Already Seen (Laura Frost FBI)

Laura ended the call and scanned down the list. There was a Donald there, and a Michaela too. Laura was dialing for Donald when Nate walked in, and she gave him a tense smile. The call rang out with no response, and she swung her wheeled office chair towards the computer they had been given to work on, quickly logging in to access any records she could find on him.

“Anything yet?” Nate asked, perusing the list and picking out a number to call for himself.

“Maybe,” Laura said. “Couple of leads. I’m going to chase them down, see where they get me.”

***

Where they got her turned out to not be very far. Already, Laura felt like they were sifting through a haystack to look for a needle. Donald was not available because he was still recovering in a treatment center; it turned out his breakdown had been very severe, and he had been confined to his room at the center ever since. Patients required a day pass to leave, and he had never requested one. That would explain why Caleb hadn’t brought him up as suspicious – he couldn’t possibly be involved in any of this.

Michaela turned out to be working at a marketing firm and loving it and had moved on from acting entirely. She wasn’t mad about changing careers – she was happy. By the time Laura had worked through them, Nate had another five leads from the people he’d called, all of them accusing other students from the acting classes.

All of the actors in the class, it seemed, had some kind of neurosis or issue. Some of them were transient because they couldn’t make a living from acting, moving from one place to another every week but still managing to turn up to class. Some of them had had breakdowns like Donald, in varying degrees of severity. Some of them had just quit the class to focus on some other aspect of their lives or gone to a different coach and held no grudge against Lucile. There was gossip in every quarter, enough rumors to fill a whole tabloid paper, and none of it seemed to actually lead anywhere.

By mid-morning, they had a pile of reports from Mills’ detectives, who were finding and calling the students from Suzanna Brice’s list one by one. It was a much harder process. Suzanna hadn’t kept good records: some of the students were just listed by first name or nickname, and none of them had contact details. But the story was emerging in a similar light. Lots of rumors, no real leads.

It was enough to drive Laura to a breakdown, herself.

She looked over the names they had already investigated – dozens, by now, and buried her head in her hands for a moment. She couldn’t keep doing this. She needed a break, something to keep her going.

Glancing at Nate to check that he was still distracted by his own calls, Laura picked up her own phone again and called Division Chief Rondelle, hoping he wouldn’t be angry at her for checking in.

“Rondelle.”

“Hi, sir, it’s Agent Frost,” Laura said, keeping her tone as deferential as possible. “I just wanted to check in and see how things are going with Amy.”

She heard Rondelle sigh, but to his credit, he didn’t brush her off. He probably knew that she wouldn’t concentrate, or do as she was told, until she heard some news. “She’s in a temporary home and seems to be doing well, according to the latest report,” he said. “I’ve made sure she’s been settled in a place where Governor Fallow isn’t going to find her easily. I don’t think he’s going to be able to make contact with her.”

“That’s good,” Laura said, breathing a little more freely. “Can you give me the number of the home?”

“No, I can’t,” Rondelle said bluntly. “Laura, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Aside from the fact that we’re not supposed to give out that kind of information, even to investigating agents – we’re trying to keep her hidden. The fewer people who know where she is, the better.”

“But,” Laura began, only for Rondelle to cut her off.

“I know you want to speak to her, and I know you’ll feel you have a right to because it was you who rescued her from that place,” he said. “I’ll try to find a way to connect you later. But not right now, Laura. She also has to begin to settle. There’s a lot going on for her right now.”

“I understand,” Laura said. She wanted to argue that Amy would feel better settled if she could talk to someone she trusted – to Laura. She wanted to point out that the girl was with strangers and probably needed to hear a friendly voice. But she didn’t. Her long, drawn-out fight to get access to Lacey had taught her that women who argued were branded trouble, or troublemakers, or too unstable. They were told they would harm the child with their attitude and made to stay away for even longer.

Laura wasn’t going to make that same mistake again.

“Alright. Any progress on your Seattle case?” Rondelle asked.

“Some, and then none,” Laura sighed. “We’ve had a couple of very good suspects, but nothing viable so far. We’re just making calls to individuals from a long list of potential witnesses, and I wanted a quick break. I’ll get back to it now.”

“Glad to hear that,” Rondelle said. “Keep working hard. I want results as soon as you can. The press are starting to catch wind of this, and we need to get it wrapped up before we have a city-wide panic on our hands. Don’t let yourself get distracted.”

“Yes, sir,” Laura said, as if she was going to try for anything else.

She put the phone down and was about to go downstairs to find out where the other detectives had managed to get to on their list, when she realized Nate was talking with a renewed note of interest in his voice. He made several affirmative noises and then thanked who he was talking to, putting the phone down and giving her a triumphant look.

“What did you get?” Laura asked.

“Maybe something, maybe not,” Nate told her. “I just got off the phone with a photographer – one of the students from the list referred me to him. Apparently, Lucile Maddison used to refer her students to him for a slight discount on their headshots – and she wasn’t the only one. He reckons he covers at least half of the aspiring actors in the city because of his connections.”

“Which include other acting coaches?” Laura asked, her eyebrow raised in hope.

“Oh, yes,” Nate said with a grin. “Such as Suzanna Brice. I said we’d go over there now to talk to him.”

“Thank God,” Laura said, getting up from her chair. “Maybe he’ll actually be able to tell us something. If I have to listen to one more melodramatic actor tell me that someone in their class was suspicious because they were also melodramatic, I might just have to scream.”