Already Taken (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Who is she, then?” Laura asked, leaning forward slightly to check the road in both directions before pulling out.

“Looks like she’s some kind of genealogist,” Agent Moore replied thoughtfully, scrolling through the results on her phone. “She’s organized quite a few of these ancestors reunion things. She tends to keep them local, I suppose so she can always attend and make sure everything runs smoothly. There are loads of testimonials and galleries from past events on her website.”

“Anything about our event?”

“Not much yet. It was recent, so I suppose she hasn’t processed it correctly. There’s a small gallery, but not as many shots as the others.”

Laura glanced her way before focusing back on the road. “Any shots of our victims?”

Agent Moore was silent for a moment, scrolling. “No,” she said, at length. “Not yet.”

“That’s a good thing,” Laura pointed out. “It means that we know the killer must have attended in person. If he didn’t, he would have no way to know who attended and who didn’t. Well, unless he had access to the guest list, of course—we can ask her about that when we arrive. What was her name again, Alice…?”

“Alice Papadopoli,” Agent Moore replied, the name rattling off her tongue naturally. “She doesn’t have any opening hours listed on her website. What if she’s not in when we get there?”

“Then we’ll try to get a home address,” Laura said. Her hands flexed on the steering wheel in frustration at a slower vehicle blocking their way. It felt like all they’d done since getting up this morning was drive around from one place to another. She was hoping that this Papadopoli would be in the office listed on her website—because if she wasn’t, it would only mean another agonizing delay.

“This is so interesting,” Agent Moore said, lost in whatever she had found on the site. “Do you think I have distant cousins out there who I’ve never met?”

“That’s how it works,” Laura said, her impatience almost boiling over as they stopped at a red light, fingers tapping on the wheel. “Everyone has distant cousins they’ve never met.”

“Everyone?” Agent Moore asked, thinking about it. “I haven’t met my close cousins, come to think about it. I never got a chance. When we were living in the commune, it was just us. Actually, I thought our neighbors were my cousins for years, but that was just because we were supposed to call all older adults Aunt and Uncle. They weren’t really related to me at all.”

What an odd life Agent Moore had had. Laura didn’t say it. Even if she wasn’t sure that Agent Moore would even realize it was rude to say so. “You say she’s organized a lot of these things, but always here? It’s a bit random, isn’t it?”

“Well, not if she lives here,” Agent Moore said.

“It doesn’t matter where she lives,” Laura said. “You’d think it would be easier to hold this kind of thing in a big city. Or at least, near one. Everyone who attends has to come out to the middle of nowhere. Why would she do it like that?”

Agent Moore shrugged silently. Glancing over from the corner of her eye, Laura realized she probably didn’t even know that traveling to a rural location for a random conference hall wasn’t unusual. She probably didn’t understand the concept of distant relations being scattered all across the country, to the extent that many of them might have needed to fly in. To make that possible, surely you’d want to hold your reunion near major transport links—an airport, a train station, a metro system.

“I think it’s nice,” Agent Moore said, as Laura took another turn. “Imagine meeting all those people you’re related to that you didn’t even know! I wish someone would organize one for my ancestors.”

“I’ve never heard of one of these before,” Laura mused. “Never been invited to one. It seems unlikely, doesn’t it? If she’s done so many of them, eventually you do get to a point where everyone is connected.”

“Are you sad you’ve missed out as well?” Agent Moore asked. “Maybe we can ask her if she can check our DNA and organize something!”

Laura shook her head impatiently as she pulled up outside the office indicated by her GPS. It was clearly a shared space—an old warehouse converted into offices, with a dozen company signs out front. None of them were for this genealogist. “I mean, what if these other events are faked, and the whole point of this convention was to get certain people in a room with one another? Maybe to lure them somehow or push them together? Let me look at that website.”

Agent Moore handed her cell phone over—Laura noticing as she did that it was an older model, with a bit of damage to the bottom corner of the screen—and she looked at the site closely. She scrolled through the pages, speed-reading each one as well as she could. There wasn’t anything she could see that would definitively guarantee the events were real. She checked the photos from a recent event, noting the quality was better than the ones from the one their victims had attended, and her thumb hit an image of the organizer as she scrolled, sending a jolt of pain through her temple and—

The same farmers, the ones she had seen before. They were standing around in the same configuration, talking silently. There wasn’t a sound between them, even though their mouths were moving. It was like Laura was deaf.

The same vision again. What was she supposed to gain from this, except for knowing she was on the right path?

Laura watched, unable to control the vision, impatient for it to end. If this wasn’t going to show her anything new, it was a waste of her—

One of the farmers turned, his face wide in a scream, his eyes open in panic. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was running, and she followed him. She couldn’t see the others. She only saw him running through the field, racing away as fast as he could, from—someone? Something?

