his hand over his chin. “Where’d you get a picture of her? I’ve been looking, and I’ve come up with nothing for Tabitha Walker, not even a driver’s license photo from when she lived in Illinois.”
“Maybe she never had one. Or maybe the feds pulled her records from the database at some point. I tracked down a picture of her from the student newspaper at DePaul University. They ran a story about some service organization, and she was the treasurer. Look.”
She brought up the screen shot on her phone—the same screen shot she’d given Seth to use. It showed a smiling young Tabitha standing in front of the student center collecting cans for a holiday food drive.
“Damn, she looks young,” Jacob muttered.
“She is. That was taken her junior year, so she was probably twenty.” Bailey looked at the picture, and anger swelled in her chest. “I’m sure she never thought her charity work might someday put her in a killer’s crosshairs.”
“You think McKinney’s people found this?” Jacob asked.
“I don’t know. I did. It took a lot of looking, but it’s out there.”
“And your source ran this through the program?”
“Yes. He used it as a probe photo and got several hits, not just one. All within the last two months, and all in the same city.”
“You’re saying—”
“I know where Tabitha is, Jacob.”
“Let me guess. New Orleans.”
She drew back, startled. “How did you know?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
JACOB DIDN’T ANSWER. He just watched her.
“Oh my God. Is she—”
“As far as I know, she’s alive,” he said.
Bailey waited, as though she wanted him to reveal more. But he wasn’t going to talk about the cell phone he’d recovered near the murder scene or the call they’d traced to a cell tower in New Orleans.
She tapped at her phone and brought up another photo. “Here’s one of the images.”
“This is in the database you’re talking about?” He took the phone from her.
“Yes. They’ve got more than a billion images.”
He blinked at her. “A billion?”
“Yes, and they’re gaining more every day.”
“Where are they getting them?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. From what I know so far, there’s some hacking involved.”
“And this company is local?”
“Headquartered right on Lake Austin.”
He was starting to understand the scope of this story and why she’d been so