“No. Matter of fact, she said she’d seen the girl around here many times in the past couple of months. Seemed to her that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
But none of that meant Hayley hadn’t been kidnapped. Brian could’ve been hiding a gun, in which case Hayley wouldn’t have dared to struggle. Or maybe at that particular time, Hayley hadn’t known she was being kidnapped. She didn’t necessarily have to know that Brian took the photo of her at the Hollywood Hills house in order to use it later as proof of life. In fact, it would’ve been smart of him to keep everything looking normal for as long as possible. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about controlling Hayley until it was absolutely necessary.
“Did you ask her how well she knew Brian?”
“Said she’d known him a little less than a year, but that he seemed okay. He’d help her with groceries, that kind of thing. She didn’t say he was a ‘nice young man,’ but that was the gist of it.”
“Thanks, Stanley.”
He frowned. “Name’s Evan.”
“Right, I was just kid-”
Evan squinted at me. “Stan’s my brother.”
Of course he was.
Bailey joined us in the hallway, a worried look on her face. Without preamble, she tersely ordered the unis to stand guard on Brian’s apartment until our criminalist got there, then headed for the car. I trotted to catch up and jumped in as she gunned the engine.
I quickly brought her up to speed on what I’d learned, aware that whatever she’d just heard on her phone call wasn’t good, because she was taking it out on the gas pedal. Bailey listened to my report without comment as she whipped down Hollywood Boulevard. I wrapped up my assessment of Iris Stavros and asked, “Want to tell me why we’re traveling at warp speed, Captain Kirk?”
“The news release paid off, sort of. We got a tip from a guy at a cybercafé in Silver Lake. Claims he ‘sniffed’ someone sending a ransom note.”
“Sniffing,” the hacker’s term for spying on someone’s Internet mailings, is incredibly easy to do in a cybercafé. Don’t ask me how they do it, I’m a computer Luddite. I only know about it because Graden is a computer whizbang, and he’d told me stories from some of the hacking cases he’d handled.
“That’s all? I mean, that’s great, but…” The call had taken a lot longer than it should have for just that.
“Brian, or whatever his real name is, had a lot of jobs before he landed the gig in the Sherman Oaks Galleria. The first sign of him in L.A. was about a year ago. He was a busboy at the Pinot Gris. Three months later, he turned up as a waiter at the Hungry Pig. Two months after that, he applied for a security job at a Bank of America a few blocks away from the Hungry Pig. He hung on to that job for four months, and then he landed his job as a jewelry store manager in the Galleria.”
