Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Monday, June 13—3:00 p.m.
Despite what Faisal had been told, there was no evidence that Ava Adams had gotten off at Fort Lauderdale. And there was no information to be found at the bus station in Fort Lauderdale. The man at security was no more helpful than the guy in Miami. In fact, he appeared to be more interested in the sandwich he was chewing than anything Faisal had to say. It took all Faisal had not to yank the sandwich from his hand. But instead he had to take the high road and walk—there might be information to be had, but it wasn’t here or in this moment.
He stood outside for a moment and considered what he knew. Ava Adams had vanished. No one had seen a dark-haired, slim woman in scrubs. Faisal had asked every potential witness—the ticket agent, a number of other employees and a bus driver. No one had seen her. But it was possible that she’d disguised herself. Even a simple disguise, hair tucked up, a cap of some sort. The ditching of the scrubs—that is if she’d passed a clothing donation bin or similar such options. Providence could present all sorts of opportunities that one wouldn’t notice in other circumstances. Desperation was a strong motivator.
His phone buzzed.
“What do you have, Barb?” He knew there was an edge to his voice but frustration did that. Whether Ava had been on a bus heading through Fort Lauderdale or whether she hadn’t was still a question. As it stood, Ava had disappeared, leaving him concerned and beyond frustrated.
“Darrell Chan was the Vancouver man Dan Adams was in contact with a few times in recent days. He actually wasn’t that hard to locate—I hacked into Adams’s email and phone records and found him. Not too difficult to put two and two together. In fact, I think Ezra could have done it,” she said, referring to her five-year-old daughter.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, there was a smile in her voice. Besides her efficiency, that was the other thing that made Barb so great to work with—her ability to add humor to any situation, even some of the toughest.
“I don’t know, Barb, Ezra’s smart but you’re giving her a little too much credit,” he said with a slight laugh that surprisingly, despite the situation, came naturally.
“Watch it or I may require babysitting duties again,” she laughed. It was a standing joke between them that in a pinch a few years ago she’d brought Ezra to the office. He’d been in the office he used in Marrakech that day and the little girl was fascinated by the record player he kept on the filing cabinet. He’d spent the last hour of the day sitting on the floor with her tapping out the beat of “Smoke on the Water.” Barb had found the two of them there and never let him forget it.
“Tell her we’ll have another go next time I’m in Marrakech,” he said.
“I tell her that and she’ll be begging you to show up next week. She’s smart but her patience needs some work.”
Faisal laughed. It made some of the more difficult aspects of his job easier to have staff who knew him well enough to know when he needed just a moment of light diversion. A smile or a laugh to release the pressure before he exploded from the stress he was under, this time to save a woman he loved. And just like that his lighthearted mood dissolved into the turbulence of self-realization. His fist clenched the phone so tightly he threatened to crack the plastic. Love. He didn’t love Ava, he couldn’t. It wasn’t true and yet his heart told him that it was.
Barb continued, unaware of the revelation that had just broadsided him.
“This thing just gets bigger the more I dig. I’ve hacked one email that Chan sent. He seemed to be under the impression that Dan was partnering with Ben Whyte on land deals in a southern rural area of Texas. Chan had already paid Whyte for one property and had reservations about the second. This all happened in a very short period of time. Thirty days. Interesting thing is that there’s nothing filed online in the county land registry to verify any of this.”
Faisal shook his head at what Barb was implying. But there was no denying the fact that Dan had mentioned land transactions when he’d called. At the time, the call had been brief and he hadn’t gone into details. Still, he’d been surprised at the idea. Dan had never dealt in land before, not that he knew of. But real estate wasn’t illegal and he hadn’t given much more thought to it.
“Go on,” he said as she paused as if waiting for confirmation from him.
“Here’s what I have on Chan. He immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong while it was still part of Great Britain. Before it became an administrative region of China. As you know that all happened in 1997.”
Faisal bit back a comment. He’d learned that it was quicker to let Barb say what she had unearthed without interrupting.
“For a decade or more prior to 1997, wealthy Hong Kong nationals were acquiring property in countries around the world as part of an exit strategy. The Canadian cities of Vancouver and Toronto were hotbeds for wealthy Hong Kong citizens to acquire real estate. Chan invested in real estate and owns numerous properties in Vancouver, mostly commercial.”
