The Stranger

Sometimes you can’t wait to wake up and get to work in the morning and you hate the day to end. You get consumed. You eat, drink, sleep the case. This was one of those times. You grow close to those who stand with you in what you start to see as a glorious, hard-fought quest.

He and Sally Perryman had grown close.

Very close.

But there hadn’t been anything physical—not so much as a kiss. Lines hadn’t been crossed, but they’d been approached and challenged and perhaps even stepped on, though never over. There comes a stage, Adam had learned, where you are standing near that line, teetering, one life on one side, one life on the other, and at some point, you either cross it or something has to wither and die. In this case, something died. Two months after the case ended, Sally Perryman took another job with a law firm in Livingston.

It was over.

But Cori

Why? The answer seemed obvious. Adam tried to think it through, tried to come up with theories and hypotheses that could possibly explain what had happened to Cori

It was past midnight. The boys were in bed. This house had a grieving quality to it now. Part of Adam wanted the boys to express their fears, but right now, most of him just wanted them to block, to just get through another day or two, until Cori

He had to find Cori

Old Man Rinksy had sent him the preliminary information on Ingrid Prisby. So far, there was nothing noteworthy or spectacular. She lived in Austin, had graduated eight years ago from Rice University in Houston, had worked for two Internet start-ups. Rinsky had gotten a home phone number. It went immediately into a message machine set to a robotic default voice. Adam left a message asking Ingrid to call him. Rinsky had also provided the home phone number and address of Ingrid’s mother. Adam considered calling her but wondered how to approach her. It was late. He decided to sleep on that.

So now what?

Ingrid Prisby had a Facebook page. He wondered whether that might provide more clues. Adam had his own Facebook page but rarely checked it. He and Cori

But who knew for sure?

He flashed back to sitting in this very room with Cori

“Everyone looks happy,” he’d said to Cori

“Oh, not you too.”

“What?”

“Everyone looks happy on Facebook,” Cori

“I didn’t say it was. I said everyone looks happy. That was kinda my point. If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac.”

Cori

He spent almost an hour on Ingrid Prisby’s Facebook page. First he checked her relationship status—maybe he’d get lucky and the stranger was her husband or boyfriend—but Ingrid listed herself as single. He clicked through her list of 188 friends, hoping to find the stranger among them. No luck. He looked for familiar names or faces, someone from his or Cori

But these observations brought him no closer to finding Cori

He was missing something.

It was getting late, but Adam kept plugging away. First off, how did Ingrid know the stranger? They had to be close in some way. He thought about Suza

Or was that true? He knew that Suza

And maybe they were just the kind of blackmailers who told anyway.

Was that likely?

No way of knowing. Concentrate on the question at hand: How did Ingrid and the stranger know each other? There were several possibilities, of course, so he put them in order from most to least likely.

Most likely: work. Ingrid had worked for several Internet companies. Whoever was behind this probably worked for Fake-A-Pregnancy.com or specialized in the web—hacking or what-not—or both.

Second most likely: They met in college. They both seemed about the right age to have met on a campus and remained friendly. So maybe the answer lay at Rice University.

Third most likely: Both were from Austin, Texas.

Did this make sense? He didn’t know, but Adam went back through her friends, keeping an eye out for people who also worked on the Internet. There was a fair amount. He checked their pages. Some were blocked or had limited access, but most people don’t go on Facebook to hide. Time passed. Then he looked through her friends’ friends who worked on the Internet. And even friends of those friends. He checked out profiles and work histories, and 4:48 A.M.—he saw the time on the little digital clock on the top bar on his computer—Adam finally struck gold.

The first clue had come from the Fake-A-Pregnancy website. Under the CONTACT US link, the company listed a mailing address in Revere, Massachusetts. Adam Googled the address and found a match—a business conglomerate called Downing Place that operated various start-ups and web pages.

Now he had something.

Scouring again through Ingrid’s friends, he found someone who listed his employer as Downing Place. He clicked on his profile page. There was nothing much there, but the guy had two friends who also worked at Downing. So he clicked on their pages—and so on, until he arrived at a page belonging to a woman named Gabrielle Dunbar.

According to her ABOUT page, Gabrielle Dunbar studied business at New Jersey’s Ocean County College and in the past had attended Fair Lawn High School. She did not list a current or past employer—nothing about Downing Place or any other website—and she had not posted anything on her page in the past eight months.

What had drawn his eye was the fact that she had three “friends” who listed Downing Place as their employer. It also stated that Gabrielle Dunbar lived in Revere, Massachusetts.