Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

out and swung the phone around to face her. I reeled off the number and she punched the buttons. Dial tone came out of the handset. Ellie punched another button and the dial tone switched to speaker. There was a crackle as the call was answered on the other side. But it was voice mail. The professor was not in his office at the moment. We were invited to leave a message, which Ellie did. She left it vague, identified herself, and asked that the professor call back on her mobile phone.

I typed ‘Amber Chapman’ into the computer. Ellie pulled a chair from the conference table and rolled herself next to me. Amber Chapman was a very popular name. Hundreds of results. Grids of images, each image a woman, or a girl. Older or younger, darker or lighter, thin and thick. The varieties were endless. None of them were the Amber Chapman I was looking for. Which didn’t mean anything, because there were so many of them. I typed in ‘Amber Chapman Physics’, and got her.

It was a photograph in a grid of search results. I clicked the picture and it opened up larger. Amber Chapman perched on the edge of a circular fountain. She was dressed in black. Stylish, with her straw-colored hair up in a complicated-looking braided crown. She wore sunglasses and a pair of white sneakers. Behind her was an imposing building. It looked like a palace. The word ‘baroque’ floated from the inner recesses of my mind. The palace was constructed from some kind of sand-colored material, but the ornate facade was detailed in ochre paint.

One thing for sure, it wasn’t in America. Not Alaska, and not the outside as they called it. I figured the photograph was from Europe.

Ellie said, “That her?” I grunted. She said, “Click in.”

Below the photograph was a link. I clicked it. The page blanked and then redrew itself from top to bottom, line by line. Ellie leaned in. She said, “It’s a blog. Someone’s journal.”

There were several images besides the one we’d just seen. All of them had been taken in the old town of some European city. Cathedrals and that kind of thing. Old bridges and ornately decorated stone structures that had become tourist locations, like an even more expensive version of Disneyland.

The photographs all had young people in the foreground, posing against the grand backdrops of the old world. Students, I figured. The type of young person who does not go into the military. Then there was a group picture in a restaurant. They were seated around a large oval table with a white tablecloth. The shot had been taken after dinner. Faces were flushed from the beer and wine. Empty glasses littered the surface. Ellie pointed to Amber Chapman on one side. My eyes flicked over the faces and I caught George Abrams on the other side of the table, face slightly averted, concentrating on something off-camera.

I scrolled up and started reading the author’s comments. The city was Tallinn, capital of Estonia. My mind made the jump to the physics conference that had been listed on George Abram’s MIT profile page. I got that up in another computer window. I flicked between the two. Ellie had her chin grasped in her hand. She looked at me. I looked at her.

“Interesting. Maybe they met there.”

Ellie said, “Maybe they did. I bet a lot of scientists meet in academic conferences. Where else would they meet?”

I said, “I don’t know, I guess they meet places that other people meet, like bars and dinner parties and church.”

Ellie looked at me. “You ever meet anyone at church?”

I said nothing.

She said, “What?”

“I’m thinking about Chapman and that boat, the Emerald Allure. I want to know if she gets off the boat, so I can find her. Either that, or I’ll have to go there again. What do you do here, when you need to keep an eye on something?”

Ellie said, “Usually, I get Dave to do it.”

“The guy out front?”

“Yes, that Dave.”

“You deputize him?”

“Don’t need to.”

Which is what happened. Ellie called Dave into the office. It wasn’t complicated. The Emerald Allure had two ways on or off, both visible from multiple spots on Water Street. Dave listened and agreed. We showed him the photograph of Chapman. He said that he could recognize her even if she was dressed differently. Dave was eager. I was skeptical. I questioned him on technique. Turned out that Dave liked to read detective novels and knew all about stakeouts. He would secure donuts and coffee. He would piss into an empty milk jug. He had a car and a phone, and he had Ellie’s number programmed into the phone. Which was one extra point for phones. Too bad the minuses outweigh the pluses.

Dave was gone two minutes when Ellie’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She was at the computer and had to push back her chair and stand up. Ellie pulled the vibrating thing from the front pocket of her jeans and pressed a button. Which stopped the buzz, but lit up the screen. Ellie looked into it, read something to herself. Her lips moved as she did so.

I said, “Can’t be Dave already.”

She looked up at me. “No. The computer geek. He says he can look at George Abrams’ laptop right now.” She turned to the conference table and hooked the straps of Abrams’ laptop bag. “You want to go?”

Twenty-Five

The computer geek lived in the Chilkat tribal territory with his mother, who lived in a trailer. Which would have been a terrible cliche, if it wasn’t for the mother and the trailer. The mother, because she was a kind of geek herself, and the trailer because it wasn’t a trailer, but the weird result of a marriage between a double wide mobile home and a log cabin with a boulder stuck in the side.

The house looked absurd. The left side consisted of the double wide, and the right side was a log cabin. At the ball