Based on the very brief context of the conversation, this Camp Green Hill didn’t sound like a good place. I wouldn’t mention it to Mia since he either wanted to keep it a secret or didn’t consciously remember it. However, once I was in the office, I would do some research into this camp, at least for my own peace of mind.
If Camp Green Hill was dangerous, then I needed to know, and if I could find information about it, then maybe it could lead me to Mia’s true identity.
CHAPTER 24
Auggie
In the end,it turned out that I really shouldn’t have bothered.
For the first hour after coming into work, I searched as much as I could for the name Camp Green Hill, but my search was useless.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t find anything. The real problem was that there was too much. Green Hill was such a generic name, and I had nothing else to cross-reference. Without a location, not even a state, to narrow down the search, I came up with more results than I could possibly sift through on my own.
I tried anyway and spent some time looking through the first few results I could find. The information was… not encouraging.
A summer camp that was accused of abusing its underage campers.
A church youth group that used questionable means to ‘educate’ young parishioners.
An after-school program that was caught teaching inappropriate material to children.
I found dozens and dozens of stories like this, and that was after limiting my search to cases where abuse had actually been documented. If the Camp Green Hill I was looking for had got away with its crimes unnoticed, then I really had no hope of ever locating it among the sea of other Camp Green Hills littered across the country.
I was growing increasingly frustrated when someone suddenly grabbed the back of my chair and spun me away from my desk.
“What?” I barked as the room spun around me.
When my vision came back into focus I found Roland’s face just inches away.
“We found it.”
“What?” I repeated, still just as confused, but now for a different reason. My mind was still so filled with the endless list of Camp Green Hills that I couldn’t focus on anything else.
I was saved when someone else pulled Roland away, giving me some space to breathe.
“What’s all this ‘we’ business?” Tyler said as he forced his partner to step back.
Seeing Tyler here reminded me just how little time had passed. Roland’s partner was only here visiting him for two weeks. I hadn’t been keeping track of the days, but it felt like months had passed since I brought Mia home with me. Tyler’s presence here in the office was like a slap in the face with reality.
How could Mia have become such an integrated part of my life in such a short amount of time?
Neither of the other men took any notice of my inner turmoil and continued to rattle on.
“Okay, okay,” Roland conceded as his partner shoved him into a chair to sit properly and stop bouncing around. “I didn’t actually do much. It was mostly Tyler who figured it out, but I helped sift through all the paperwork, so I deserve some credit.”
Taking a deep breath, I looked at Tyler for clarification.
“Here,” the man said as he shoved his phone in my face. “I knew the name Tony Smith sounded familiar. It took me some time to find it, but I finally figured out where I’d heard it before. It was from a case that I covered for one of my classes. It was small, and mostly only covered locally. The only reason it even came up was because it practically happened in the backyard of my university.”
As soon as the name Tony Smith passed Tyler’s lips, I snatched the phone from his hand. On the screen was an article from a local Maryland newspaper about a dirty cop who was being investigated.
I wanted to believe it, I really did, but I’d bashed my head against too many dead ends with Mia’s identity already. I couldn’t get my hopes up too soon.
“How do you know this is the same person Mia remembers? The fact that he is a cop, as Mia mentioned, is promising, but Tony Smith is a relatively common name. I don’t want to get Mia’s homes up over a coincidence.”
Without taking the phone from my hand, Tyler scrolled down the screen until he came to a particular part of the article and pointed at a specific passage.
“Because of this right here.”