Page 67 of Broken Princess
He nodded and brought up another map on his computer. “Yes. I’ve plotted out every zone within a two or three hour flight-time to D.C. I figured he’d probably want to keep her relatively close because he has work and other commitments here in the city, and he doesn’t want to make anyone suspicious by disappearing for days at a time.”
“There’s thousands of possible spots,” I said, skating my eyes over the map. “Three hours on a plane can get you almost anywhere in the country.”
“Hence our dilemma,” he said, letting out a small sigh. “We’d need to search every one of these places, and we wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Most of them are in mountainous areas or forests. We could look up property records to see if Jamie or any of his family members own houses around any of those spots.”
“On it,” he replied, typing speedily again. “Problem is, though… they could’ve bought a bunch of investment properties through shell companies—or in other people’s names—for tax reasons. So there could be a bunch of houses we don’t even know about.”
“Fuck, that’s true.” I leaned back, put my chin in my hands, and let out a deep sigh.
The computer suddenly let out a pinging sound, and Rowan’s brows shot up. “Jamie’s burner phone just came into range again.”
“Where is he?”
“Looks like he’s back at the summer house in New Hampshire,” he said, zooming in on the map.
“Whichever dead zone he’s keeping Willow in has to be somewhere near that house, right?” I said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t keep going back there.”
Rowan nodded slowly. “That’s true,” he said. “Thing is, though… there aren’t really any viable dead zones anywhere near there. See?”
I glanced at the map. Then I traced a finger over it, out into the ocean. “You’ve only marked out continental dead zones,” I said. “But what about the ocean? There’s got to be a ton of islands without phone towers, right? He could be keeping Willow on one of them and taking a boat back and forth from the mainland. That would explain why we lose him after the summer place.”
Rowan’s shoulders drooped. “Shit, you’re right,” he muttered. “I didn’t even think of that. I’m totally off my game.”
I smiled faintly. “I guess I can be useful sometimes.”
He kept his eyes on the screen as he typed rapidly for a few minutes. “Okay, here we go,” he finally said. “I’ve marked every island within a hundred square miles of the Torrance summer place in red.”
“There’s so many,” I said, forehead creasing as I stared at the little red dots. “Wait… look at this.”
“What?”
“One of the islands near the Torrance summer place is Fire Island,” I said, tapping my finger on the map.
“Fire Island?”
“It’s an Order property. There’s a mansion there, and there’s also plenty of plane and boat landing spots. Do you think Jamie could be keeping Willow there?”
“It would be nice if that were the case, but I doubt it,” Rowan said gently. “There’s no way he’d be dumb enough to keep her in a place your mother could visit anytime.”
I groaned. “Shit. You’re right,” I said. “We’re gonna have to search every fucking one of these islands, aren’t we?”
“I guess we could narrow it down by making it less than a hundred square miles, but then we might miss Willow.”
“Yeah, because he could be keeping her really far out,” I said, shaking my head. “Fuck…”
Rowan’s computer made a strange buzzing sound, and his eyes widened. “That’s VIGIL,” he said. “Jamie’s about to take a call on his burner phone.”
“From who?”
He glanced at a number on his other screen. “It’s your mother,” he said, turning back to me with his brows lifted.
“This should be interesting.”
We leaned forward to listen in on the conversation.
“Jamie,” my mother snapped on her end of the line. “Where the hell have you been?”