“Anything else?”
“Not yet.”
“Thanks, Barb,” he said as he disconnected, smiling at the needless lecture on foreign affairs. But that was what made Barb so good. She never assumed you knew and she never wasted time asking the question if just flipping the information off would take less time. His mind switched to Chan. He wondered, since Chan lived a short flight away from Texas, whether he’d made the journey to verify his purchase or, more interesting still, whether he hadn’t.
He wondered if there was a connection to what had happened on the missing yacht—a shady business transaction didn’t seem likely. Dan Adams had always been a straight shooter.
He replayed in his mind everything Barb had said about Darrell Chan. The man had long since obtained a Canadian citizenship and established roots in the country. Considering the price of Vancouver real estate and the number of properties involved, Darrell Chan must be a very rich man.
An hour later, with all possibilities exhausted in Fort Lauderdale and no new clues as to Ava’s whereabouts, he stood in the penthouse suite in the Nassar-owned hotel. Faisal contemplated everything he knew. He hated this part of the job, when he was forced to wait, to gather information before moving forward. When his phone buzzed, he grabbed it.
“I had to dig hard for this,” Barb said. “Looks like Chan was fleeced.”
“Fleeced?”
“He was sold a piece of land that was never going to be transferred as the seller didn’t have ownership. Chan paid millions for a large tract of so-called ranch land. I found all that in a trail of emails in which he claimed Dan Adams was responsible as the seller.”
“Unbelievable. I’m betting that’s what the phone calls between Darrell Chan and Dan Adams were all about.”
It looked like Dan Adams had been speculating in land, an area that he’d never shown an interest in before. In fact, he’d reacted with disdain the one time the subject had ever come up. Now he appeared to have done an about-face. More disturbing was the fact that there was evidence of fraud. Dan Adams had neither the heart nor the need to steal. Something much more sinister was going on. But despite knowing all that, he was stunned into silence. He could only listen to what Barb had found.
Sales of land in southern Texas. Purchases where no land had ever changed hands, nor would it. Ranch land sold to foreigners—the perfect patsies, he thought. They would arrive to discover there was no land and by the time they did the perpetrator would be gone. Dan Adams’s name was on every deed. None of it made sense.
“Interesting thing,” Barb said, “I’ve found no official record.”
He hung up with a sense of foreboding. Something wasn’t ringing true about any of this.
* * *
Monday, June 13—9:00 p.m.
THE GRIND OF the road, the sleepless night, all of it had exhausted Ava. She’d been on this bus for hours and there were hours left to go. The rest breaks had only made her wary and they proved more tiring than being on the actual bus. There, she was constantly vigilant, afraid that someone had followed her. Now, she slouched back in the seat trying to get comfortable. It didn’t help. Despite cat napping through the journey, her head ached and her back hurt. The slight curve of scoliosis in her lower back ached as it always did without regular exercise. The nagging pain was the least of her problems.
On her head was a worn Chicago Cubs ball cap under which she had tucked her long hair so very little showed. She’d found the cap on the ground by the Miami charity clothing bin she’d raided before getting on the bus. She didn’t think about who might have been wearing the cap before—couldn’t. She was in survival mode.
A middle-aged man looked back at her from his place a seat ahead and across the aisle. There was a question in his eyes as if something about her bothered him. She knew her appearance was off, that she might appear lost or homeless in her worn, ill-fitting clothes. She hoped at worst she only looked down on her luck. She broke eye contact. Her psychology studies had taught her that the connection between strangers was fleeting. Memory happened when it was highlighted by an unexpected event or accentuated over a period of time or through repetition. She’d leave him nothing to remember. His ego and the memories that supported them were more relevant to his sense of self than she was.
She tapped her foot. The sneakers she was wearing pinched her feet, but there’d been no choice. They were the closest to her size in the hospital locker room. She felt bad. Someone would be going home in her work shoes.
She ran the back of her hand across her eyes, sweeping away dust, sweat and the remnants of the tears that the thought of her father always brought on. The air-conditioning seemed to barely move the air and the heat was cloying. She lurched in her seat as the road got rough for a minute and then settled into its regular rhythm. They’d encountered a detour only an hour ago and the ride had become slow and bumpy as they took a narrow, paved side road.
