by Dale Mayer
Kanen had a notepad opened up on his laptop as he jotted down the family tree. “What about the brother? Did he have a wife? Several wives? Kids, grandkids?”
“Definitely could have,” Taylor murmured, typing while he talked. “Not sure anybody beyond the brother is applicable though. The relevance here is, if the brother was heavily involved in the business, he could have been the blackmailer. Nobody would have known he would have used the business as a front, and his brother could have been completely in the dark about it all. Then again, that goes for all the employees as well.”
“How much did the sale of the businesses net?” Kanen asked.
“Several million,” Taylor said. “I’ve just lost the page. Hang on while I go back.”
“Even though he was charged and convicted of blackmail?” Laysa asked.
Taylor nodded. “He had multiple stores across Europe, a great franchise. It brought in multiple millions. Ten point four million,” he announced when he found the page.
“So,” Nelson theorized, “what if the grandfather didn’t get any of that blackmail money? What if it went to the grandfather’s brother and the grandfather’s son? When Grandpa gets out of prison, he wanted his share, and they weren’t willing to give it to him.”
“Conjecture all the way,” Kanen said with a light tone of voice, “but I like it.”
“The thing is,” Taylor added, “we have to track down these people and go from conjecture to reality.”
Laysa nodded. “Does anybody have any photos?” she asked of the men. “It’s not like I saw my captor’s face because he wore a full ski mask, but I certainly saw his body type. Although I guess that can change from generation to generation too, can’t it?”
“Absolutely,” the men said.
“I don’t think photographs would help much. It would probably just confuse you all that much more,” Taylor said.
She nodded. “Kind of depressing to think he was there in my apartment for hours, and yet, I couldn’t identify him.”
“No tattoos? Nothing distinct?”
“No, just like I said, it looked like he was a bit of a gym junkie. Very rip-cord, bulging-veins type of guy. You know what I mean.” She looked at the other men’s wrists, but they all looked normal. “None of you have anything even close to his, so it’s hard to explain.” Then she opened up a new tab on the laptop and compared images of bodybuilders and different lean-muscled men, looking specifically for their wrists and their forearms. She found one that was similar. “Like this,” she said, holding up the laptop. The men studied the image that showed ropy veins and tendons and muscles up to the biceps.
They nodded. “Yeah, we’ve seen something like that on guys—gym rats—before.”
“But this guy was definitely extreme. His hands were thick, muscled and had zero fat on them. A darker skin tone on his arms too.”
“And he had very little body fat all over?” Nelson asked.
“As far as I could tell, yes,” she said. “He had on a muscle shirt and jeans and a knitted ski mask. So I couldn’t really see much.”
“You gave us his basic body mass and his height. I can extrapolate his weight,” Taylor said. “There was nothing identifying in the jeans or the shoes?”
“Blue jeans. I couldn’t tell you if they were designer or cowboy,” she said with a laugh. “And he wore sneakers. That’s all I can remember.”
“Any idea what kind of sneakers?”
She shook her head. “No, but his feet weren’t very big. Maybe because he wasn’t terribly tall. Blake wore a size eleven shoe. But this guy’s feet were much smaller than that. Maybe an eight or nine. But they were wide,” she said as an afterthought. “Oddly enough, they were really wide.”
Kanen jotted down the little bits of detail. “All of it helps. When we finally get our man, we can confirm some of the things you saw against our suspect.”
“I just don’t want you to dismiss anybody who doesn’t have a really wide foot,” she said, “because what if my memory is wrong? I was extremely stressed, terrified, in fact. And it’s very possible I made a mistake. Plus my definition of ‘wide’ may not be your definition of ‘wide.’”
“Which is why we’ll keep it in mind,” Nelson said. “But we won’t take it as gospel.”
She beamed at him. “You really are a very nice man.”
He glanced at her in surprise and smiled. “Thank you.”
Taylor looked at her and frowned. “Hey, what about me?”
She laughed. “You are too.”
Kanen frowned. “So you mentioned my buddies as being nice guys, and you don’t say anything about me? … Sheesh.” He grinned at her, letting her know he had no hard feelings.
It was nice she got along so well with the guys. He knew from them that they admired her guts. But, more than that, they also liked her. She’d shown herself to be somebody they could not only admire but who would fit in with the other guys in their units. A roomful of alpha males would never scare her off.
She leaned over and kissed Kanen on the cheek. “You’re much nicer than a nice person. You’re special.”
At that, the men, including Kanen, went off on a bout of laughter.
She glared at them. “Now what are you laughing about, Kanen?”
He just chuckled, wrapped his arm around her shoulders, a habit he was doing more and more often. It was almost as if he wasn’t comfortable or happy if she wasn’t in his arms. “They expect the next thing out of your mouth to be an insult,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. They’re used to being teased and to teasing each other.”
She sighed and returned to the laptop in front of her.
He checked the time and found it was after nine o’clock already.
“We have an early morning flight,” he said, “so the earlier to bed, the better.”
She nodded. “Not an issue. But maybe, if you don’t mind, may I check my email?”
