“To a fresh start for us, my love,” you say and raise your glass.
“Yes,” I breath.
We drink.
I pray.
forty-seven
Bailey rings the bell, and Jax opens the door looking cored out and frazzled—her cloud of dark hair piled high, fastened by some mystery of scrunchie and hot pink headband. Her black T-shirt slips off her defined shoulder. A bit of a Flashdance thing going on, Bailey thinks.
Jax doesn’t say anything, just tugs at her violet leggings, moves aside so that he can pass into Wren’s town house.
Ben and Jason, the Dear Birdie zen master and PI respectively, are at the dining room table. Jason lifts a hand, and Bailey nods. The three friends have turned Wren’s dining room into a war room, every surface occupied by a computer, a spread of photos, property surveys, newspaper articles, police reports. The search for their friend has been long and exhaustive. And they all look a bit frayed, a bit red around the eyes, defeated. Welcome to my world, he thinks.
“What did you find out?” Jax asks, taking a cross-legged seat on the couch.
He runs down his conversation with Marty, with Beth, then the news that the ghost was back on Torch. It lands hard; Jax’s eyes go wide, she seems to shrink.
“What does that mean?” she breathes. “Does it mean that he’s—moved on?”
Bailey shakes his head, feeling the weight of the question. “I don’t know. But I have an idea.”
“An idea.”
“Let’s make a match for him.”
Jax gasps, then releases a long slow breath.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll swipe.”
“No,” say Ben and Bailey simultaneously.
The two men regard each other. Bailey likes all of these people—Jax is a staid and reliable friend; Ben is a good-hearted hard worker. Jason is a young, tech-savvy PI. They all love Wren. Together they’ve been managing Dear Birdie, the media storm that followed Wren’s disappearance, and have launched their own investigation. They have become Bailey’s unofficial team since Turner and Ives pulled the plug on his case, on him.
“I’m not firing you, Bailey,” Nora had said during their last conversation. “You’re the best investigator I’ve ever had. I’m trying to help you. There’s always one case in every career, you know. I’ve had mine. Diana hers. The one that hurts too much, that destabilized the process. This is yours. Recover and come back. Work on something else.”
“You’re telling me I care too much,” he’d said, injured, angry, frustration lodged in his solar plexus. “That’s bullshit.”
A breath drawn and released.
“I’m telling you that your judgment is off. That you’re not the man for this case.”
“Who is?”
“Whoever Henry Thorpe hires next. Did you forget about the client? The one who’s paying the bills? That’s my point.”
He had forgotten about the client. All he thought about was the ghost. And Wren.
“Get over this and come back home,” Nora said, then hung up in the silence that followed.
But he hadn’t stopped. He’d tracked down Jax, agreed to help her gratis. Now, here they were, six weeks later.
“Not you,” Bailey says now. “He’ll know you. Obviously, he knows everything about her.”
Ben comes to sit beside Jax, takes her hand. They’re mismatched, Bailey thinks. She’s all wild energy, high passion, ass-kicking. Ben is mellow and pale, graying—khakis and sensible shoes. She reacts, hot, fast. He’s all slow nods and chin rubbing. But something works. Yin and yang.
“Then what?” asks Ben.
“We create a person, one who fits his criteria—young, gorgeous, rich, and tortured by some childhood trauma. If he takes the bait, we set a date. When our fake person doesn’t show, we follow him from there,” says Jax.
“What are the odds something like that even works?” says Jason from the table. He’s a tall, skinny guy with a mop of dark hair and a beard, bespectacled, pasty and slouched from too much screen time.
“About as good as our odds just going over all the same information we’ve been looking at for the last week. We have nothing. Well, almost nothing,” says Bailey.
He fishes the folded white paper from his pocket, hands it to Jason.
“What’s this?”
“The Bitcoin account where Wren had her money transferred. Can you do anything with it?”
“The whole point of Bitcoin is that it’s untraceable.” Jason nods thoughtfully, looking at the mostly blank page. “Maybe. I’ll need to see a guy.”