So that meant they had to put boots on the ground in Brazil, employing good old-fashioned footwork, which was fine by her.
Sometimes old school is best.
As Painter pulled open the door to the guesthouse, she adjusted her backpack, running her palm over the grip of the Glock 20 holstered on the underside of her bag. Painter had supplied them with weapons shortly after landing, found hidden in an airport storage locker. He never told her how that had been arranged, and she didn’t care to ask.
Though armed, she still felt naked without Nikko at her hip.
Jenna followed Painter inside, while Drake remained on the porch with the cat. As they approached the reception desk, which was little more than a raised bench, Painter scooped an arm around Jenna’s waist.
An older Brazilian woman, wearing a housecoat and a welcoming smile, stood up from a cushioned chair before a small television and greeted them. “Sejam bem-vindos.”
“Obrigado,” Painter thanked her. “Do you speak English?”
Her smile widened. “Yes. Mostly I can.”
“This is my daughter,” Painter said, drawing Jenna forward. “She is looking for a friend of hers, someone she was supposed to meet in the city. But they never showed up.”
The woman’s face grew more serious, nodding her head at their concern.
Jenna felt a slight pressure on her lower back as Painter urged her to continue. “Her… her name is Amy Serpry,” she said, putting as much worry into her voice as possible, which wasn’t hard.
I am worried…
“My friend has been traveling in the area for the past month, but when she first came here, she stayed at your beautiful hotel.”
With no way to trace the call in any greater detail, Painter had tried to track the last steps of the saboteur, searching bank records, tracing additional phone calls from her home apartment in Boston, even mapping the GPS log recovered from her Toyota Camry. It was like filling in the life of a ghost, bit by digital bit, constructing her steps over the past months.
The investigation also revealed more about the woman’s volatile youth, before she settled into her postdoctoral program and was hired by Dr. Hess. In her late teens, she had been part of a radical environmental movement called Dark Eden, which advocated for a natural world beyond humankind, promoting acts of ecoterrorism to make their point.
Then shortly after 2 A.M. last night, Painter had received a call from D.C. Jenna had been in Painter’s office with Drake at the time, both of them just released from quarantine. Painter had put the call on speakerphone. The woman on the other line — Kathryn Bryant — had made a breakthrough.
We found no hits on her U.S. passport, so we thought she was stateside all of this time. But then I found out she still kept her French passport.
Apparently, Amy had become a U.S. citizen seven years ago, but having been born in France, she still maintained a dual citizenship. Tracing that original passport, Bryant discovered that Amy had taken a flight five weeks ago, paid for in cash, from Los Angeles to Boa Vista. The timing and location couldn’t be a coincidence.
It hadn’t taken long to discover that Amy had used a French credit card, issued from Crédit du Nord, to pay for Internet services at this hotel in Boa Vista.
That thin lead led them to be standing here now, hoping for some additional clue to follow the steps of their ghost.
“I have a picture of her,” Jenna said.
She took out a copy of Amy’s driver’s license photo. Again, Jenna had difficulty looking at that smiling face, knowing the horrors the woman would unleash, remembering the state of her body at that Yosemite cabin.
The proprietor studied the photograph, then slowly nodded her head. “I remember. Very pretty.”
“Did she come with someone?” Jenna pressed. “Or meet someone here.”
“Someone who might know where she is now?” Painter added.
The woman chewed her lower lip, plainly trying her best to recall anything. Then she slowly nodded.
“I remember. A man come at night. He was very…” She struggled for the word and instead forked her fingers and pretended bolts were shooting out of her eyes.
“Intense?” Jenna asked.
“Sim”—she nodded—“but scary, too. Senhor Cruz no like him. He hiss and hide.”
Senhor Cruz must be the tabby out front.
If that nighttime visitor was Amy’s accomplice or boss, maybe the cat was a good judge of character. He certainly had taken a shine to Drake.
Painter stepped forward, pulling out a sheaf of photographs. “Maybe you could recognize him. These are some of Amy’s friends.”
He spread the pictures across the reservation table. They showed various colleagues and associates of Amy’s. But a majority of the photographs came from when Amy was young, from Dark Eden’s old website, which still had pictures of the early members of that group. It was the most likely connection. There was even one that showed a teenaged Amy smiling in a group photo.
The woman bent lower over the pictures, slipping on a pair of reading glasses. She shifted through them and gave each a good look. On the group photo, she tapped one face.
“This the man. He smiles in picture, but not when he was here. He was very”—she glanced up to Jenna—“intense.”
Painter retrieved the photograph and studied the man in the picture. Jenna looked over his shoulder. The suspect had ebony black hair, combed back from a handsome pale face with piercing blue eyes.
“Did you overhear them speaking at all?” Painter asked.
“Não. They go to her room. He leave, but I no see him.”
“And no one else came?”
“Não.”
Painter nodded and passed her a few bills of Brazilian currency. “Obrigado.”
She pushed the bills back with a shake of her head. “I hope you find your friend. I hope she not with that man.”
Jenna patted the woman’s hand atop the bills. “For Senhor Cruz, then. Buy him some nice fish.”
The woman smiled, then nodded, her fingers crinkling the bills off the bench. “Obrigado.”
Jenna headed with Painter out onto the porch.
“Did you learn anything?” Drake asked, waving for Schmitt and Marlow to close in.
Painter sighed. “Someone came to visit her, someone from her past, from Dark Eden.”
Drake glowered. “Then that must be our guy.”
“Who is he?” Jenna asked.
“He was the founder of Dark Eden.” Painter did not sound happy and explained why. “According to all reports, he died eleven years ago.”
Jenna glanced back to the guesthouse.
So it seems we’re still chasing ghosts.
“Isn’t the view beautiful?” Cutter Elwes asked.
Kendall wanted to argue, to lash out, but even he could not find the gumption as he stared beyond the wrought-iron rails of the balcony.
The sun was just cresting the rim of the tepui. The thunderstorm had cleared during the night, leaving the skies a dazzling blue overhead, but mists still clung to the summit, adding to the illusion that this was an island in the clouds. The morning light cast those mists into shades of honey amber and dusky rose. The plateau itself seemed to glow with the new day, glistening in every shade of emerald, while the pond was a perfect reflection of the cloudless sky.
It was tempting to let his guard down in the face of such inspiring beauty, but he remained steadfast. He sat stiff-backed across the table from his host, a breakfast spread between them: a kaleidoscope of colorful fruits, dark breads, and hot platters of eggs and lentils.