“But you knew,” she says.
“I knew. Ezra believed me. We spent the next few days looking for her. No one helped us. We finally found her on the outskirts of town. She’d managed to escape and she’d had someone call us with her location. Ezra and I went for her right away. We got her. We picked her up and brought her to the police again and she gave a statement. She was brave and she gave them everything she could, but Hector’s got the cops in his pockets. No one believed her. Not without proof.”
“And that’s what you’re looking for,” Fiona says. “You’re looking for proof.”
“I took his ship because he’s a dick,” I admit. “But when he came after me hard and fast, I realized there had
to be more to the spacecraft than what was on the surface.”
There has to be more here.
Why else would he come after me?”
“Now I’m looking for anything to show the intergalactic police, to show the government, that he’s bad news. I’m looking for anything to send him away. It’s been seven years,” I tell Fiona. “Seven years of trying to save my sister. I won’t find proof he took her. That ship has sailed, but I can find proof he’s a monster. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what this search is about.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says again.
“I should have fought harder.”
All the old feelings of helplessness are washing back up and I try to choke them down, but I can’t. I can’t this time. I’m so close to breaking him, to catching him. I’m so close and I’m still so far away. I know my time is limited. I know it’s only a matter of days, maybe even of hours before someone finds me, but I have to keep trying.
“We’ll keep looking,” Fiona whispers.
“We don’t have much time.”
“This is his ship, right?”
“It’s the one he uses most of the time,” I tell her. “I figured that if he’s up to anything illegal involving transport or smuggling, it’ll be here.”
“But we might not be looking for physical things,” she comments. “Maybe he just uses this for illegal business. Maybe he conducts business meetings on the ship.”
“No, we need something physical, and there should be something here. There has to be. The first thing I did was to reprogram the ship to respond to my fingerprints and voice: not his. Then I went through the computers. It took me two damn days, but there’s nothing there.”
“Are you a computer expert?”
“I am.”
“How?” She asks, and I raise an eyebrow.
“Not the time for that story, love.”
“Alright,” Fiona stands up and starts walking around. “So we need physical proof that he’s up to no good. There’s nothing in this room. How many more are there? Where is his main office?”
“Next to the bedroom,” I tell her.
“That’s the first place anyone would look,” she says. “If it was me, and I was a criminal, I’d hide things in a place that was easily accessible and a place that wasn’t close to my office.”
“Someplace you could get in and out of quickly,” I comment.
And then it hits me.
I wonder why I didn’t see it before.
I was so busy searching the cargo hold and the storage rooms I didn’t think of the one place he could easily access without anyone asking questions, the one place that’s easy to get to from the ship’s entrance.
“The kitchen,” I tell her. “We need to check the fucking kitchen.”
“That’s it,” she says. “Of course. It all makes perfect sense. No one is going to look in a kitchen for smuggled goods because that’s where you eat. That’s where you cook. Why would you hide weapons there or counterfeit money? Why would you hide anything there?”