Red Rock Island (Damian Green Book 1) Read online

  Hannah was quiet as she considered their offer. Her family and her future were so perfect a week ago. She wanted Damian to turn back the clock so that her parents had time to get into their safe room. Did she trust these strangers not to hurt her? Would they help her find her parents? Her intuition had never been wrong before. If she sensed someone was bad, she usually had evidence of their bad behavior within a few weeks. She didn’t feel that there was anything too bad about these two people, even though she didn’t so much as know their last names. Their pets were well cared for and that was always a good sign. She sighed not knowing what to do.

  Damian had watched the girl and found himself guessing at what she was thinking and so he asked, “Would you like a computer so you can look us up and read about us?”

  Hannah had pretty much made the decision to take a chance on these two strangers. But if she could do an internet search on them that would probably seal the deal for her. So she nodded her agreement.

  They went back inside and before Hannah sat down at a computer, she asked, “You’re sure you can create a secret identity for me? Do you know how to code?”

  Damian laughed at her question and replied, “Hannah, I hold ten patents related to things I invented that required coding. When you want to learn, I can teach you. Is that what you want to do in the future?”

  The tears suddenly welled up in her eyes over the word ‘future’. For the past week, she’d concentrated on surviving and now she could devote a sliver of her personality to thinking about her future.

  “Will you teach me regardless of my future? Can I look you up someday to help?”

  Damian nodded, swallowing a lump over such a small request from someone who’d been through so much.

  Hannah sat down at a computer and began looking the two of them up. Since Damian had looked Ariana up, he knew that Hannah should be able to form an opinion of Ariana based on what she found on the internet. He was curious to see what Hannah would find on him.

  Thirty minutes later, she stopped typing and looking at Damian said, “Was your family really murdered seven years ago? Your daughter and I must have been about the same age at the time of her death.”

  “Yes.”

  Hannah continued to look at him solemnly, aware that he’d suffered as much as she had. Then she blinked and looked at Ariana and said, “You lost your husband to cancer three years ago and you don’t have children. Right?”

  “Yes,” this time it was Ariana providing a single word, large meaning response to Hannah.

  “If you’ll have me, I’d like to stay with you. Will your niece mind if I stay in her room?”

  “No, she’ll just move to another when she visits.”

  “Will you take me back to my house so I can retrieve some things?”

  “Hannah, I don’t think that is safe. What exactly do you want?” Damian replied.

  “Pictures. I had pictures in frames and pictures on my cell phone and I dropped it when I crossed a creek on the way to the marina. Can you get information off a wet phone?”

  “Maybe, anything else besides the pictures? Is the creek close to your house?”

  “Clothes and books can be replaced. What will happen to the house if my parents don’t come back?”

  “We’ll have to do some research on that. In the near future, is the guy that was trying to find you still in the house? Longer term questions about electrical, water, and tax bills will need to be sorted out. At some point, law enforcement will need notification that the entire family is missing. We won’t tell them that you’re with us, but it would be good to have someone looking for your parents officially.”

  Hannah’s shoulders looked weighted down by the view of her new future. So Damian said, “Hannah, I’ll continue to search for your parents until we have an answer on their location. In the interim, we’ll need a new name for you and a story so that we can enroll you in school. Do you want to be adopted by Ariana and I or would you rather be a relative that lost her parents in a car accident? What new name would you like? You could pick the maiden name of your mother or perhaps that of a grandparent, or maybe a nickname that your parents called you. You can think about it for a few days, but I think we should take you to be registered for school on Monday. I will be able to create all that you need by that date with your help. Just think about those questions and let me know when you’ve got answers.”

  Hannah nodded and then Ariana added, “We also need to change your appearance some and the easiest thing to do is hair and glasses, so give some thought as to whether you might want short blond hair and cool glasses to wear at your new school.”

  Hannah showed both fear and excitement with Ariana’s comment. She’d get to start over at a new school and be anyone she wanted to be, but then she was reminded that there was someone looking for her that might want to kill or kidnap her.

  “Hannah, Ariana and I have to make a few more arrangements for you and we need to have a private conversation. It’s one of the few about your future that you’ll be excluded from, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll go sit in the kitchen until you’re done.”

  Once she was out of earshot, Damian said to Ariana, “Are you up for this? I thrust this child on you less than twenty-four hours ago and now you’ll be a full time parent. I’ll be there to help and I’ll look into modifying my home so she can stay there some times. I’ll pay her bills. I don’t know you well at all Ariana, other than you’re a widow and a kind, occasionally reckless adult, but I think the two of us could make good surrogate parents until we have an answer on what happened to her own parents.”

