Chapter Thirty-Two

Margo Angelhart

Jack came over to my house at nine Tuesday night with his laptop and a six pack of one of my favorite beers from Four Peaks Brewing, their year-round specialty Double Knot IPA.

"You really love me," I said and grabbed the six pack. "Want one?"

"I'll waste half of it. I don't know how you can drink IPAs."

"A meal in a bottle," I said. My favorite beer was Four Peaks seasonal porter, but I had to wait until October for it. The Double Knot was a close second.

I pulled out a bottle, put the rest in the fridge, and found a Coors Light in the back—it's what Rick drinks the rare times he drinks, so I usually kept some around. Thinking of Rick reminded me of our conversation today. It hadn't been as bad as I thought it would be.

I handed Jack the can and popped open my bottle, took a long swallow. "Did you get it?"

Jack and Tess had been working with a PI in Florida to obtain the yearbooks from Jennifer White's high school.

"Photos only," Jack said. "The school wouldn't give him hard copies. And even finding her high school was difficult—it's nowhere on her employment documents, and Tess finagled it out of her college. The problem? She lied on her résumé. No Jennifer White graduated from this high school. But I considered your theory that Jennifer White isn't her real name. Maybe she did graduate from this school, but not under that name."

"Don't businesses confirm all this? Run backgrounds?"

"College, maybe—get her transcript or just a copy of her degree. But unless she's going for a job that needs security clearance, no one is going to confirm her high school information. They might not even ask for it."

Jack opened his laptop and downloaded a large file from a cloud account.

"How does she get into college on a fake name?" I wondered.

"She's a computer expert. Maybe she falsified her transcripts. Almost everything is digital these days and someone who knows the system might be able to do it. Or hack in? I asked Logan about her skills, and he said she's more than capable. She has the ability now, but at eighteen?" He shrugged.

"Or someone did it for her," I said.

Jack brought up the most recent yearbook. "This is the year she graduated high school, according to her résumé with Desert West. This coincides with when she would have started college as well."

The Miami PI had done a decent job with the photos, taking clear pictures without any glare. The senior class had 520 graduates, and there was a total of 2,123 kids in the school. Jack first looked at all the W's in all four grades and there was no Jennifer White.

So we started through the yearbook, looking at every senior female.

"Stop," I said. "That's her."

"What?"

I pointed to a blond girl with thick glasses. Under the picture was the name Virginia Bonetti.

Jack stared. "It could be, but—"

"She dyed her hair darker and wears contacts. But that's her."

I didn't doubt it. I pulled up my laptop and started searching the name while Jack continued to scroll through the yearbook photos. "She started at the school her sophomore year," he said as he finished going through the yearbooks. "She's not photographed or listed in her freshman year."

"Okay," I muttered as I scrolled through Google first. I had access to paid databases that most PIs used, but Google was always my first stop for basic information. "And she's dead."

"What?" Jack turned my laptop so he could read with me.

Teenager killed in boating accident week after high school graduation

A tragic boating accident outside Key Biscayne took the life of eighteen-year-old Virginia Bonetti on Sunday when a fire on the boat forced the occupants to jump into the ocean before the boat exploded.

The Coast Guard arrived twenty minutes after the explosion and rescued Vincent Bonetti and his sixteen-year-old son Thomas. After an extensive search, the body of Bonetti's eighteen-year-old daughter Virginia was not recovered. She is presumed to have drowned.

The family went out for the day on Bonetti's forty-foot yacht when, an hour after they left the dock, mechanical failure stopped the vessel. A fire started and Bonetti called the Coast Guard for assistance, but the fire spread fast and the family was forced to evacuate. Bonetti put his children on the lifeboat and pushed it off while he attempted to put out the fire, but it spread close to the fuel tank and he jumped as the boat exploded. The lifeboat capsized by the force of the explosion, and Thomas Bonetti found his father unconscious in the water. The teenager managed to right the lifeboat and pull in his father, but Virginia never surfaced.

