Murray Hill || A Superhuman Tale - 1

Chapter Eighteen

Tommy had an hour to sit and cogitate.

He and Sam both had started working the phones at roughly the same time and had continued to do so, on and off, over the last four days. Earlier that morning, they'd talked on the phone and had shared their findings.

There'd been little for either to report.

Tommy was able to confirm the broad outline of what Sam had told him about Amy. In addition, he'd tracked her activities for the few months preceding her disappearance, scrutinized her business affairs, and ascertained that Amy had been living for the last four years with a domestic partner named Linda Cahn in a house near Flagstaff, Arizona. It wasn't much, but it was somewhat more than they'd had.

It surprised both Tommy and Sam that they hadn't known such important details about Amy as where she lived and what her domestic status was. Both had presumed that she lived more-or-less constantly on the road. She had that itch. But thinking of Amy, it should have been no surprise. Their friend always had compartmentalized her life carefully, and though both recalled Amy speaking fondly of someone named Linda, there was nothing in her words to suggest any hint of domesticity.

Sam had news on another front.

Of the seven friends he'd attempted to track down, he found two alive, one living near Biloxi and another outside Olympia, Washington. A third had died of a heart attack at about the time Sam had lost contact with him. A fourth, a woman Sam had last heard from about six years before, recently had been in Lubbock. Sam hadn't been able to contact her, but two different associates of his had admitted to having seen her as recently as six months before.

Save for the one death, that was good news. But it forced Sam and Tommy to presume that the three friends who Sam couldn't locate were among the missing. That raised the list of abductees to nine.

Sam had passed all their pertinent information to Tommy and had briefed him on what his white board looked like. It was then that he'd given Tommy two other names to add to the list of missing.

A young woman who Sam had first met in Houston about 10 years before, named Philly Mettouchi, had provided them.

"She's something of a high-tech whiz kid," Sam had claimed. "Her Gift is hiding in plain sight."

Apparently, the young woman could move about in public without being noticed. Her practical ability was organizational skill. She'd spent most of the last decade developing information systems for Internet start-ups. In that trade, she'd made a fortune.

"She's wicked smart, wants to help, and can set us up with better information systems than my sorry-ass white board," Sam had said during their phone conference. "I trust her, but I didn't want to say anything until you got a chance to meet her."

Sam had good instincts about people, but he usually deferred to Tommy when it came to reading folks. Neither of the men were paranoid, but there was no guarantee anyone with whom they shared information had the best intentions, and even an honest person might exercise faulty judgement.

But, so far, walking around and flashing old pictures of Amy had gotten Sam nowhere.

They both wanted her back, but if they intended to find her and to get to the bottom of what appeared to be a much broader conspiracy, they needed the assistance of someone who could extract and collate potentially large volumes of information. If necessary, they needed the help of someone who could hack government systems.

Tommy bridled at that last thought—the Tommy of recent decades had become an unusually law-abiding creature—but things had gone too far for him to be squeamish.