She looked out the window but there was nothing to see but the occasional sweep of blacktop, a road sign lit up by the headlights and darkness. She thought of Faisal. He’d been at the hospital every day, sometimes for hours. Once, she wasn’t sure, but she thought he might have stayed the night. She remembered waking up in the night and seeing him there watching her. He had made her feel safe, feel like it would all work out, that her father—she turned her head to the window. She couldn’t think of her father. It was all too grim, too seemingly hopeless. There was only his memory that she had to preserve, to make right. To ensure that his reputation and the charities he supported would remember him as the outstanding and upstanding man he was.
She tore her mind from the grim thoughts and instead her thoughts returned to Faisal. Seeing him again only reminded her of how much she’d missed him and of how much she still cared. It had been difficult not to tell him of her new memories, not to trust him. But that was the problem, she did trust him and she didn’t want to place him in danger. Despite the years they’d been apart, she cared about Faisal too much. It seemed like both yesterday and so long ago since she’d seen him. Over the last few years, he’d never been far from her mind but her studies had been more important. At least that was what she had told herself as the years had slipped by. But he’d never left her heart. The hard truth was that she’d lost track of Faisal but she’d never forgotten him. She’d picked up the phone so many times to call him but she’d never known what to say. It had all been so long ago. A time when she’d felt things for him that she shouldn’t have felt for a friend. They were feelings that she’d had to hide, for then Faisal had a girlfriend. She imagined it was the same now. He’d matured into an extremely handsome man.
Emotions aside, the smart thing would have been to trust him. He’d rescued her and she knew he was an investigator. Protecting people was his job. Knowing that didn’t change how she felt. She couldn’t involve him. She didn’t know what she was up against and neither did he. Her father was more than likely dead. The thought of that again brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t jeopardize anyone else no matter who they were or what they did for a living. The only way to stop this was to uncover whatever it was that her father claimed was hidden in the small town where she was headed. She needed to go into her father’s email, which he had shared the password for, just in case. But there’d been little time and no computer easily accessible, at least so she’d thought at the time. Her mind hadn’t been clear then. The email was important, she knew that. It was the first thing she’d check when she arrived.
“Just in case something happens to me,” her father had said after giving her the password to his email.
Something had happened. She wiped away a tear. The only good that had happened in the last hours had been the return of her memory.
“Miss,” an older woman said in a muted, nighttime voice as she stretched her arm across the aisle and held out a small packet of tissue. “You look troubled.”
“I’m fine,” Ava said, glancing briefly at the woman who had gotten on the bus at the last stop over an hour ago. The last thing she needed was attention of any kind.
The woman shook her head as if she were reading between the lines and seeing everything that Ava was trying to hide. “It will get better. No hardship lasts forever. You’ll see.”
“Thank you,” she managed but the woman’s compassion had almost caused her to break. She couldn’t allow that to happen. She had to get it together. It was all on her and in getting to a small town in the middle of nowhere. To save her father’s reputation she needed to be there. But to be any help at all, she needed to get it together as quickly as possible.
Two hours later, she was thanking the Fates that brought strangers into your life. For the woman turned out to be a lifesaver. Her name was Anne Johnson and somehow she made the fear, without ever knowing that it existed, manageable. She talked about her family, of mundane things—her sister who was waiting for her. Her voice was the kind that was soothing, a Southern drawl that was filled with life experience. She spoke briefly of her four grown children.
“All of them older than you,” she said. “Six grandchildren so far.”
The conversation went on—one-sided as it had been from the beginning. Eventually it faded as the night thinned, and as dawn broke they reached the stop that was Anne’s. She felt a sinking feeling in her gut as Anne got up, grabbed her overstuffed flowered carryall and reached over to squeeze Ava’s shoulder. Her smile was wide in her dark, round, rather plain face.
“You’ll be okay,” she assured. “And if you’re not, you know where to find me.”
Where to find me.
The thought that she might have to do that. That she might need Anne’s help. That fear found her and rode with her the last miles until a small town in Texas glimmered in the distance, offering hope with a good dose of fear.