Read The Line Between Here and Gone for Free Online

the closed door, his lips curving into a lazy smile.
    * * *
    All humor was off ten minutes later as the team gathered around the conference room table.
    “I met with Amanda Gleason,” Casey began, hands folded in front of her. “Marc was dead-on in his assessment. The woman is desperate. The situation is heartbreaking. Time is of the essence. And we’re going to save this baby at all costs.” She turned to Ryan. “What do you have for us?”
    “Let’s start with my facial recognition software. I did a comparison of the guy in Amanda’s photos with the enhanced image of the guy in the cell phone picture. Using elastic bunch graph matching techniques and a cutting-edge sparse representation algorithm, I was able to determine…” Ryan glanced around at the table of blank faces. “Never mind the details. I’m ninety percent sure it’s the same guy.”
    “Nice odds,” Marc commented.
    “Yup. I’m willing to bet that Paul Everett is alive.”
    “A fact that we’re not going to pass on to Amanda Gleason,” Casey informed them. “Not until we’ve ruled out the other ten percent.”
    “Agreed.” Ryan nodded. “Moving on, I got in touch with a couple of Paul Everett’s former business associates. Lots of praise. No red flags.”
    “So a dead end.”
    “Nope. Now comes the interesting part. Marc got me some personal info from Amanda—Everett’s birthday, where he banked, a few key dates like when they first met—that kind of stuff. I did a little bit of strategic guesswork and a lot of poking around. It took me some time, but I managed to hack into the guy’s banking records.”
    “And?” Casey perked up. She knew that tone of voice. It meant Ryan was leading up to something big.
    “And Paul Everett had some hefty bank balances and some equally hefty withdrawals. The withdrawals followed a pattern. Same amount each time—twenty grand, and same time increments between withdrawals—six weeks. Interesting that this came at the same time that he was fighting for construction permits to upscale his dock operations into a waterfront luxury hotel. With all the amenities he planned and the close proximity to the new Shinnecock gambling casino, this would have been a gold mine.”
    “Sounds like our guy was paying someone off to get what he wanted.” Marc stated the obvious.
    “Sure does.”
    “So he wasn’t so squeaky clean after all,” Patrick stated. After thirty-plus years as an FBI Special Agent, he was a no-bullshit guy who played by the rules—mostly—and called it like it was.
    The playing-by-the-rules part was a huge rub at Forensic Instincts. But Patrick was good—very good. And, as he put it, he kept the team as close to “legal” as possible.
    Now he pulled over his pad and started scribbling. “We’ve got two main possibilities here. Either Paul Everett was paying someone off like Marc said, or he was being blackmailed by someone who had dirt on him. Either one could get him killed or convince him to disappear.”
    “So much for true love conquering all,” Claire murmured.
    “Self-preservation trumps true love plus a whole lot more,” Ryan replied tersely. “And murder trumps everything. If I’m wrong—and I’m not—and Paul Everett’s at the bottom of the ocean, he didn’t exactly have a lot of choice about whether or not he hung around for Amanda.”
    “I get that.” Claire looked thoughtful. “I wasn’t suggesting that Paul should have—or could have—stuck around. I was just wondering if the relationship between him and Amanda was even real, or if he was just using her as a cover for whatever he was involved in.”
    “Good point.” Casey’s eyes narrowed as she scrutinized Claire. “Is that a random question or a feeling?”
    “A random question. It’s way too soon for me to have a connection with any of this. I haven’t even met Amanda, much less gotten into her personal space or feelings.”
    “That’s about to change.” Before she elaborated, Casey