I swallow hard past the lump that suddenly lodges in my throat. It’s already in my head now, so maybe I should tell him. If this catastrophe hadn’t happened, I’d be in Washington, D.C. right now, telling it over and over again as people questioned me.
“I’ve relived it so many times,” I whisper. “I don’t know.”
“You were going to tell it to a bunch of strangers,” he reminds me. “I’m not a stranger anymore, am I?”
I’m starting to wonder if he can actually read my mind.
“No, you’re not.”
“That’s good to know.” Falk props himself up on one elbow and looks at me.
“All right, I’ll tell you. I’m a shitty storyteller though.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, trying to compose my thoughts before I begin.
“It started with an accounting report,” I say. “The woman who usually investigated discrepancies was out of the office. I’d been on a project a few months before, working on the programming for that system, and one of the other accountants I’d worked with asked me to look at it. I followed the data through the system and found this holding company.”
“Baby Blue, Limited.”
“Yes, that one. I kept seeing all these small amounts—much smaller than the one I was investigating being funneled to this holding company. It looked odd, so I searched for Baby Blue on Google but couldn’t find anything. That was weird, too, so I asked a friend of mine to check into it and see what he could find.”
“Daniel McIntyre. The hacker.”
“We were in school together,” I say with a nod. “We took a lot of the same computer classes, but he was a lot better than me. He could find anything anywhere—get into any system he wanted. I didn’t know he would end up…”
“He was killed in a car
accident.”
“He was run off the road. It wasn’t an accident.”
“I realize.”
“He linked Baby Blue to a bunch of porn sites. Porn sites with underage girls being raped.”
I take a deep breath.
“He sent me a picture from one of them,” I tell Falk. “He sent it because he thought one of the girls looked like me.”
“Your sister.”
“Yes.” I swallow again, tears welling in my eyes. “Her body was found with the others in that compound in Nevada. It brought us some closure, at least. It’s the only good thing that came out of it all. At least we know what happened to her.”
“That paper you talked about writing in college,” Falk says, “was about your own family.”
I nod, and Falk reaches over and lays his hand on top of mine where it lies on my stomach. He grips my hand for a moment and then relaxes.
“I turned it all over to the police,” I tell him. “All the evidence Daniel and I found. Their investigators linked it back to Tyler Hudson through some offshore accounts. A week after Hudson was arrested, Daniel was dead.”
“The arraignment was the day before, but he was let out on bond.”
“Yes.”
“You were attacked the following week.”
“Yes. How much of that did you read?”