Jack called his brother. Ethan didn’t pick up until four or five rings, and when he did, he was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Jack asked.
“I was just taking a shower. I had soap in my eyes. When I reached for my phone, I grabbed a pair of racy red underwear with an embroidered S&M logo. Is that the official brand of San Francisco now? Did S&M replace Fruit of the Loom? When did you get so kinky?”
“That might be funny if we were eight,” Jack said, annoyed. “Do you want to hear what I found or not?”
“You got a match? Already?” Ethan wrapped a towel around his waist, stepped out of the bathroom, and dropped his voice an octave, “I’m sorry. Go ahead. Tell me.”
“Benjamin Carver was an employee here.”
“What?!”
“He worked at Hounddog. Until recently. He put in his resignation almost two months ago. His last day was a week ago.”
Ethan took a moment to let it sink in. “Brooke married a guy from Hounddog? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. But he was a lead programmer and had been with the company since they opened their doors. There’s a good chance they hired me to replace him.”
“He was a lead programmer?”
“And a polygamist,” Jack said. “He was already married.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m reading from his file. His wife’s name is Sarah. They live in Palo Alto. No kids.”
“He was already married,” Ethan repeated. “Do you think he’s living a double life?”
“Could be.”
“What’s his real name?”
“Rufus Wall.”
It took Ethan a bit to realize why the name was familiar, and then he blurted, “Rufus Wall is dead.”
Jack scrolled down Rufus Wall’s file. There was nothing about the former Hounddog employee dying. “Not according to this—”
Ethan cut him off, “Remember when I told you that I stopped at Dancing Rabbit?”
“Yeah. The old hippie zapped you.”
“Right. After I left, I headed up north,” Ethan explained, “and I saw that a car had gone off the side of Highway 1, where the road winds like a snake and there’s a hundred-foot drop down to the ocean below. I had a really bad feeling, so I pulled over. I thought the worst, that it was you or Brooke, or you and Brooke—”
“I get it, your imagination went wild.”
“They were bringing up a car,” Ethan continued. “I told the police that I was concerned. They showed me two suitcases they had already found. One of the cases had a name tag.”
“Rufus Wall?”
“Yep. With a Palo Alta address.”
“The second suitcase didn’t have a tag but I know whose it was. Remember Brooke’s roommate, Anna?”
“Her roommate?”
“Yeah.”
“Hang on, I’ll check the local news sources….” Jack ran a quick search and found a press release from the Big Sur News. “The car they brought up was a red Mini Cooper, belonged to Anna Delaney Gopnik.”
“Bingo.”
“Says they are still searching for bodies.”
“The cops said something really odd,” Ethan remembered. “When I told them that I knew Anna from Dancing Rabbit, they seemed rattled, and said there had been a lot of missing people that have some connection to the resort. One of the detectives called it ‘the rabbit hole’ and asked me if I’d noticed anything strange when I was there.”
“‘The rabbit hole’?”
“What if the Dancing Rabbit people are all using false identities like Brooke? What if Rufus Wall left Hounddog, faked his death, used Benjamin Carver’s name, and then married Brooke—?”
Jack cut his brother off, “Why would they be going to all that trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think your imagination is going wild again. Sounds like a stretch.”
One of the Hounddog programmers came from behind and asked Jack, “Going to be long? I need to print.”
Jack quit out of the program using a short keystroke before he spun around. “All yours. I’m through, actually.”
Jack walked away and crossed the room. “I shouldn’t have this discussion here,” he told Ethan. “Call you back when I get outside.”
—
Ethan finished drying off, got dressed, and ran down to the kitchen to run a search of Rufus Wall on Jack’s laptop. He found a short Wikipedia page listing an impressive programmer résumé: educated at MIT, started at Intel, a long stint at Microsoft, helped Amazon develop their analytics, headed up Tinder, and then moved on to Hounddog.
Ethan’s phone rang and he picked up quickly. “How would Brooke know a guy from Hounddog?” he asked Jack again. “Don’t you think that’s really weird?”
Jack waited for his eyes to adjust from the fluorescents to the bright sunlight in the parking lot. “She had a life before you,” Jack reminded him.
“I’m not buying that. Too random that she would marry a guy from our competition. And besides, her life before me was in London.”
“Wasn’t she in Big Sur for about a year before you met her? And didn’t she run the retreats for tech companies? Maybe it’s not that random.”
“She hated the tech business. She was trying to get tech people back down to earth, away from their devices. She once told me that one in ten American adults confess that they check their emails when they’re having sex, to make the point. She wanted to simplify our lives. Unplug. She hated what we do—”
“Not true,” Jack told him as he moved past the guard in the lobby, “she didn’t hate the tech biz at all. She’s the reason I moved up here.”
“Brooke was the reason you what—?”
“She introduced me to the guy who hired me,” Jack confessed.