Bonetti is currently in a medically induced coma while the doctors wait for swelling on his brain to go down.

Two weeks later, a follow-up to the article revealed that Bonetti was recovering at home and that the Coast Guard halted search efforts after a tropical storm moved in. A spokesman stated that Virginia Bonetti was presumed dead and they would send notices to all coastal agencies should they find remains. The Bonetti family set a memorial date at St. Elizabeth's.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

"She faked her death," I said.

"You can't be certain—"

"I am."

Jack was skeptical, so I continued. "There is no lapse between her high school graduation and when she started college in Texas. If she was injured, suffered from amnesia, whatever, there would have been a lag. A semester, maybe a year. But if she rolled up alive on shore, someone would have known who she was. Hospitals and police would have checked missing persons. And she's using a completely different name. She changed her appearance. She has no social media profile, no friends. She made one stupid mistake."

"Only one," Jack said sarcastically.

"She used her real high school to get into college. I don't know how she did it, maybe she created a fake high school transcript? Found a way to use the school to send it to the college? Used her own transcript to get into college, but somehow changed the name in the system? You and I both know that if someone is determined, they can disappear and take another identity. But it's her." I tapped Jack's screen.

He nodded. "You're right."

"She needs a social security number, needs to be able to pass basic checks," I muttered. "I wonder if Jennifer White is a real person? The best way to assume a different identity is to take an existing one."

"Tess should be able to find the trail, now that we know where to look."

I saved all the articles, then searched Vincent Bonetti. "Her father is a wealthy developer in Miami. Some hints of shady deals, but no big headlines, no public arrests. That's just a cursory look."

Jennifer White was twenty-six—Virginia Bonetti would have been twenty-six as well.

"This is interesting," Jack said. "I'm reading the obituary—Virginia was born on February 4th. According to her employee file, Jennifer White's DOB is January 18th of the same year. Two weeks earlier."

"Maybe the real White was born on January 18th."

Jack did his own search and a minute later said, "Wow."

"What?"

He turned his screen toward me. I scanned an article from a newspaper in Orlando, Florida. The obituary of a thirteen-year-old girl, Jennifer White, who died along with her family in a house fire the day after Christmas.

Her birthday was January 18.

"No coincidence," I said. "She took the name of a dead child. That's creepy. Can you get the PI in Miami to find out more about the Bonettis?"

"Do you think this is important?"

"Yes," I said. "Very important. Is there a problem?"

"No, I can justify the expense."

"Well, Logan Monroe wants to hire me to find Jennifer West."

"But he didn't."

Not caring that it was nearly ten, I dialed Logan's cell phone. He answered on the second ring. "Did you find her?" he asked before even saying hello.

"I have a lead. But there's some expenses I may incur, and I need to make sure you will cover them."

"Absolutely. Anything, bill me. Do you need an advance?"

"No, I trust you're good for it."

"What's the lead?"

I didn't want to share too much over the phone, so I said vaguely, "Florida. When I know something definitive, I'll let you know. Thanks, Logan."

I ended the call and smiled at my brother. "Bill me for the PI, but I'm going to want to talk to him. Send me his contact info."

"It's one in the morning there."

"I'll wait a few hours."

Jack sent me his contact and when it came through on my phone, I saved it and added a few notes.

"This is a turn I wasn't expecting," Jack said. Then his phone rang. "Hey, Lu, did you find something?"

As he listened, his face grew dark and I leaned forward and whispered, "What?"

He didn't respond, and I couldn't hear what my sister was saying. Jack said, "I'll be right there."

He jumped up, started to pack his laptop. "A fire in the building that houses Desert West. It's serious. Lu, Tess, and the guard were the only ones in the building at the time, and they're fine. But Tess and Lu were drugged. Lu managed to get Tess out of the building before they passed out."

"You're sure they're okay?"

"Lu said they were, but I want to make sure."

"I'm going with you."

Jack didn't argue.