“Sure, go ahead,” he said. “You’ve got the laptop. You can do what you want.”
She smiled her thanks, brought up her email program and flicked through it.
He searched the living room for what needed to be packed. They were good at leaving in an instant, so he wasn’t worried they would need much time.
He heard the small gasp in the back of her throat and saw the color leach from her face. “Laysa, what’s the matter?”
She swallowed hard and said in a faint voice, “There’s an email I wasn’t expecting.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath.
He squeezed her shoulder gently. “Hey. It’s okay. What’s the matter?”
She stared up at him.
The other men looked at her, waiting for her to gather her thoughts and to tell them what was going on.
“So, is it good news or bad news?” Kanen asked.
She took a deep breath. “I haven’t opened it yet.” She stared down at her fingers drifting across the email.
He didn’t want to look because it was her confidential email, but, at the same time, he wanted to know what she was thinking. “Are you going to share?”
She lifted her troubled gaze his way and then switched to look at the other two men. “I just don’t understand how this could have happened.”
“If you don’t explain it to us,” Kanen said gently, “we can’t explain it to you.”
She nodded, took a deep breath and turned the laptop toward him, tapped the edge of one email, not opening it but letting him know it was there.
He stopped and stared. He raised his gaze and looked at it again.
She nodded her head slowly.
He faced the other two men. “This email is from her dead husband.”
Chapter 10
Laysa stared at the email. “How can this be?”
The others gathered behind her. “There’s a good chance somebody hacked your husband’s email account,” Nelson said. “It’s guaranteed to have shock value. And that’s what you just had—a shock.”
“It’s also
possible to set up an email like that before you die,” Taylor said. “I know you don’t want to consider that, but Blake may have sent it to you himself.”
“But why now?” Kanen studied the email. He sat closer beside her, the laptop on both their laps. They hadn’t opened the email yet but just stared at the bold lettering, showing it was an unopened email. “Is it from his usual account?”
“Yes,” she said. “His work email.”
“That would be much easier for somebody else to get a hold of then,” Taylor said. “The naming convention at a job will be the same for each employee.”
She understood what he was saying, but it was still rather unnerving. She clicked the email and opened it. It showed a picture of her standing almost nude in a bedroom. It wasn’t her bedroom.
“Do you recognize that picture?” Kanen asked softly. He rubbed her shoulders, trying to reassure her that everything was okay. Or at least it would end up that way.
But she felt like she’d gone down a rabbit hole and didn’t know how to get back out. “I don’t know when this could have been taken,” she said. “I’m not even sure where this is.”
“And the next question is, why would somebody send it to you?”
She started to shake. “I swear I’ve never been in that bedroom. I don’t recognize the wallpaper. I don’t recognize anything about that room.”
“Maybe it was altered via Photoshop,” Taylor said. “Some pretty sophisticated Photoshop gurus are out there. They could have taken a picture of your head, attached it to a nude body and stuck it in somebody else’s bedroom.”
She twisted in surprise. “Could they really do that?”
“Absolutely. They can even add a date stamp.” He pointed to the far corner.
“It’s dated the day after I escaped,” she said slowly. “I don’t even remember if I had changed clothes that day. Things were a bit hectic.”
Kanen asked, “Is there any chance this isn’t your back?”
She frowned, thinking about it. “I guess there’s one way to know. Here.” She sat forward on the edge of the couch and lifted her shirt so the men could see her back. “You guys tell me. Is it?”
There was silence while they studied her back, noting some bruising—which Kanen felt better about not mentioning to her—and then the image in front of them.
“It doesn’t have this mole here,” Kanen said, gently placing a finger on the side of her spine.
“What does that mean?”
“Your back is also a little fleshier than the back in the photo,” Nelson said. “The person in the photo has very low body mass.”
She frowned, thinking about that. “I’m certainly not fat, but you’re right. My ribs don’t show.”
“Thankfully,” Kanen said smoothly. He tugged her shirt back into place. “So we now know it’s not your back.”
“If it’s my head, you’re saying they could have taken it off another photo and put in on this one?”
“Yes, exactly,” Kanen said. “It’s pretty easy these days to do something like that.”
“But for what purpose?” she asked, staring at the photo. “I do have leggings like that.” She tapped the bright blue geometric pattern beneath the skirt the woman held in front of her. “I rarely walk around without a bra. And this woman isn’t wearing one.”
“Again that could have been done with Photoshop software.” Kanen studied the photo, then said, “It’s not even that great of a job.” He pointed out where the two middle sections of her body supposedly joined. Ever-so-slightly they were off. “It’s hard to see here, but, if we opened this up in Photoshop, we’d see that discrepancy very quickly.”
She sighed with relief. “I have to admit. I’m much happier to think this is a fake photo than to consider somebody took images of me when I changed.”
“It’s a warning,” Kanen announced. “Basically telling you to stop what you’re doing, or images of you will show up somewhere you don’t want them to.”
She turned and looked at the men. “And just what the devil do they think that’ll do?”
