Chapter 13: Chase
Friday, May 8th
I spun around in my chair, closing my eyes to the office around me. I generally enjoyed a good mental challenge, but attempting to recover the data from Haley’s phone was testing the limits of my patience. After almost two weeks of failed attempts, I was itching to smash the device with a hammer.
I stopped spinning and faced the phone, choosing to believe my latest attempt would be successful, because I was running out of ideas. The sophisticated hardware encryption offered by the iPhone was a blessing and a curse. The fact that Haley felt the need to wipe the phone encouraged me that it actually contained useful information, but I was trying not to get my hopes up.
When my computer displayed a message relaying incoming data, I fist pumped the air. A sense of relief and the satisfaction of accomplishment washed over me as I opened the file and looked through Haley’s phone contents. I scanned through the e-mail accounts linked to her phone but didn’t expect to find anything new considering we had already accessed them. The work account was available through our office server, and we discovered the personal account on the laptop she borrowed from Theo.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in her text message conversations. Apart from the guys, she only ever texted with Jessica, Kara, or Tyler. While there were a few fairly recent messages from Kara, nothing around the time of Haley’s departure seemed suspicious. I briefly considered skimming her conversations with Ethan, but he already confirmed that he didn’t know where she was. I certainly didn’t want, or need, to read her messages with the other guys, especially Liam, despite some curiosity.
Every time I thought about her with Liam, I felt a little sick. He was so charming and experienced, and I was anything but. All this time, I’d considered my kiss with Haley a perfect moment. Something I would do almost anything to repeat. But, what chance did I have against someone like Liam? Or any of the others?
Focus, Chase. Her photo library was full of happy images, and I lingered on the rare photos she had taken of herself—dressed as Lady Guinevere for the gala, wearing a navy party dress I had never seen and taken in a dressing room, and another in the dress she wore to the Christmas party; I forwarded my two favorites to my phone and then continued skimming. There were a few pictures of places or things, some of Penny and Jessica even, but her library was dominated by pictures of Knox, Theo, Jackson, Liam, Ethan, and me.
After reviewing her calendar, apps, and call log, I was beginning to wonder why she had felt the need to wipe the phone. I glanced through the contents once more and opened the voice memo app—there was a single recording, timestamped mid-April. I plugged in my headphones and pressed play.
It was mostly quiet apart from the muffled sound of birdsong. And maybe a fountain? Was she outside?
“Good afternoon, Haley,” a man’s voice said, and for a split second, I wondered if he was her dad. But, the speaker’s formal tone seemed odd, and I knew he couldn’t be her dad after he said, “Or should I call you Kira?”
Haley strongly denied it, but she must have been freaking out on the inside. I kept concentrating on the man’s voice—it sounded familiar, and I mentally urged him to reveal his identity. His patronizing tone grated on me, and I had an irrationally strong urge to punch him.
The man alluded to “his position” and told her he wanted to get in touch with her father. I was impressed with Haley’s persistent denials of her identity, even going so far as to claim that her father was dead. Why didn’t she tell any of us about this?
The more I heard, the more I suspected the man was none other than Gerald Douglas. His mention of the Zenith Youth event, as well as his knowledge that Zenith had been hired to find Taylor, confirmed my suspicions. The jackass, I thought, despising the fact that we helped him in the past and led him straight to Haley.
When she started crying, it about killed me. I wished I could hold her, protect her. My anger was rising, and then he threatened to release her identity if she didn’t help him. I slammed my fist on the desk. How dare he.
“Everything okay over there?” Jackson asked from his desk across the room.
“No,” I said through gritted teeth, pressing pause on the recording and pulling out my headphones. “You guys need to listen to this.”
After Knox, Theo, Jackson, and Liam gathered around my workstation, I restarted the recording without saying more; I wanted to see if they’d come to the same conclusions I had. They were silent, intent on hearing the recording. When we finally reached the part I had yet to hear, the conversation got even worse, if that was possible. Douglas gave Haley a May first deadline and had the nerve to threaten her if she told any of us about their conversation.
Is this why she left? The timing certainly made sense. Considering it was May eighth, I was hopeful that he hadn’t followed through on his threat to reveal her identity. When the recording ended, I turned and faced the others. Leaning back in my chair, I crossed my arms and awaited their reactions.
“What the fudge?” Theo said, a perplexed scowl on his face, while Knox looked downright murderous.
“Chase, have you run voice identification software to see if Douglas’s matches up with the speaker in Haley’s recording?” Jackson asked.
“No, I just finished listening to it, but I was about to do that and run internet searches on ‘Haley Jones’ and ‘Kira Taylor’ in case something slipped past our alerts.”
“Focus on the recording. Liam and Theo can run the searches,” he ordered.
While Liam, Theo, and I completed our tasks, I heard Jackson and Knox talking behind me in hushed voices.
“Did you know about this?” Jackson asked.
“No.” Knox sounded angry. “I thought she knew she could come to us, could trust us,” he said, the anger fading to hurt.
“No new hits on ‘Haley Jones,’” Liam called from across the room.
“None on ‘Kira Taylor’ either,” Theo added.
“Gerald Douglas is a match for the speaker in the recording,” I stated, confirming what we all already knew.
“Well, I guess now we know why she left,” Theo said, hanging his head. “Her ‘roommate with the tattoos’? I can’t believe he would sink so low as to threaten me to get to her. This is all my fault.”
“You’re forgetting that I have tattoos.” Knox nudged Theo. “And it’s not your fault. I wish Haley had told us about this, but we could’ve done a better job protecting her from Douglas in the first place. We never should have allowed her anywhere near him.”
“Fortunately, the rat bastard doesn’t appear to have followed through on his threat, at least for now. But he will pay for this,” Liam said forcefully, echoing all of our thoughts.
“Agreed. So what’s the plan?” Knox looked at Jackson.
“Let’s keep an eye on him and see what useful information we can find. Then we can decide what to do with it,” Jackson answered stonily.
Reading the underlying threat behind Jackson’s words, I was tempted to applaud. It wasn’t in my nature to seek revenge, but I couldn’t help the overwhelming surge of protectiveness that hit me as soon as I’d listened to the recording. We needed to find something “useful,” as Jackson put it, something that would take Douglas down for good.