Tiger Mom (Killer Moms #4) - Eve Langlais Page 0,11

back tomorrow. Have the money, or else.”

Ted would have it. Mostly because he considered it a cost of doing business.

Less than ten minutes later, after the gang had left, he locked the door and went upstairs to where he had converted a second-floor storage space into an actual apartment. He’d even installed a bathroom and a small kitchenette area.

Not the height of luxury, but he didn’t have many needs. The big, comfy chair that creaked when he sat was one of his few splurges. The cold beer going down his throat another. The third and most expensive thing he owned, was the computer on the table in front of him. As the machine booted, he held a pack of frozen fries to his cheekbone, minimizing the hematoma he felt forming. Luckily, he didn’t bruise like a peach. He had some friends who used to turn purple at even a hint of violence.

The computer login screen appeared, and he typed, the setup much more elaborate than anything else he owned. Because for him, having a powerful machine he could play on at home was worth the cost.

Ted wasn’t much on going out. He’d seen the world. It was ugly. Every day, he could see signs of it online. The killing. The hate. The lies. He kept as far away from it as he could. It made it easier to hold his temper in check. Easier to fight the temptation of the vices that flooded the streets.

Once Ted logged in, he activated a private VPN that routed his signal via too many channels for anyone to follow. He protected himself before doing anything that might be considered shady.

Being a bit of a shut-in meant that he learned how to dig, deep enough to unearth secrets. He set off some searches, using some macros he’d programmed. They all went crawling, looking for Macey Munroe on the big, wide web. It didn’t take long to realize that the Macey he once knew didn’t exist. Not a single peep about the girl he’d known in high school, who’d gone off to do incredible medical things.

Who now went by another name.

But something niggled at him. He remembered hearing something back in the day on one of the rare occasions that he’d come home on leave. Something important regarding Macey.

Since normal searches weren’t netting him anything, Ted dove past the regular internet most people knew, right into the dark web. The real internet.

He opened a new search window and typed in her name. For a price, he could access all kinds of databases, like that of his old high school. He found himself in those records, and other people whose names he remembered, but no Macey. Impossible. They’d graduated together.

More digging revealed that not only her school file was gone but also her birth records. Everything appeared to have vanished, except for one odd mention in a dark web forum devoted to archived newspapers. Buried inside a short paragraph of an ex-pat periodical circulated in Asia, a mention of the tragic demise of an American scientist in China.

Macey Munroe. Dead in a helicopter crash. Now, he remembered it. His mother had been quite excited, her whole church abuzz with the news. Could they have been wrong? Perhaps the clipping was about someone with the same name.

He swigged his beer and recalled how he’d almost not recognized her. Might not have clued in had she not used his name. She’d changed her hair. No longer strawberry blond, she’d gone brown and let it grow out from the shoulder-length she used to have. Then there was the mole on her jaw. A distinctive dark mark that he used to fantasize about kissing. It was now gone. As were the cute wire-rimmed glasses she used to wear. He also could have sworn that her nose and chin were different. A little more pointed.

But, people aged and changed their style. What he found a bit odder was that she’d changed her name. And lied about it. Portia wasn’t her middle name. Nor was there any record of a Macey Munroe getting married. Not in North America or anywhere he could search marriage registries online.

However, there were a few places he couldn’t get in to, countries with much more robust firewalls to penetrate. Hadn’t the article mentioned that the helicopter crash had happened in China?

Interesting how she had two little girls with Asian features.

There were only a few reasons why someone would want to disappear. All of them deadly. In her case,