Page 26 of Inside the Maelstrom: Part Two
My throat grew tight. “He didn’t find him?”
Evan nodded. “He found him. Timothy Smith.”
Nemo’s name was Timothy Smith? Well, that was underwhelming.
I took in Evan’s face, the small crease between his brows. The fact that his face wasn’t neutral meant something, and I couldn’t tell yet if it was good or bad.
“Is he dead?”
Evan shook his head this time. “Not that I can tell. Come on, let’s find Otto. We should have a family meeting about this.”
I couldn’t stop the grin that spread across my face. “Familymeeting? I like the sound of that.” If I had any doubts about Evan’s commitment, that one throwaway comment appeased them somewhat. I looked over my shoulder to see that Sampson and Hendrick were following along behind us.
“Otto is in the library doing his college assignments,” Drix offered, and I nodded, veering toward my favorite room in the apartment.
They’d let me decorate it since we were basically housebound with the amount of reporters hounding the front doors, so I’d ordered a desk that was almost as long as a dining table, meaning we could all work in here if we had to. There was also a Chesterfield two-seater couch near the fireplace and a huge Persian rug on the floor. It was perfect.
Otto looked up, smiling softly as he took us all in, but it slowly melted away as he realized we wereallhere. “What’s wrong?”
I walked over and sat in his lap, and he rocked back on the office chair so I could lean against him. He kissed my shoulder, making me melt. Fucking Otto. He had my damn heart and he knew it.
“Nemo’s really Timmy Smith, which is a fucking dumbass name.” Sampson flopped down on the couch, taking up all the space and making Hendrick sit on the floor. Evan took the seat opposite me and Otto.
“It sounds fake,” he said. “But his passport checks out.”
Otto squeezed me tighter. “You’ve found him?”
“No. Well, not really.” Evan pulled out a tattered Hello Kitty notebook and slid it in front of me. He flicked it open to a page that seemed to have a printed list of dates and numbers in columns. “This is my investigator’s research—”
“Is your investigator a twelve-year-old girl?” Hendrick called from the floor, laughing at his own joke.
Evan just gave him a bored look, then turned back to me. He plucked a piece of paper from the notebook and laid it next to the printout of numbers and dates. “As I was saying, this is his research. He used a source at the wellness center where you and Hendrick were staying, and coerced a nurse to give him files to compare—”
“Get to the point, Evan,” Sampson grumbled.
“I will, if you fuckers stop interrupting,” Evan growled, and I threw Sampson a dirty look. He just rolled his eyes and motioned for Evan to continue. “As I was saying, we matched the handwriting in the Verne books with handwriting samples from the patient records, and this guy was definitely your guy. But it was confirmed by his travel history. Look. This is his exit interview from the wellness center.” He pointed to handwriting that I found achingly familiar, then pointed to the right column of the printout. “These are flights he took, and dates. Do you see?”
I looked at the two pieces of paper side by side. I recognized some of the letters beside the numbers. LHR was Heathrow Airport in London. CDG was Charles De Gaulle. Beside them were dates. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell…
“The dates are before his release from rehab,” Otto whispered, and I automatically went back through them. Holy shit. I frowned and looked at the list again, trying to get it to make sense.
Hendrick jumped up, coming to look over my shoulder. “Wait, does that mean he did his trip around the world andthenchecked himself into the looney bin?” He let out an oof as Otto elbowed him in the gut. “What? We were both there, no point sugar-coating it.”
I shook my head and went back to studying the numbers. There it was. The whole trip was laid out in airport codes. The time between flights was longer than ours though, of course. He’d spent a month in London, six weeks in Paris, three weeks in Kolkata. Two months in Japan. Only four days in Hong Kong.
I pointed to the last two entries. “What are these two?”
Otto was already googling on his laptop. “SFO is San Francisco.” So he’d flown back into San Francisco? What did that have to do with his last message? “And KEF stands for Keflavik. That's in Iceland.”
I frowned. There was no return, and the date on that travel entry was nearly two years ago. “He moved to Iceland?”
Evan shrugged. “He never came back here anyway; there are no other entries on his travel report. He’s still there.”
“If he died…”
“It would be on the report,” Evan answered, his expression filled with understanding.
Nemo was alive. Living in Iceland. Sucking in a deep breath, I looked around at the men in this room, who were all looking back at me with similar weighted expressions, like they were waiting for me to explode like a bomb.