Laura blinked, the images on the phone still moving in the scroll she had initiated. They hit the bottom of the gallery and she handed it back to Agent Moore, trying to ignore the light throbbing in her head. It was easy enough. She’d spent her life ignoring the pounding pain of immediate visions, not the light throb of this view into the past.

“Well,” she said. “Better go inside.”

She watched Agent Moore get out of the car, giving herself a moment of breathing space. She had to figure out what she had seen. The farmers were running and screaming—clearly, something had frightened them. But who, or what? And what did that have to do with what was happening now?

If she had been in a Hollywood blockbuster, she would have assumed that some kind of nightmarish creature was back after two hundred years to exact its revenge on the people who persecuted it before. But this wasn’t a movie, and that kind of curse wasn’t real. Even if she had psychic powers, it still didn’t make her believe in witches, ghosts, and ghouls.

So, what could possibly connect early American farmers with the modern-day killings?

She had a feeling she was going to need far more than one vision to find out—but with no way to trigger them except to keep investigating, she got out of the car, following Agent Moore up to the office building’s front door. There was a buzzer panel beside it, so they had no choice but to press the button which had Alice Papadopoli listed beside it and wait for her to let them in.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Papadopoli, this is the FBI. Can we come in and speak to you? It’s regarding one of your events,” Laura said, keeping her words as neutral as possible. The more serious she knew the case was, the more likely their genealogist would try to run.

“Uh, yes. Please come up.” There was a buzz, and the door clicked; pushing it, Laura found it open, and stepped inside.

They crossed a tiny lobby scattered with old junk mail that had drifted in through the door and then been left to pile up, climbing a grimy staircase to the first floor. Laura began to have serious misgivings as they passed under a flickering lightbulb to knock on the door marked with the name they were looking for. What kind of office was this? It didn’t look like a place where someone with a legitimate business would set themselves up.

She knocked on the door and it flew open before she had even finished the gesture, revealing an older woman in a thin cardigan over a densely patterned floral dress. She was tiny, with bone-like arms and legs that immediately put Laura in mind of a fragile bird.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Alice Papadopoli.”

“Ms. Papadopoli,” Laura responded, blinking. “I am Special Agent Laura Frost, and this is my partner, Agent Bee Moore.”

“Be more what?” Alice asked, without missing a beat.

“Be more everything,” Agent Moore replied, grinning wide. “Anything that you are. Just be more.”

Alice laughed merrily and turned to allow them in. Agent Moore followed her with almost a skip in her step, leaving Laura to shake her head wordlessly and follow once both of them could no longer see her.

At least it had worked, in terms of getting them inside.

“What’s all this about?” Alice asked, perching on a chair behind the one desk in the tiny office. There was just enough room for a couple of chairs opposite her, and Laura and Agent Moore both sank into one of these. “You mentioned my events?”

“Yes,” Laura said, reaching into her pocket. She drew out the poster she had taken from the marketing manager at the conference hall, smoothing it out where she had folded it. “This one, in particular. It took place just last month.”

Alice took the paper and nodded, her large head bobbing up and down in the air on what seemed an impossibly long neck. Her fingers were thin except around the knuckles, where they bulged in bony outcroppings; Laura suspected arthritis. “Ah, yes. This was very special. What is it that you want to know about it?”

“Why was it special?” Laura asked with a frown. That wasn’t the kind of response she had expected, and it was a good place to start.

“Well, because this was my own reunion,” Alice said with a beam. “I’ve organized them for a few other clients in the past, but this time, I decided to look into my own ancestry. It turned out I could trace my lineage back quite a way in the local area, through several different branches that started with the original Michaels family. And, wouldn’t you know it? There were thousands of us. Hundreds and hundreds still in the state. I decided I just had to go ahead and host an event for all of my long-lost distant relatives.”

It was clear from the way she spoke that she was very proud of the event and the way it had gone. “Everyone there was a relative of yours?” Laura said, because she had to be absolutely certain.

“Yes! Even the security at the door.” Alice grinned. “Actually, that wasn’t planned—it just so turned out that a couple of people who already did a bit of part-time work at the convention hall were part of the right gene pool. Just another bit of fate that made me feel I’d made the right choice in setting the event up!”

“Oh, how lovely!” Agent Moore gushed. “Imagine that, having every single person you see be a relative of yours. It must have been magical!”

“It really was,” Alice said, with a confessing tone to her voice. “I now know what it feels like for my clients, which was quite the surprise. I didn’t expect it to be so emotional—or so rewarding.”

“Could you tell me where you were yesterday, and the day before?” Laura asked, cutting across their touching conversation to get to the point.

Alice looked up sharply at the change in direction. “Where I was? Well, yesterday I was here in the office for most of the day. I had a few client meetings. And the day before I took the day off to go and visit my sister, since I didn’t have anything booked—she’s just moved into a residential facility a couple of hours away, and I wanted to make sure she was settling in properly.”