“Why would she do that?”
“She knew I wasn’t happy,” Jack explained. “She was trying to help me.”
“She was trying to help you?” Ethan repeated.
Jack sensed Ethan’s anger growing and added, “But her leaving you had nothing to do with that.”
“You sure about that?”
“I promise you,” Jack told him. “Look, I like Brooke. A lot. I know that she loved you. God knows why.” Jack laughed, without his brother joining in, and then he turned serious again. “She’s not the type to run off with an old boyfriend on a whim. I agree with you that she must be in some kind of trouble. I had no idea she was using someone else’s name and I can’t imagine why she married a guy from Hounddog. None of this behavior is like her. But if she’s going through all this trouble to disappear, I just don’t know what else we can do—”
“We can start by finding out more about the guy from Hounddog,” Ethan said. “Is there someone there you can talk to about him?”
“It’s my first week, for Christ’s sake—”
Ethan pressed. “Someone who knows what’s really going on in that place?”
“Yeah…” Jack hesitated, and then told Ethan, “there’s someone I can talk to—”
“Today? On a Sunday?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Great. Thank you. I’m going to take a drive to Palo Alto, visit Rufus Wall’s wife, find out what she knows—or thinks—happened to her husband.”
Jack said, “The police would have notified her about the possibility of her husband going over a cliff by now, don’t you think? She might be a wreck.”
Ethan grabbed his car keys and headed for the door. “Unless she’s in on it.”
—
Jack left Hounddog, got into his car, and drove out of the parking lot, still completely unaware of the dark van following him. Once on the road, he called the Hounddog that knew the most, the top dog himself.
Sean McQueen picked up on the first ring. “I was just thinking about you,” he said.
“We need to talk,” Jack told him. “Are you busy?”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Sean chuckled. “Cold feet so soon?”
“Nothing like that,” Jack assured him. “I’m coming from Hounddog. I need to ask you about an employee.”
“Who?”
“We probably shouldn’t have this conversation on the phone. Can I come over?”
“Now you’re really scaring me,” Sean said. “You think your phone is tapped or something?”
“Or yours…I don’t know—”
“I have a phone that can detect a trace,” he said. “I’ll call you right back on a secured line.”
At thirty-five, Sean McQueen was one of the most envied entrepreneurs in the valley, and he had his share of enemies as well. He had a reputation for building companies and selling them off as soon as they were overvalued, moving them around like a master chess player, always a few steps ahead, always unpredictable. He also stayed out of the limelight, kept his personal life private, which all added to his mystery and earned him the title “Wizard of Silicon.” Truth was, he had invested in his share of now-bankrupt companies, but because he was always operating from “behind the curtain,” few people knew he was involved by the time he dumped those dogs.
Players and pundits in the valley were always skeptical because he didn’t run with the wolves, didn’t gossip, and didn’t keep his companies porous. His absence from big tech events and the fact that he was handsome, flamboyant, and wicked smart made him a target of speculation for everything from his motives to his sexuality.
Jack’s phone rang seconds later.
“Talk to me,” Sean said. “This line’s safe.”
“What can you tell me about Rufus Wall?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why did he leave Hounddog?”
“He had another opportunity he wanted to pursue. He didn’t tell me what it was, but he gave notice a few months ago. That’s why I had time to find you—”
“I found you,” Jack reminded him.
Sean laughed. “You know what I mean. Why are you asking about him?”
Jack told him, “He married Brooke yesterday. Brooke Shaw.”
“I thought she was seeing your brother—”
“So did he.”
“—Can’t be the same Rufus Wall,” Sean said, “Our Rufus Wall was already married and you can’t get a divorce in California that fast—”
“He used the name and social of some vagrant from the sticks,” Jack explained. “A man named Benjamin Carver… Hold on, I’ll send you a pic to confirm that it’s the same dude.”
Jack texted the wedding photo.
“That’s him,” Sean confirmed. “That’s definitely Rufus. I guess he did leave to pursue another interest. How’s your brother dealing with this?”
“He’s worried about her.”
“I get that, it is worrisome,” Sean agreed. “I like to think I hire well and I always thought Rufus Wall was a really good guy. He was a model employee. He was smart and people liked him.”
Jack asked, “Can you access his Hounddog file from your house?”
“I can access anything from my perch. Why do you think I come to the office so rarely?”
“Because you can,” Jack said. “I want to hack into his company phone record and email history.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I can,” Jack said.
Sean laughed.
Jack explained, “His correspondences will tell me where he’s been, who he’s talked to, and hopefully where he’s going. I have to help my brother find out if Brooke is safe or not.”
After a beat, Sean said, “If anyone finds out that I let you into his personal file to do that—”
“They won’t.”
“Promise me no one will ever know.”
“I promise,” Jack assured him. “I know how to keep a secret.”
Sean smiled and sighed, “I can’t argue with that.”