Chapter 25

25

Jillian finished off another Red Bull and tossed the can in the rubbish bin with the half dozen others she’d already consumed.

She had decided to work the Teddy Fay problem from two directions. The first was to look for any hints that Fay had still been alive after his reported death. To that end, she’d set up several autonomous searches that were even now rifling through news and record databases around the world.

Her second direction was looking into his potential involvement in the World Thriller Film Festival.

For this, she took a more hands-on approach. She hacked into the festival’s computer system and obtained a list of every employee and volunteer. She then hunted down photos of each male on the list and discarded individuals who were too young, too tall, and too short to be Fay. That left her with eight men.

The only confirmed image she had of Fay was a decades-old screen grab pulled from security footage taken when Golden Hour had been active. The quality of the picture was less than ideal, but it was good enough that she could confidently conclude that even with extreme plastic surgery, none of the eight were Fay.

Frustrated, she clicked through the film festival’s website, hoping for inspiration. It wasn’t until she was perusing the synopses of films that would be showing when she realized she’d overlooked something obvious.

It could be said that the people who made each of the films were also associated with the festival. Perhaps not all would be coming to Berlin, but some would be.

The task would mean drilling deeper, but this was the kind of thing for which she lived. The task had the added benefit of needing her complete focus and thus kept her from hearing the questions that were swirling in her head about Braun, if only temporarily.

She grabbed a fresh energy drink, downed half, then cracked her knuckles and set to work.