Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

THE BOURBON DID not agree with her. Marple was still awake at midnight when she heard Holmes return to his apartment next door. At least he hadn’t fled the city. Or the country.

Better not to press him tonight, she decided. Maybe his outlook would change in the morning. Poe had turned in hours earlier, his melancholy over Helene’s pregnancy apparently doubled by Holmes’s announcement. Marple noticed a flicker of movement in a corner, near the base of a reading table. Her heartbeat quickened, then settled. It was her mouse-hunting cat, Annabel, a gift from Poe, who understood Marple’s intense aversion to rodents. The feline had done an excellent job keeping them at bay since she’d moved in.

Marple slipped out of her apartment with her laptop and tiptoed down the hall to the firm’s private library. She always relished the peace and quiet after everybody else was asleep. She pressed the code on the security pad and heard the subtle click of the lock release. Inside, the surroundings were as warm and comforting as an English parlor. No wonder: Marple had designed the room herself.

She settled into a cozy armchair, surrounded by bookshelves that held the greatest mystery stories of all time—the collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Agatha Christie—and opened her laptop. The internet connection on the Ithaca trip had been patchy and slow. But concealed in the shelves of the library were modems and signal boosters that rivaled the Pentagon’s. Thanks to tweaks by Holmes, speeds here were absolutely blazing. If Marple was in the mood to download a movie, she could do so in seconds. But she was here for business, not pleasure—in fact, about as far from pleasure as she could imagine.

The first thing she did was cover her laptop camera. Considering where she was headed, she wanted to be sure that her exploration was one-way only. She clicked on the Tor browser and started her descent into the dark web.

In seconds, she was surfing through a morass of sites hosted on private overseas servers—anonymous, untraceable, nearly impossible to shut down. It was like gliding through a bazaar of sleaze and decadence. Marple could practically hear the greedy merchants shouting out their offers of stolen credit cards, elephant ivory, homemade explosives, false identities. It was all there for the taking—for a price, of course, and from some very malevolent purveyors.

Marple’s search was specific and depressing. With a few more clicks, she easily accessed a trove of black-market adoption sites. There was a seller’s market for healthy babies, no questions asked, as long as your money was good and your ethics were flexible. Babies to order. Hair, skin, and eye color of your choice. Vaccinated or not, according to your personal medical convictions.

Marple uploaded photos the parents had given her of the six missing St. Michael’s babies to compare with online images, but she realized that the infants had been mere minutes old when their proud parents had snapped those pictures. It was the longest of long shots, so remote that she doubted the FBI had even tried it. Even with the latest biometric software, facial recognition was notoriously sketchy for infants.

Marple set her laptop to auto-scan, watching thumbnail images of babies zip by like tiles on a game board, until they melded into a single blur. A distinct tone and a freeze-frame would indicate a match. But after thirty minutes, there was nothing. The search was merely wallpaper. The babies of St. Michael’s had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

Marple had no clue where they were, but she had a theory about why they’d been taken. And it cut right to her heart.