“Okay. That’s good. Thanks.” I narrowed the search to wealthy congressmen over the age of sixty, but as usual, half the results generated were only tangentially related to what I was looking for. I scrolled past images of women, group shots of senators and several random unrelated images, then tapped on the first picture of a man who fit Gallagher’s description and held up the phone. “Is this him?”
Gallagher shook his head. “Not thin enough.”
I scrolled through more results and showed him all of the likely possibilities, but they were all either too young or too old. Too gray or too wrinkled.
“Okay, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe he’s not a congressman. Or not a politician. He could just be a wealthy bastard with a really sick fetish. Which probably describes ninety-nine percent of the Spectacle’s clientele.”
“Is there a search for that online?” Gallagher asked, and I couldn’t help smiling.
“That’s not exactly how the internet works.” Next, I tried an image search of Willem Vandekamp, concentrating on pictures of him with groups of known social associates, but Gallagher didn’t recognize any of those, either. Which left me no choice but to broaden the search to include the wealthiest Americans over the age of sixty.
Dozens of images filled my screen. According to the search engine, there were tens of thousands of pictures on subsequent results pages.
“Okay, they’re turning off all the lights,” Gallagher said, and I looked up from my phone to see that, indeed, what few windows had been lit in the university lab on a Sunday afternoon were going dark one by one. I glanced at the time—5:04 p.m. The sun was still high in the sky, glaring in through the van’s rear windshield, but the few buildings that were open on campus on the weekend were closing down for the day.
“We may get lucky,” I said a few minutes later as we watched employees head to their cars in the lot. Most were too absorbed in their cell phones or digging for their keys in the bottom of their purses to notice us sitting in our van on the back row. “We may have nothing to deal with but the custodial staff and a couple of security guards. If that.”
While Gallagher kept an eye on the building, waiting for any after-hours employees to show up, I went back to my search results, scrolling through image after image until suddenly, after studying at least a hundred strangers’ faces, the features in front of me looked familiar.
My finger hesitated just above the screen, ready to swipe it away. Instead, I lingered, staring at the face of a man I’d served in a private booth at the arena. So many of my memories of the Spectacle had been buried deep inside my own mind, butthatone...
Mr. Arroway.Beer and peanut butter crackers.
That was the first night I saw Gallagher fight. The night they realized they could use me against him.
Mr. Arroway, it turned out, was an oil executive from Oklahoma. From just a couple of hours away from my rural hometown.
“What is it? Did you find him?” Gallagher leaned over again to peer at my phone. “That’s not him.”
“No. I—I know.” At the last second, I bit off the explanation, because if Gallagher realized the face on the screen belonged to another Spectacle customer, he’d feel honor-bound to hunt the man down and kill him in defense of me. And every time he killed someone in his distinctive, bloodless but brutal style, he brought the authorities closer to finding us.
I decided to hold Mr. Arroway in my back pocket, in case Gallagher couldn’t find the blood of anyone even less karmically entitled to a long and happy life with which to soak his cap.
I swiped past his picture. “Are you sure you didn’t hear a name? Did you notice any accent when he spoke?”
“No, and no.” Gallagher turned to me with a sigh as I swiped through several more images. “Don’t let this upset you, Delilah. I’ve been looking for him for nine months. I don’t expect you to find him in two hours—”
My hand clenched around the phone. I had no conscious memory of the face on the screen, but looking at him made the hair on my arms stand on end. Sweat formed behind my knees and in the crooks of my elbows.
The man’s eyes were a piercing blue, his cheeks high and gaunt. His hair was thick and gray, peppered with black, combed over to the left.
Aren’t you a pretty thing?
The phone slipped from my grip and clattered to the floor of the van. His voice echoed in my head, and air fled my lungs, leaving me gasping.
Blue and purple pillows. Thick rugs. Bare bodies.
Deeply set eyes watch me from a gaunt face. His tongue slides out to moisten his thin lips. His gaze flicks toward Gallagher. “Take her.”
“Delilah?” Gallagher bent over his armrest to pick up the phone. The image flickered, but I knew from the sudden hardening of his gaze. From the stressed creaking of his teeth as he ground them together. “That’s him,” he growled. “Where is he?” Gallagher touched the screen and the photo dissolved into disconnected streaks of color.
I blinked, forcing the jagged shard of memory to the back of my mind, where the sharp edges made cuts I would surely feel later. Seeing his face—looking into those eyes, frozen on the screen—had driven the reality home.
A terrible thing had happened to me. My wounds were real, and I could not expect the damage to stay buried in the graveyard of my memory. It would have to be dealt with eventually, and the start of that would be hunting this man down. Letting Gallagher avenge us both, where thefuriaecould not.
“Let me.” I took the phone back and clicked on the image to open the source link, without actually looking at the face on the screen again. “Oliver Malloy. He’s an executive in a company that owns a series of restaurant chains. His net worth is about twenty million dollars. A lot less than I’d expected.” Yet more than enough to rent six captives at the Savage Spectacle and pair them to “perform” for his entertainment.
I pushed the information away. Distancing myself from it. They were just words on the screen. Information unrelated to me, or to my baby, or to the family I’d chosen for myself, when fate had taken my parents from me—twice.