Kanen shrugged. “The whole point of the photo will be to maximize your humiliation and to expose you. And again, in this case, it’s blackmail of a warning nature. Not because they want money but because they want you to stop doing something.”
“What we need to know though is who may have sent this to you,” Nelson said. “Outside of the image, is there a message?”
She returned to the email. “No, it was sent directly from Blake’s account at work,” she said slowly. “There doesn’t appear to be any other information on it.” There was still a sense of violation as she looked at it though. Even though she knew it wasn’t her back, she felt weird to think that not only had somebody manipulated her image to the point that other people would think it was her but that somebody was doing this to hurt her. “There has to be a way to find out who sent this.”
“Anybody could have sent it if they worked where your husband did, or, if a good-enough hacker, could remotely get into his email account at work,” Taylor explained.
“Sure, but he’s been dead for almost a year,” she said.
“It’s still possible,” Taylor continued. “After his death the company had to keep the email address working in case they needed to respond to people with current orders or to have Blake’s replacement deal with his unfinished orders or to refer back to any customers he worked with and maybe special orders or special pricing. So his email account will be there, but it’s probably been retired, maybe with one of those automatic vacation responders, telling people trying to reach Blake to now contact John Doe at his direct email address. So anybody in the company, or anybody who understood how email programs work, would have no trouble accessing it.”
She sagged onto the couch. “It’s an ugly world we live in.”
Kanen’s hand squeezed her shoulder. “That it is. We can get Tesla to look into it, if she’s available. She’s a software designer and maybe can trace this or at least tell us she hit a dead end. But this is a relatively innocent email.”
“Sure,” she announced. “My dead husband sends me an email to my personal email account with a seminude photo of me, supposedly, and an unspoken message that appears to be very threatening. How innocent can you get?” There was no humor in her tone.
“Time for bed,” Kanen said. “We are getting up early in the morning.”
She handed him the laptop and stood up without a question. “I’m definitely tired. Maybe if I read something, I can take my mind off this.” She smiled at the others. “Good night.” She walked into her bedroom and closed the door.
*
The men turned toward Kanen.
He shrugged. “What can I say? Somebody now knows she’s on to them. That’s the most concerning part of all this.”
The others nodded.
“Agreed,” Nelson said. “So we have to figure out who and how, based on our investigation so far.”
“We’ll be back in London tomorrow,” Kanen said. “What I want to do tonight is gather as much info as we can on all the Finest Photos’ owners and family members who may be involved, see if anybody is still alive and where they’re working and living—especially where they were this last week.” He nodded at Taylor. “Maybe the younger generations have social media accounts to help with that.”
Kanen’s voice hardened. “That asshole physically attacked her, and now someone’s mentally working on her. What if they forward that Photoshop email to her school? Or even worse, to her students? She’d lose her job while we gathered the evidence to disprove this. We’ve got to put a stop to this before somebody decides to escalate it even past losing her job and chooses to take her out of the picture altogether.”
“I don’t think gathering any more information on these people will help,” Nelson warned. “We’ll do it, of course, but the bottom line is someone—a single someone most likely—has a purpose for what he is doing. It won’t likely involve anyone else. I me
an, her attacker seemed to be working alone. This has all the hallmarks of a vendetta. A very personal one. Think of that asshole’s anger as he beat Laysa when he couldn’t find what he was looking for, no matter how many times she said she didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“We need to track him down,” Kanen said, “and fast.”
“Or set a trap,” Taylor suggested, “but not until we know more.”
Just then a text message came through. “Update from Mason. Still running down names,” Kanen read out loud. “Nothing popping so far. Not from our end or from MI6. Keep your heads down and stay safe. Sounds like you’ve got a lone wolf out there.” Kanen raised a grim face to the others.
“There you have it.” Taylor nodded.
Nelson said, “Mason’s right. It goes along with what I was saying. All this Finest Photos blackmail and related events happened so long ago, but—for someone—it’s still current. And he’s on a rampage to accomplish something. And it doesn’t make sense that he would go the blackmail route after so many years, decades even, have passed. So we have to figure out what his angle is.”
“He’s passionate about his goal. And willing to go over the edge to achieve it,” Taylor added.
“As long as that doesn’t mean coming after Laysa again.” Kanen wanted Laysa safe at all costs.
Chapter 11
Landing in England the next morning was a big relief. So much was going on, and yet, she had no closure. Laysa wanted the routine of her own life—although the thought of living in her apartment made her cringe now. She’d taken the week off from work, but that was soon running out. She didn’t know if she could take off any more time without them replacing her. And that was disturbing in its own right. She’d miss the kids, … and she needed the income.
If something happened to her, would anybody care outside of Kanen? Her parents were dead; she had no siblings. After Blake’s death, she’d had no contact with his family, which had been sparse at best. And that was sad too. It was like all these strings had been cut from her life, and now she felt suspended, on her own two feet, but as if she were alone on an island and didn’t really have any way to connect with the rest of the world. She hadn’t isolated herself as much as she had allowed herself to be isolated.