  “I’ve enjoyed being an aunt, so I’ll just slip into the role of doing it full time. Every other option I can think of puts that child in a worse position than she would have in my home. Damian, will you look at Hannah and see your younger child? After my initial attempt at trying to learn who you were, I never went back and looked you up after you told me your full name. I’m very sorry your wife and children were murdered.”

  “It’s been seven years since their murders and just the other day I was thinking that if my oldest was alive she’d been preparing for college or a prom or something. Both of my children didn’t get a lot of milestones with their lives cut short. I will think about my youngest at times with Hannah, but she’s got a very different look and affect so other than the age, there’s not many similarities. I hate to be crude, Ariana, but I researched you and I know that financially you can take care of Hannah, but so can I and I would like to set up a trust fund to pay for her expenses. You’ll be doing the yeoman’s work of caring for her day to day, at least let me take care of her major expenses.

  “A final comment, if my wife and I had been murdered and our two children left in the wind, I would have been far happier for someone like you to care for them, than for them to go through all the proper legal channels. It had been an area of worry in our marriage as neither of us had family and so we looked at a few friends as possible parents, but we hadn’t come to an agreement on what to do.”

  “Ok, we’ll see how this goes and these are the raging teenage years. She may seem normal at the moment, but at some point her hormones will take over and you better be able to hang in there with me,” Ariana demanded. “We’re each going to be a single parent to this child.”

  “I guess I’ll be making many mistakes from this day forward,” Damian replied. “Speaking of being a parent, we have work to do and we need to go inside and talk to Hannah.”

  Ariana stopped suddenly and said, “We should probably look into Hannah’s relatives, she may want to go to one of them instead of us.”

  “We’ll check with the kid, but I would have thought she would have said something before now if that was the case.”

  They returned from a brightly lit living room and walked into the large open kitchen where Hannah sat at Damian’s laptop with Miguel at her side.

  “Hannah, you’ll want to be careful contacting anyone from your life in Shepard Canyon. You d
on’t know who is watching or who might accidentally mention you in passing.”

  “I know. I posted a note on Mom and Dad’s Facebook pages, so that they would know I’m still alive if they ever check. I used an avatar of my favorite cartoon character and just said, “The drill was cancelled until further notice as I performed well on the last one.” Mom and Dad will know I mean the safe room drills and that I’m alive. With a name and location change, if they’re alive, they’ll have a hard time finding me, but I don’t want them to wonder, I want them to look for me when they’re able.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Ariana said as she gave the girl a hug.

  “Hannah, I will look for them forever until we find them and I’m pretty good at finding information. I’m working with a retired detective on cold cases that date back almost thirty years and I’ve been able to find new leads for them so I’ll work on your parents. I don’t want you searching online as you could give away your location to the bad guys. I’ll show you every week in my laboratory what new stuff I’ve done to find your parents, ok? Will you promise to leave the online world alone for now? I’ll take you to my home on Sunday so you can see the work I’ve done to find your parents.”

  “Ok,” Hannah said.

  “Now we all have things to do today. Ariana, what’s your schedule like today?” Damian knew that Ariana had an active schedule with her Silicon Valley start-ups and she was probably missing meetings.

  “I told my contacts that I was taking a long week-end vacation and I’d be back in touch on Tuesday. That gives me time to set up Hannah’s story and her new life. What do you need, Damian?”

  “I was thinking that on your end, Hannah needs stuff - clothes, a cell phone, books, etc. I’ll supply her with a tablet for games and school. I’m going to make its IP address bounce around the world so she’ll be safe. I’ll also provide you with a water gun that you’ll not be able to take to school, but that both of you should keep with you at all times except at school.”

  Ariana smirked and said, “Water gun?”

  “Before you laugh too hard, Ariana, let me tell you it’s a modified gun. I found the perfect polymer to coat it with and so it’s strong and has a considerable range. I fill the water chamber with a red chili mixture that disables your eyes for about four hours when hit with the stuff. My friend, the retired detective was fired upon by a gang thug and he missed, but she didn’t and he’s sitting in jail now. Would you like hot pink or lime green?”

  “Hot pink” and “lime green” were chorused together by the two women.

  “Hannah, I need your house address and the location of the creek where you dropped the cell phone.”

  “Is it safe to go inside Hannah’s house?” Ariana asked.

  “I’ve got infrared technology so I’ll be able to see any heat sources before I enter. The difficulty will be in not alerting the neighbors. So you have any ideas for that Hannah?”

  “You’ll need Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak,” was her response after thinking about it for several seconds.

