End of Secrets by Ryan Quinn Page A

Gabby said. Kera recognized his face. Perhaps the y’d shared the elevator once or twice, though the y’d never met. His name meant something to her, though. She knew that J. D. Jones was the designer of HawkEye. Kera was thirty-one. Jones could n’t have been more than two years on either side of that. He had wavy black hair that guarded his face and glasses with thick black rims. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. He might have been handsome, but she did n’t notice that at first. He was mostly just plain, the kind of man who would stand out in a crowd like a blade of grass on a golf course. Jones shook Ker a’s hand, but his eye contact was fleeting. By the time Kera introduced herself by name, he was already seated at his workstation in front of a large touch-screen keypad surrounded by an array of screens.
    Jones laid a hand flat on the touch-screen pad and the main screen flashed to life. Beneath the Hawk and HawkEye logos, his picture and full name appeared next to two entry fields. The initials stood for James David, Kera noted. Could that be any blander? She doubted it was his real name. With a quick, fluid blur of finger activity, he entered two passcodes and then tapped the log-in button. Within seconds, the screens around him flashed to life. Controlling them with a combination of efficient swipes and taps, he called up a series of files. Kera immediately recognized images of Rowena Pete on one of the monitors. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of images of the missing singer. They came and went across the screen quickly, one after the next. It took Ker a’s eyes a moment to register that these were not just photographs. Most of the images were video files.
    “Any luck?” Gabby asked, eyeing the screens over his shoulder.
    “Luc k’s for Vegas. This is actual data,” Jones said. “And we have a lot of it.” He made a few deft strokes on the touch-screen keypad and two rows of photographs materialized on one of the screens. The images resembled something between head shots and mug shots, but more candid than either. Kera scanned them, not recognizing any of the faces until she picked out Rowena Pet e’s , which was displayed last. “To answer your question, yes, I found the others.”
    “How many are there?” Gabby said.
    “Leaving out abducted children and runaway teenagers, New York City reported just three missing adults last year. So far this year there have already been eight. Of those cases, six remain open. I think we can remove these two,” Jones said, pointing at a pair of faces. “This guy had a gambling problem his family did n’t know about before he buried them all in debt. And the woman here had been in and out of mental health facilities for a decade before she vanished.” He keyed a few strokes on the keypad and their photos dissolved. “That leaves four that fit our profile.”
    “What do we know about them?”
    Jones clicked through their files quickly. “Craig Shea, a waiter at Otto in the Village. Also a novelist. H e’d had two novels published before his thirtieth birthday, which he celebrated by renting a sailboat in Newport, Rhode Island, and has n’t been heard from since. Next is Cole Emerson, thirty-four. H e’s an investigative documentary filmmaker. Disappeared from a boat off the coast of the Horn of Africa while shooting a film about Somali pirates. And as of last night, we can add Rowena Pete, who is the most well-known of the missing. The fourth subject, Caroline Mullen, abandoned her bike on a path leading to the George Washington Bridge. The cops concluded she jumped, but no bod y’s washed up. The thing with her is, she was a law associate at an estate-planning firm, not an artist, so she does n’t exactly fit the profile of the others. But on second glance she has more in common with them than not.”
    “Like what?” Gabby said.
    “To start, she was young, just twenty-nine. And single, so she left behind no significant other. But wha