“What?” GJ asked, figuring this was the exact opposite of what Eleri had told her to do. She was supposed to be keeping Donovan on track.
GJ had been comparing oyster data between Blake Langley’s and Allison Caldeira’s records. Donovan had been looking into Allison's past history, for anything he could find: bank accounts, travel, credit card expenditures, reports, published papers, and more. He was simply trying to put together a history of the woman's life without any input from Hannah or anyone else who would likely be biased.
Everything had been going along great. Or so GJ had thought, until Donovan huffed out a breath and sounded angry. “Son of a bitch!”
When GJ had asked What? it turned out the answer had nothing to do with Allison, Hannah, or even Blake. Donovan had sat back in his chair slowly, his eyes glazed. She pressed him again and this time found out that what he'd found was his mother's death certificate.
“Why is that so stunning?” GJ was getting drawn into his research, rather than keeping him involved in hers. Shit. Still, she wasn’t going to just say that. “I thought you knew she was gone. What's the new information?”
He was shaking his head, as though dispelling something that had gotten lodged there. “My mother died when I was seven.” He said it evenly, as though recounting a case rather than his own experience.
It must have been horrible for him, but GJ wasn’t going to say that.
“For me, that was the beginning of the shit show of life that was my father. He was never good, but he was worse without her.” None of this was news to GJ, and Donovan had already explained to her about the package from his brother, but not much more. She nodded along and waited.
“What I found out yesterday was that she didn't die when I was seven—”
“What?” This time, GJ chucked the word at him like a fastball, before realizing her question was horribly inappropriate.
“Yeah, I found out she didn’t die. So yesterday, I thought she was actually still alive. I’d been lied to all these years, though I don't know why I didn't question what my father said. He's a liar.” Donovan was throwing his hands up in the air, agitated, just as Eleri had described. GJ had never seen him like this before.
He went on, not looking at her but continuing the story anyway. “So I just now found her death certificate.”
“But I thought she wasn’t actually dead?” Oh look, she did have other words and they weren’t much better. “Or. . . they faked it when you were seven?”
“Yes, they faked it when I was seven, but this death certificate is from fifteen years ago. Apparently, she’s actually dead now.”
“Oh, shit.” GJ finally got it. “Fifteen years ago? That means she lived almost—what?—another ten or fifteen years after you thought she had died?”
As she watched the expression move across his features, she realized it was exactly the wrong thing to say, to point out just how long his mother had remained alive that he didn’t know. Surely, Donovan would have calculated those numbers quickly on his own. But GJ knew she should have kept her fat mouth shut and not been the one to deliver the blow.
“Holy fuck,” he whispered into the air, as stunned as when he’d started talking.
Well, GJ thought to herself, managing to keep her lips tight this time. Eleri had told her that something was up with Donovan's family.
She had not been prepared for this and, honestly, she would have expected Donovan to keep it all to himself. But the Donovan sitting with her today couldn't keep anything to himself. He was radiating his anger, hurt, and stunned confusion outward, sending vibrations that passed like slow-motion shockwaves through the room each time he realized something new.
This time when GJ spoke, she whispered. “What do you want to do?”
He took several forced short, deep breaths, and she began to feel afraid he wasn't even going to answer her.
“I'm going to go get a soda and a bag of chips and take a short walk.”
She was smart enough to ask, “When will you be back?”
“Give me twenty minutes.” He was already halfway out the door, so she called to his back.
“Set alarm on your phone!” The words bumped out between her lips as though she hoped she might create a scenario where he would, in fact, come back. She did not know how to call Eleri and confess that she’d lost the senior agent she was supposed to be watching.
Donovan didn't answer. He merely moved slowly out the door, not looking back, walking as though he didn't quite see where he was going. She thought about asking him to bring her a snack, as though giving him a task might give him a plan, a direction.
It took five minutes for the vibrations of his shock to leave the room enough for her to realize she was staring at the walls, accomplishing nothing. Taking her own deep breath and counting backwards from ten, she let go of her surprise and buckled back down to the work.
Thirty minutes later, when Donovan still hadn't returned, she was starting to get worried. But she’d learned FBI-specific time management for expected outcomes. She could handle this. She wouldn’t fly off and call Eleri, only to have Donovan walk back in while she was on the phone losing her shit.
So GJ noted the time, made a plan, and went back to taking notes. The distraction of the clock had pulled her gaze away from the pages, and when she looked at them again, she noticed something. It wasn't about the oysters. It was the barnacles.
Flipping pages, she looked for more connections. If it hadn’t been for the alarm she’d set for herself, she wouldn’t have noticed when Donovan had been gone for forty minutes. But she messaged him and was grateful when, five minutes later, he sent a return message. “Twenty more minutes.”
At least he was communicating. Turning back to her own work, GJ thought, Yes, this is the link: barnacles.
But then her own alarm went off for the second time that day. This one was a reminder to do a second check on a handful of email accounts associated with Neriah Jones and her friends. Neriah had three accounts, each of which needed to be logged into and checked for any correspondence. So far, all GJ had found was untouched emails, updates, and spam. She was hoping for something in which Neriah told her friends she was safe and not to worry.
Noah had supplied her with all of the passwords, though GJ still didn't quite know how he'd gotten them. Neriah’s email yielded nothing. Neither of her parents’ emails contained any news, though GJ was convinced Neriah’s mother was dating at least one man outside her marriage. But when GJ logged into the email of Neriah’s best friend—that of Missy Maisel—she hit pay dirt.