Chase turned to meet her gaze.
She felt a funny tingle. “Where do we begin?”
“I’m going to begin in the shower. I’m dying to get this pomade out of my hair. Unless you want to go first?”
She put her hand on the back of the closest lounge chair. “Be my guest. I’ll be very happy relaxing here for a while.”
Skylar drifted off, waking only when there was a loud commotion on the beach below. She looked over to see Chase standing at the balcony rail. This was the first time she’d seen him in daylight, and with his normal look. She found it somehow comforting. His dark hair was a bit on the long side of corporate norm, and he had a day’s worth of stubble despite having just showered. No razor, she realized. The unshaven appearance gave him a carefree look that clashed with the intense intelligence she detected when he turned to look at her with eyes that were now more blue than gray.
“What now?” she asked, feeling a flash of guilt but not knowing why.
“There’s a mall about four miles inland with both an Apple and an AT&T store. I’m going to buy a phone and a laptop. If I’m able to pull Tom’s picture from the cloud, I’ll send it to my friend.”
“They’ve got computers in the business center, but of course you already know that. What will you be using the computer for? Have you figured out how to backtrack to Tom?”
“I have a theory,” Chase said, taking a seat.
As he settled in, Skylar couldn’t help but recall the last time she’d done the same thing. Relax on a beachfront balcony with a handsome man. It was in Kona, after the World Championship triathlon. He was the third-place male, she the third-place female. That natural match was only last year, and yet a lifetime ago. A few deep lungfuls of superheated smoke had closed a door that would never open again.
As she looked across the white sand toward the late-morning sun, she felt the first glimmer of hope that happiness might yet find her this side of that door. “Lay it on me.”
“I’ve given more thought to what you and Lars have in common.”
“Beyond age, IQ, and skin color,” Skylar prodded, recalling exactly where they’d left off. She had a mind for dialogue. Images didn’t stick. Neither did reading. But she retained spoken words like a voice recorder. Didn’t matter if it was a conversation, a television script, or the lyrics of a song. If she was giving something her attention, she could recall it. Verbatim. She never spoke of her ability, but did use it on occasion to win a bar bet or entertain friends at a cocktail party.
Chase raised an eyebrow. “Right. Except I don’t think we need to go beyond them. I’ve come to realize that those seemingly worthless similarities may actually be significant.”
“How so? There must be more than ten million college-educated white people in their early thirties living in the U.S.”
“Actually, it’s closer to five. There are about twenty million people in any five-year band from birth to sixty. Three-quarters of Americans are white, and thirty percent of us are college educated.”
“Well, aren’t you an encyclopedia.”
“I’ve sat in on my share of profiling discussions. Shall I continue?”
“Please.”
“If it’s graduate school and not just college that counts, we’re below two million. On the other hand, if any of those three criteria are irrelevant coincidences, then the number gets significantly larger. But in any case, the pool is at least a couple of million people. Not very helpful on its own.”
“But?”
Chase shifted his chair to make it easier to see her face. “When you approach it from the other side, it gets interesting.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Motive. What reason could there be for hiring a professional to make certain members of a population subset disappear without a trace?”
Skylar had been so focused on finding the guy who could tell them why, that she neglected to ask herself the obvious question. She suddenly felt inadequate, sitting there next to Mr. CIA. It was a feeling she’d avoided for many years, but found increasingly common since the fire.
She met Chase’s eyes and repeated a line she’d heard John Travolta use in a movie. “Well, possible motives for murder are profit, revenge, jealousy, to conceal a crime, to avoid humiliation and disgrace, or plain old homicidal mania. The first five don’t apply to me, and the sixth seems unlikely given the use of a professional killer.”
Chase’s eyes lit up. Given the lighting and the ocean behind him, they now looked totally blue. “The General’s Daughter, right? I loved that movie. But I didn’t say murder, I said disappear without a trace. Makes no difference to the victim, I realize, but I think it’s crucial to our investigation.”
“How so?”
“If Tom just wanted you dead, he could have stabbed you on Clearwater Beach. One quick thrust and you’d have gone down, while he ran away. Instead, he lured you across the country and then went through an elaborate ruse to leave no clues to your demise.”
“I’m with you.” Why hadn’t she thought of that? Probably because she was scared, exhausted, and new to the whole P.I. thing.
“But again, that’s something he could have accomplished in Clearwater. Why not lure you onto a boat and feed you to the fishes?”
The clouds parted in her mind, and Skylar suddenly saw the answer as clearly as the sand beyond the boardwalk. “Information. He spent a full day pumping me for biographical information.”
“Exactly. I’m sure he did the same thing with Lars. If you think about it, dangling a dream job requiring a background check is the perfect way to get someone to willingly disclose their whole life story.”
“I agree. But why would anyone care about my story? I’d understand if I was rich, but stealing my identity isn’t going to get anyone very far. And in any case, there are easier ways to get a birthdate and social security number.”
Chase raised a finger. “You have to couple it with my initial question.”
Skylar repeated it from memory. “What reason could there be for hiring a professional to make certain members of a population subset disappear without a trace?”
Chase nodded.
“So it’s identity theft plus disappear without a trace.” She processed that for a second, and again felt the joyful jolt of an epiphany. “Someone’s not just looking to replace me on paper. She’s looking to replace me in person.”
“Exactly.”
“But why?”
“I suspect we could come up with a dozen reasons if we put our minds to it. Let’s save that for later. The operative question is Who?”
“Why Who?” Skylar asked. “Don’t tell me third base.”
The Abbott and Costello reference brought a smile to Chase’s lips. He had a nice smile, she noted. “Because we can find the who.”
“How’s that?”
Chase just raised his eyebrows.
“Of course,” Skylar said, experiencing yet another lightning strike as she recalled what he’d told her about the man masquerading as Lars. “She has to look like me.”
41
Face the Truth
THE RESILIENCE of Skylar’s mind astonished me. Less than a day out of the oven and her hard drive was spinning without wobbles or skips. Professional agents often cracked in the wake of their first close call, but she was powering through. Apparently Ironman training transformed nerves from flesh into steel.