  Damian thought of the bullet proof fabric he’d provided Natalie’s family and decided that at night it would serve the purpose of invisibility. He pulled a Google Earth street view picture of Hannah’s house up on his laptop and they discussed the house and where her pictures were located. Ariana, Miguel, and Hannah would escort Damian back to his island and he would go from there. Ariana’s boat provided a comfortable ride and he thought about getting something similar for himself, but he could get to her house on the jet ski or more slowly in his rowboat with the small motor. Having a boat like her would require a permanent dock and remove the look of his island being uninhabited, so he’d pass on a new boat. They dropped him off at his dock and as he waved good-bye he knew his life had changed forever. He went into his lab to gather some gadgets and while he was there he took a look around his lower level trying to decide where to build Hannah her own bedroom. He had space that wasn’t in use, but there were no windows down here. Maybe her parents would be found later today and then building her a bedroom would become a moot point, but somehow he doubted that. He’d arranged to have Mike pick him up in a few hours. He wanted the sunshine of the day to look for her cell phone, but the cloak of darkness to visit Hannah’s house.

  Chapter Twenty

  With his supplies sorted and ready to go for Mike’s pick-up later, he went to look for Bailey and Bella. They were miffed he missed a second night on the island, but warmed up to Damian with the smell of fish. He stood looking out his kitchen window at the bay and thought, ‘I’ve become a father again; how weird, okay maybe not a father but an uncle.’ He’d protect Hannah as he hadn’t been able to do for his daughters.

  Then he thought, ‘first order of business. Damian, is to get over your morose thoughts and move on to getting the child what she needs and trying to find her parents like you’re trying to solve the cold cases. He was grateful Natalie hadn’t called him during this time that he was dealing with Hannah’s situation.

  He went back to the runs he was doing concerning who in the Aryan Brotherhood had put the original kill order out for Natalie. Going through seven years of some twenty thousand inmates and ex-inmates was challenging for his computer; it wouldn’t have been something he could have done manually. Once he had the emails that were spoken in their code, he also had the computer go back and look at those emails from the same address written in plain English to assure there were no messages about Natalie. So far he hadn’t figured out where the kill order had come from, but hopefully, he armed Natalie with enough of the Brotherhood’s secrets that she’d get somewhere with their leadership. If not, he was ready to leak the first fifty or so emails to the black guerilla gang. He hoped he wouldn’t have to do that as he didn’t want to encourage a race riot in any of the state’s prisons. It was time to check in with her.

  “Hey, Damian, we were able to tow Avery’s truck from the salvage yard down to our lab and the techs are going over it now. If they find evidence, it will be hard to prove the police did not plant the evidence.”

  “If the police don’t have Debbie Altman’s DNA or fingerprints, how could they plant evidence in the car?”

  “The DA needs to hear that reflexive answer from you; he thinks because of the nearly thirty year delay in finding this car, we’ll be accused of planting evidence. I wish Kevin had thought of the appropriate response when he spoke with her.”

  “The DNA you’ll have for matching will be that of siblings. Close enough that you know you’re dealing with close blood relatives, but not so close that you would have an exact match.”

  “I know, Damian, you’re preaching to the choir, here.”

  “I can’t find who ordered the hit on you for your meeting with the leaders of the Brotherhood, but I have fifty emails so derogatory and inflaming, that the prisons will have riots on their hands as soon as we post them,” Damian said. “I hate to cause riots, but we must get them to back off you and your family.”

  “Maybe we should let the wardens know at the various prisons of the impending storm.”

  “They might react by turning off the email system to bide themselves some time and remove the inflaming emails if they have advanced notice. Most of these riots result in inmate deaths rather than guard deaths.”

  “I’m really torn on this one. Since so much drug use and trafficking occurs inside prison, the guards have to be part of the distribution system; they just haven’t been caught yet,” Natalie paused a moment to think and then said, “It’s my life and my family’s that I’m fighting for, give me five of the fifty emails so I can take them with me and share with whomever I’m meeting.”

  “Will do.”

  “Eddie and I are looking forward to your meeting with Trevor and Haley this weekend. We really like her and you’re like the final approval for him.”

  Damian had completely forgotten Trevor coming that weekend in the last twenty-four hours of solving Hannah’s problems. He’d have to talk to Ariana about it. He
planned to have the two of them over to his home after Trevor was there so he could work on Hannah’s identity and get her approval for a small bedroom he could build her.

  Instead he lied to Natalie, “I’d forgotten about the visit, in the wake of your shooting, but at least this is a safe place for him to relax. Do you and Eddie want to join them in a visit to my house this weekend? It’s pretty safe here.”

  “Thanks for the offer but it’s good for you to have some alone time with them for this first meeting. After that, you can invite us anytime.”

  “Okay I’ll trust your opinion on the matter. How is everything working there? Have you experienced any problems with my technology or with any thugs?”

  “Only the postman and our neighbor. Eddie filed a hold card at the post office and we put a sign up about stepping on the property, as it was dangerous. One of our neighbors with young children was outraged, but we explained that someone that I sent to jail was rumored to be looking for me, and we had set traps that would contain but not kill someone. She debated sending over her oldest for the day.”