Page 5 of Not Our Daughter

“What’s in it?”

“Photographs from Colorado today. Cole Shipley. They just arrived from our guy in Denver. I’m having them run through facial recognition, but I thought I’d go ahead and send them over to you.”

“All right, give me a sec.”

Burns sat at his small wooden kitchen table, opened his laptop, and logged in to a secure server. The email from Davis sat at the top of his inbox. He accessed the attached file and watched as a dozen high-resolution photos populated on his screen. The first couple of images were of the same fortysomething guy who was listed as a teacher on the private school website, sans the eyeglasses. He stood alone by a lake or something. Burns searched his laptop and opened an old file that contained all the information on the Greg and Amy Olsen case. He hadn’t been inside this folder in years. He enlarged a photo of Greg and Amy together at a park somewhere that the FBI had seized from their home during the investigation. They were in their early thirties in the photo. Burns did a quick comparison between the two men. Maybe a slight resemblance but it felt inconclusive. While Greg Olsen had been a bit pudgy with short hair and clean shaven, Cole Shipley looked to be in excellent shape, with long hair and a full beard.

He scrolled through the rest of the photos. Cole Shipley was sitting at an outdoor table with what looked like a teenage girl and a woman. Burns’s eyes locked in on the woman, and he immediately leaned forward. He enhanced the image, and then he cursed out loud. Amy Olsen. She looked slightly different from thirteen years ago. Brown hair instead of her previous blond. But there was no mistaking it was the same woman. The face was a dead giveaway. When you are as attractive as Amy Olsen, it’s nearly impossible to hide it, no matter what measures you take. This had to be her.

He jumped out of his chair, cursed again, even louder.

“What is it?” Davis asked.

Burns felt his adrenaline racing. “Where were these taken?”

“Grand Lake, Colorado. The woman has been identified as Lisa Shipley. She helps coach cheer part-time at a local gym. The girl is their daughter, Jade Shipley.”

“We got an age for the daughter?”

“Yes. Today is apparently her fourteenth birthday. They were celebrating.”

Burns did quick math in his head. Same age as Marcy, the baby they’d taken.

He’d found them. He’dfinallyfound them.

“You think it’s them, boss?” Davis asked.

“Iknowit’s them.”

Now Davis cursed excitedly. “What do you want me to do? Have Denver grab them?”

“No! Get us on a plane ASAP. I need to be there. I don’t want anyone screwing this up. Tell our Denver guy to not let Cole Shipley out of his sight, even for a moment.”

“Will do. This is huge!”

“I know. I’ll meet you at the airport shortly.”

Burns hung up, sat there for a moment, stunned. He went back to the old digital file on Greg and Amy Olsen. It had been more than thirteen years since they’d murdered Candace McGee inside their home and then disappeared with her baby in the middle of the night. A child they’d fostered to adopt for eight months—until the judge had made the decision to return the baby to her mother. Family and friends had told Burns and his team in the aftermath how absolutely devastated both Greg and Amy had been on the afternoon of that fateful decision. Their motive was very clear. Although Greg Olsen had deleted all security camera footage, they didn’t need it. They’d found the murder weapon inside the house: a seven-inch petite chef’s knife that matched a set in the kitchen. It was covered in Candace McGee’s bloodandhad Greg’s fingerprints on it. A neighbor had discovered the body by looking through the glass front door midmorning the next day when she came over to check on them.

Burns had no idea how long the Olsens had been gone. An analysis of timelines gave them up to a twelve-hour head start. But he knew they had fled north, at least initially. The FBI found their Lexus SUV abandoned in a Target parking lot in Waco later that afternoon, whereBurns discovered they’d also withdrawn ten thousand in cash from a bank. But that was the very last sign of them.

Their life on the run had undoubtedly been helped by Greg Olsen’s previous career. After graduating with honors from Arizona State, Greg had quickly worked his way up the corporate ladder, eventually heading up the security and fraud division of a large international banking system. His job was literally to protect the bank from stolen and fake identity hacks. Greg knew that world inside and out and had made contacts all over the globe. Burns eventually tracked down an individual who worked underground in Prague who admitted he’d helped Greg get new identities the day after they’d disappeared. The man claimed he knew nothing about the crime—he was on the other side of the world. They were just business acquaintances. He’d created fake identities for Greg Olsen on many occasions over the years to test against the bank’s security operations.

Burns had searched long and hard for the first three years after they’d disappeared. Twice, he thought they actually had them. Once in Casper, Wyoming. A year later in Boise, Idaho. But both raids had ended in failure. Burns had lost support from the top after the last disaster. Resources for his search eventually dried up. He was told if the Olsens somehow fell into his lap again, he could ratchet up the pursuit. Until then, he was to get busy solving other crimes. The whole thing had been a big F on his FBI report card.

Burns stared at the photographs from Grand Lake. Greg and Amy looked happy sitting there, eating ice cream, enjoying life as Cole and Lisa Shipley. He wondered how long they’d been living under the new names. He’d concluded years ago they’d likely left the country and probably settled somewhere in South America or Europe. But Colorado? This was a surprise. He studied the teenage girl. Jade Shipley had to be Marcy McGee. But there was obviously no way of telling by simply comparing photographs.

He checked his watch. Within five hours, he was going to have his first actual conversation with the fugitive couple. It was hard to believe. He hurried to his bedroom, threw together a quick overnight bag, and then bolted for the door.

Four

The Fisk & Whitmore Law Firm occupied the entire fifteenth floor of a newly built trophy office building in the heart of Washington, DC. While the firm, with only eighty-two lawyers, wasn’t the biggest in DC, Fisk & Whitmore had been a political powerhouse for more than thirty years. At sixty-six years old, Carl Fisk had represented some of the most influential political figures going all the way back to the beginning of the Clinton administration. Fisk’s massive office had a sweeping view of the Capitol. He would often stand at the expansive floor-to-ceiling windows and stare out over the Capitol grounds, as if overseeing his kingdom. Which was how many in town viewed him: the king of the hill. If you were a major player in town and had a serious legal issue, you called the king. You also privately called the king when it was not just legal but scandalous.

Fisk was good at fixing things, inside and outside the court of law.

He currently stood at his office window wearing a standard dark-blue business suit, a neatly pressed white button-down, red tie, and gold cuff links given to him by George W. Bush. The suit jacket hung from an antique coatrack behind his desk. Fisk wore an expensive custom-made suit every day of the week—mainly because he was in the office every day. The only time you’d catch him not impeccably dressed was while sleeping or while rowing in the Potomac, which he’d been doing sinceHarvard. The exercise had kept him in great shape over the years. He could pass for midfifties if not for the silver hair, which he didn’t mind. It made him look more distinguished. While this wasn’t Hollywood, looks still meant a hell of a lot in this town. Image was everything.

He took a sip from his glass of Macallan and stared out over the bright lights of the most powerful city in the world. It had been a stressful day. He just wanted to enjoy his scotch and try to take the edge off.

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