Stingrays by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

THE STINGRAYS (continued)

“So you just let us go on and on?” Kate asks. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I was hungry,” Otto says.

Kate’s eyes narrow to a kind of laser-beam focus. Are you jerking us around or what? Otto is the one team member she knows the least, and that worries her. Theo looks angry, too—and those two shared a jail cell for a while. Jana, meanwhile, shakes her head and smiles softly, which is what she always does when she’s frustrated and doesn’t want it to show. She types something on her cell phone.

“Hey,” Otto says when he sees the look on his teammates’ faces, “you guys seemed so excited about all of the hard work you’ve been doing. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Quinn says, “Let’s hear your proof, Otto.”

“Okay. So I spent most of the day impersonating Paige’s older brother. She doesn’t have one, but whatever. Most people don’t know that. I wanted to see if anybody else had eyes on her while she was here. And I found three people who saw Paige Ryerson on three different occasions on three different parts of the island. And this was over the weekend, after the Clee girl first reported her as a missing person.”

“Why didn’t they call the police?” Kate asks.

“They told me they did but never heard anything in response,” Otto says.

Theo frowns. “Who are these witnesses, anyway?”

Otto points at Quinn’s laptop. “I did some quick background checks on all three, and they’re solid citizens. I uploaded it to your secure folder, Matthew. You can do your deep web magic from there, but I’d be shocked if they were anything but legit.”

They all knew that Matthew Quinn was an expert at surfing the so-called deep web, the murky underbelly of the internet that lies beyond search engines and passwords. It is the kind of digital underworld that takes a skilled navigator to operate.

“I’ll check them out,” Quinn says. “What did the witnesses say Paige was doing?”

“They all said she looked like she was feeling no pain—either tipsy or maybe even a little stoned. This is, after all, the tropics, man.”

“And somehow this drunk or possibly stoned girl was able to evade an island-wide search for her?” Kate asks. “Sorry, I’m not buying it.”

“Why would these people lie?” Otto asks. “It’s not as if they came forward with this information on their own. If I hadn’t gone digging, chances are they wouldn’t have told another soul.”

Theo hurls his fork into the sink like a petulant child. “So what I’m hearing is that everybody’s guilty, or nobody’s guilty, because our so-called victim might be off on a bender somewhere.”

“So where does this leave us?” Jana asks. “And what do we do next?”

“For one thing, we don’t take our frustrations out on innocent cutlery,” Quinn says, cocking an eye at Theo. “This also means that the next phase of our investigation will require great care. Whether Paige is dead or alive, I believe we’re dealing with a conspiracy—not the passionate mistake of a single perpetrator.

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