Page 46 of The Shadow Friends

She surfaced from a deep sleep straight into alertness. Felt her heart pounding as she lay in the unfamiliar bed and stared up at the darkness. The clock on the nightstand said 3:13 a.m. Why am I awake? What woke me up? She had left her past career behind, but she had not shed the old instincts that had kept her alive during those years, the instincts that now told her to pay attention. That something was not right.

She heard a muffled thump. Someone was moving downstairs in the Slocums’ house.

She rolled out of bed and cracked open the door. Saw a faint glow of light from below, funneling up the stairwell. Not a burglar, then. No self-respecting thief turns on the lights when robbing an occupied house. In her bare feet, she made her way downstairs and followed the glow down the hallway, to the study. Seated in front of the desktop computer was Lloyd, so focused on the screen that he did not realize Maggie was standing in the doorway behind him.

“Lloyd? What are you doing?” she said.

“I couldn’t sleep.” He didn’t turn to look at her, instead keeping his gaze on the computer. “I kept thinking, she wouldn’t leave me without some sort of reassurance. Some indication that she’s all right. There’s got to be a message. Something I’ve missed.”

There had indeed been a message, one that Maggie was sorely tempted to reveal to him, seeing how disheveled and heartsick he looked.

“Lloyd . . .”

“I think I’ve found it,” he said.

“What?”

“The message. A message, anyway.”

She pulled over a chair and sat down beside him. All she saw on the screen was a photograph. If this was Ingrid’s message, it only raised more questions. The photo was of a bespectacled man in a gray suit standing on a street corner, holding a briefcase. He appeared to be in his fifties, short and stocky, with a comb-over that could not disguise the fact he was well on his way to going bald. The camera had captured a passing car as a blur of motion off to the side, and to the man’s left was a stopped bus.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But this photo means something. It has to mean something.”

“Why?”

He took a deep breath and sank back in his chair. “I kept thinking she must have left some clue about where she was going, what she was planning. So I came downstairs and looked through her email accounts.”

“You know her passwords?”

“I’m not entirely clueless.”

“Well, what did you find?”

“Not much of interest. A lot of emails about conference logistics, travel arrangements, reservations for the speakers. I thought there had to be something more, so I went into the trash folder to see which emails she’s deleted. I was surprised to find it completely empty. Zero items.” He looked at her. “How often do you clear out your trash folder?”

“When I think about it.”

“Exactly. Most of us empty our trash bins only when we’re tidying up, or we think it’s getting full. But to find it completely empty? That made me think there was something in there that she wanted to permanently delete, and that’s why she cleared out the whole folder. So I started digging, to find out what she’d deleted. I did a data carve and pulled out my old FTK software to scan the hard drive.”

“And?”

“I found this deleted photo. It was sent in an email early Tuesday morning at 3:26 a.m. That’s fourteen hours before she boarded that plane in Belfast. There were only two words accompanying the photo: Call me. Twenty minutes later, she deleted this email and then emptied the trash folder. Obviously, she didn’t want me, or anyone else, to see it. I wouldn’t have known it even existed, except for that strangely empty trash folder.”

“Who sent this?”

“I don’t know. The sender’s address is just a ten-digit string of numbers. And it was sent to one of Ingrid’s old personal accounts, one I don’t think she’s used in years.”

“What does it mean, this photo?”

“I have no idea. I’ve been staring at this man’s face for an hour, wondering if I know him. But I don’t recognize him.”

Maggie didn’t either. With his briefcase and gray suit and generous belly, he looked like a banker or a bureaucrat, someone who spent his day at a desk. If Ingrid had left her husband for a lover, this was not that man. Maggie could see the attraction of someone like Rodrigo Estrada, but not this person.

“Have you run him through facial recognition?” she asked.

“I turned up no matches. He’s not in our database. Which, in itself, is curious.”