“Like a suckerfish on a shark,” Tox added between bites.
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Then once they hit the bait shop, the suckerfish swims away.”
“And the shark swims on.” Twitch stared at the screen with something like admiration.
“Where does the shark go?” Tox asked.
“I’m not sure. It’s taken me this long to track the suckerfish to South Carolina. But that’s not the weird part.”
Nathan and the rest of the men knew Twitch’s command of understatement and waited.
“I’m not working on the biotoxin transmissions. Well, I was, but this transmission from a few weeks ago; it’s about Emily’s abduction. I can’t tell where it ends up yet, but it originates from the same source as the emails regarding the sale of the toxin. It appears to be a message to the local contractors after Emily escaped.” She looked up. “The sender writes he’s coming to the U.S. to handle the situation personally.”
“The person selling the bioagent and the person trying to abduct Emily are one and the same.” Ren looked poleaxed.
“Busy guy.” Tox walked over and handed Nathan the folder. “You know the two kidnappers taken out in prison after Emily’s original abduction?”
“Yeah, but that’s a dead end.”
“I know. But remember how one was stabbed three times? Right eye, right ear, throat.”
“Yeah, that’s a signature but the other guy was stabbed in the gut.”
“Right, but I think that was a fuck up. Maybe the hitter was interrupted, maybe he just got lazy, because the guy suspected of the second hit got taken out six months later. Guess how?”
“Right eye, right ear, throat.”
“Ding, ding, ding.”
“But that trail leads nowhere. We always assumed those two were taken out by the mastermind.”
“Right, but,” Tox shuffled through the papers Nathan held, “three months earlier outside of Hartford—that would have been just days after Emily had been taken as a child—a body was found floating in the Connecticut River, stabbed once in the eye, once in the ear, and once in the throat. A low-level dealer named Cyril Bond.”
The sound of shattering glass had everyone turning toward a recessed bar where Jack Webster stood surrounded by a shattered tumbler, the smell of whiskey filling the air.
“Dad?”
“Cyril Bond... was an acquaintance of your mother’s.”