CHAPTER 32

AN: Do you think Steph will be able to help Oz solve his case? Leave a review and let me know your thoughts. The reviews for the last chapter were a little low. I hope you guys are still interested in this story.

DAY 64

Monday

"Good," Finn said, "now hit him with the palm of your hand in the nose next time."

Oz gave Finn a look that said, thanks a lot, buddy. I wanted to laugh at his reaction, but since I was all about taking my training seriously, I held it in… barely. Not wanting to give Oz time to counter, I flattened my palm and went for his nose. At the speed of light, his hand came up, blocking me. "How are you able to block every move I make?" I groaned when I heard how petulant I sounded.

"You're telegraphing your strikes," Oz said. "I know exactly what you're going to do before you do it."

I thought sparring with Finn was hard, but having both come at me made it impossible to defend myself. It was only Monday morning, and I felt like calling it a day. Sweat dripped down my forehead, and my arms and legs felt like they weighed a ton. I don't think I'd ever been this tired, not even on the first day of boot camp. "Stop," I finally pleaded and dropped to the floor, lying flat on my back because I was so done.

"I got this. You go get us something to drink," Oz told Finn as he sat beside me.

"Don't bother with a pep talk. I can't defend myself against someone like you or Finn."

"That's true."

I turned my head, staring at him pointedly. "You didn't have to agree."

"Finn and I are highly trained, so staying alive is an accomplishment." I nodded, understanding he was trying to put things into perspective for me.

"Sometimes, staying alive to fight another day is all you can do," Finn said as he lowered himself to the floor beside me and handed each of us a bottle of water.

They were right. But that didn't mean I was going to lie down and let them win. Well, right now I was lying down because I still needed to catch my breath, but in a minute, I was going to get up and kick some major butt. I would show them what the Plum's were made of. They hadn't seen nothin' yet. I burst out laughing. I'm losing it.

"What's so funny?" Oz asked. My brain was too busy conjuring crafty ways to take them down to answer. Each scenario had them landing on their asses and me laughing harder and harder at their stunned faces. "Is she okay?" They gave each other a concerned look but did not engage with the crazy lady. Wise men.

I got control of myself and sat up. I recalled what Finn had said about the Kali knife-fighting method and how to incorporate defensive moves in tandem with offensive moves. It truly was a dance. A complicated life-and-death dance. "Let's do this." I quickly jumped to my feet, squished the empty bottle, and tossed it behind me. Who knows where it landed. Making it into the garbage would have been too much to hope for. They looked shocked but stood as I bounced on the balls of my feet with newfound energy I did not know I possessed.

Oz handed me one of the fake knives to spar with. "Remember. If you draw your blade or someone draws on you, the fight has become a death match."

We spent the rest of the morning reviewing ways to disarm someone with a knife and learning where all the arteries are in the body. Finn stopped Oz from going into detail about optimum slice patterns and how long it takes for someone to bleed out. Since we went at it extra hard today, Finn let me out a little early. After a quick snack, Oz helped me set up my anonymous company. He said to choose a name that gave no clue what product or service the company offered. While I sat on the deck trying to come up with a name, Judy and Billy wandered out of the woods looking for their usual afternoon snack. During my time here, they've given me so much joy, so I named my new company, JB Industries LLC, in their honor.

While I relaxed on the deck, Oz and Finn were in the cabin, reviewing a case that was giving Oz trouble. I heard bits and pieces. It was a kidnapping/murder case that had gone cold. It sounded like the kid was missing and the mother had been killed. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. I went inside, strolling by the couch where the contents of the box were spread on the coffee table. Since neither one said anything about my presence, I asked, "What's all this?"

Oz handed me a thick file. "It's a cold case. Read it and tell me what impressions you get."

"Me?" I gave him a questioning look and snorted at the absurdity of me advising a seasoned spy on a case that had him stumped. "I think Finn is better qualified."

"Your BEA close rate is impressive," Oz said, "and you've helped solve several difficult cases for the TPD and the feds. Look the case over and tell me what jumps out at you. A fresh pair of eyes or two never hurts. No pressure."

A funny feeling erupted in my chest, and I felt tears pricking the backs of my eyes. This man barely knew me, yet he had more faith in me than people I've known my whole life. I swallowed hard, and when I could speak without my voice cracking, I said, "I'll do my best."

"That's all I'm asking."

I sat on the couch, flipped open the file, and carefully read the first page. Charlie Porter, age 3 years, was abducted thirteen months ago from his home in Tuxedo Park, an upscale suburb of Atlanta. His father, Brian, age 40, came home from work to find his wife, Kimberly, age 38, on the child's bedroom floor, dead from blunt force trauma to the head, and the nanny passed out on the kitchen floor with blunt force trauma to the head. The nanny, Cheryl Monahan, age 46, claimed someone attacked her from behind, and she didn't see anything. She only remembers waking up to find Mr. Porter screaming and crying frantically as he called 911.

"The chances of finding the boy after all this time are extremely low," I told Oz.

