I started to respond but there was a knock at my door. Jeremy poked his head in.
"Hang on, Halsted," I said, flipping on the speakerphone. Might as well invite Will into all of the problems now. "What do you have for me, Jeremy?"
He pointed at his notebook. "That mobile phone number last pinged near Montauk yesterday morning, but there hasn't been any tower activity since."
"Please tell me you haven't resorted to surveillance on vonRebound," Will murmured.
"It's not surveillance. Not exactly," I replied to Will. I pointed at Jeremy. "Anything else for me?"
"I know you didn't ask for this, but I checked the account information," Jeremy started, "and it's a burner phone. Looks like it was activated two weeks ago."
"What? Why would April have a burner?" I asked, mostly to myself.
I gripped the edge of my desk. It felt like my life—and business—were unraveling, and I couldn't do a damn thing to stop it.
"You can really pick 'em, Kaisall," Will said.
"Should I keep digging?" Jeremy asked.
"Yes," Will and I replied at once.
The conference room was dark, and the shadows were a welcomed reprieve from all the curious eyes. By now, my entire office knew of Jocelyn's duplicitousness and Renner's efforts at infiltrating the organization. A select few were busy tracking down April, but as the presentation underway seemed to indicate, that task was gaining complexity by the minute.
It seemed there was little to find.
"It appears that a signal jammer was in use here," Jeremy said, gesturing to the grainy photo on the screen. It was a blur of static, and I could make out the alleyway stairs leading to April's apartment only because I'd installed the camera to catch that exact angle. "Whenever she was within range, the jammer distorted the CCTV feeds. We couldn't pick anything up from the other CCTV feeds around town either. This was the clearest screen grab we could get." He laughed and tucked his hands into his trouser pockets. "Pretty sophisticated equipment. I'd love to get my hands on something like that."
What Jeremy wasn't saying was that the kind of technology that could interfere with every security camera April passed was beyond our expertise levels. We didn't have toys like that, and it wasn't for lack of innovation or investment. She was working with heavy-duty tools of the spycraft trade, and I'd taken her to bed without a second thought.
"What about the bakery? The apartment? Where's the paper trail on that?" I barked. "There has to be something."
The two other analysts seated around the table—not the ones who mentioned to Mom that they were investigating Marco, but the ones who could keep their mouths shut—stared at their laptop screens. It was a clear giveaway that they didn't want to speak up.
Jeremy cleared his throat and toggled to another slide. A photograph of a white-haired woman appeared on the screen, with an obituary beside it.
"We pulled the payroll records from the bakery," he said. "She's been on staff for three years, but the Social Security number is a dead end. It tracks back to a grandmother from Carefree, Arizona who died about ten years ago."
"Did you follow the money?" I asked. "Where are those payroll checks going?"
With a wince, Jeremy clicked over to the next slide. The backside of an endorsed check appeared. "All cashed by the bakery," he said. "Didn't even bother with a bank. Whoever she is, she's a pro."
Jeremy continued on, but I'd stopped listening. Breathing, too. The only thing I knew was that I knewnothing. Slapping my hands against the table, I stood and waved to Jeremy to end his report.
"That's enough," I said. I pocketed my phone and strode across the room. The conference room door bounced off the wall when I flung it open. "I'll be in the field for the rest of the day. Message me with any critical updates."
Storming through the office with the singular goal of getting the hell out of there, I collected a few kits from my office. I owed updates to Will, and my mother had left numerous messages in need of my response, but all of that had to wait. I was getting to the bottom of this.