We all silently contemplated that fact, and then I went back to reading. Stapled to the first page was a picture of Charlie with his parents. He was a cute, towheaded child with sweet chubby little cheeks. My heart squeezed painfully. He was the same age as my niece, Lisa. I flipped to the next picture of the bedroom crime scene. Charlie's mother was lying near his toddler bed, her head smashed in, and a huge pool of blood soaking into the carpet. She'd died with her eyes still open, staring at the empty doorway, and her arms stretched out as if she were trying to reach for her child. I imagined how hard she must have fought her attacker and what it felt like to lie there dying as she watched her child being taken away. The entire scene was so gruesome I had to look away.

After a few deep breaths, I focused back on the pictures and was struck by the sheer number of trains in the room. They were on the bedding, curtains, and walls. The light fixtures were even in the shape of trains. Beside the bed sat a stuffed lion big enough to sit on, and a huge train track was in the center of the room. The usual cars, trucks, and Duplo Lego blocks were sprinkled in with all the trains. It looked as if Charlie was yanked away mid-play.

"What's with all the trains?"

"Mr. Porter is a bit of an enthusiast," Oz said. "He wanted to share his love of trains with his son."

I flipped to the next page in the file. They questioned every neighbor on the street and all the members of Charlie's playgroup, but the list of suspects was small since he didn't go to school or daycare. It seemed Charlie's parents were very cautious, especially his mother. Outside of family members, the nanny was the only person who maintained daily contact with the child. After she recovered from the assault, she went back to her previous profession as a nurse. The authorities initially considered her a person of interest. After a year of keeping tabs on her, they determined she wasn't involved.

I dug into the box on the coffee table, picking up one of five hardback photobooks that reminded me of my school yearbook. They were a nicer version of the stickers and glue scrapbooks that Mary Lou makes of her kids. "Mrs. Porter was a scrapbooker," I stated as I looked through each page. My Spidey sense hummed. "What did the parents do for a living?"

"Mr. Porter is an estate lawyer at Wickersham, Porter & Taft, and Mrs. Porter was a cyber security analyst for Breckenridge Financial Services. It's an investment company… stocks, bonds, hedge funds, IPOs, that kind of thing. She made sure everything they did online was secure."

I returned the albums to the box and checked the stapled list of evidence logged from the crime scene. Each piece of evidence had a corresponding picture showing where the item had been in the house. I went down the list, line by line, cross-referencing the items with the images. When I came to a line item listing six external hard drives, holding 5TB of storage each, my Spidey sense began humming even louder. "I've seen these in Hector's office."

Oz looked over my shoulder to see what I was looking at. "They found the hard drives in the home safe."

"Do you know what's on them?" I asked.

He shook his head. "They're encrypted, and Mr. Porter deferred to his wife on all things computer, so he couldn't give us the password. He claims he doesn't know it."

"Do you believe him?"

"Yeah, even a year later, he's still a broken man. He reminds me of someone we both know."

I looked around for Finn because this case would bring up bad memories for him, but he was gone. "Where'd he go?"

"He said something about going to the garage, but you were absorbed in reading and didn't hear him." We were both quiet for a minute. I'm not sure what Oz was thinking, but I was thinking about Finn and how he was still grieving for his family after all these years.

"Maybe I should go check on him." I put the file down and moved to get up.

"He'll want to be alone right now," Oz said softly, causing me to pause. I was torn about whether to go to Finn or leave him be. "I'm usually more select in the cases I ask Finn to help on, but this one has me stumped. If you work on this case with me, we can leave him out of it, and hopefully reunite a child with his father." If working on this case spared Finn from having to relive his past, it was the least I could do. "The FBI cyber division had no luck decrypting the hard drives. Their direct response was, If we had a supercomputer and a hundred years, we could break the encryption."

"Wow. Mrs. Porter really was hyper-vigilant about cyber safety, even at home."

"The feds think she might have been blackmailing someone because of information she came across during her job."

"But you don't think so." It was a statement because even though I'd just met Oz a few days ago, I felt I knew him.

"No. I think Mrs. Porter could've been involuntarily caught up in something but not of her own free will."

Oz had a doom and gloom outlook on this case. Suddenly, it dawned on me. "You don't think Charlie's alive, do you?"

"This case is cold. We're probably looking for a body, but Mr. Porter needs closure regardless."

"You know what your problem is?" He patiently waited for me to enlighten him. "You've lost faith. Maybe Charlie's just waiting for us to find the right clue." I had experience with waiting for rescue and fearing no one would ever come. This case was hitting close to home for me too.

Still, I had no business acting as if I could pull off the impossible. Every lead had been followed, and every string had been pulled… numerous times. And this was all before Oz was called in to consult. The local police turned it over to the feds within hours of the child being reported missing. They worked the case hard for weeks, then shifted their focus to newer cases. Smarter people than me had put their all into this case and come up empty. I didn't see that I had anything to add. Knowing all that, I still wasn't ready to give up. However, right now, I needed a break.

"I think I'll let all this information sink in overnight and look at it again with fresh eyes tomorrow. Who knows, maybe something will come to me in my sleep."

I left Oz and got ready for bed. After I drifted off to sleep, Finn came to bed. He was quiet, and I sensed he didn't want to talk about why he escaped to the garage. He reached for me, and I opened myself to him, each taking and giving in a slow dance of need. When we were done, we fell asleep holding each other.