Chương 7
“She died.”
Mara’s stomach tightened.
“How?”
“Car accident.”
Vincent looked away.
Mara heard the answer Pike had given her as clearly as if he were still gripping her coat.
His.
“Was it an accident?”
Vale met her eyes.
“For eleven years, I believed it was.”
Mara’s phone vibrated again.
She expected her mother.
Instead, the screen showed an unknown number.
A message appeared beneath it.
DON’T PLUG IN THE DRIVE.
A second message arrived before she could speak.
IT CALLS HOME.
Vale saw her expression.
“What?”
Mara turned the phone toward him.
Vincent stepped closer.
A third message appeared.
YOU HAVE SIX MINUTES BEFORE THEY ERASE EVERYTHING.
Mara looked at the message until the letters seemed to detach from the screen.
“Six minutes from when?”
Vincent checked the timestamp.
“Five minutes and forty-two seconds now.”
Vale held out his hand.
“Give me the drive.”
“No.”
“I’m not going to plug it in.”
“That sentence would be more comforting if you hadn’t spent the last ten minutes revealing increasingly relevant family secrets.”
A detective called Vale’s name from across the garage.
Vale ignored him.
Vincent looked toward the elevators, then at Mara’s phone.
“Whoever sent that knows we have it.”
“Or knows Warren had it,” Mara said.
“Difference?”
“One means we’re being watched.”
Bruno rose from her shoe.
The dog’s head turned toward the far end of the garage.
His ears lifted.
Mara followed his attention and saw nothing except concrete pillars, parked cars, and the pulsing red reflection of the emergency lights.
Vale took out his phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling someone who can isolate the drive.”
“No network.”
He stopped with his thumb above the screen.
Mara watched the signal indicator search and fail.
Vincent tried his own phone.
“Same.”
The garage alarm stopped.
The sudden quiet was worse.
Mara could hear engines on the street below and a police radio crackling near the ramp.
Then every overhead light went out.
Someone swore in the darkness.
Emergency strips along the floor flickered on several seconds later, painting the concrete in weak blue-white bands.
Bruno barked once.
“Adrian,” Vincent said.
“I know.”
Mara gripped the drive.
“Know what?”
“The building systems shouldn’t do that.”
“Very reassuring.”
A detective’s flashlight swept toward them.
“Everybody stay where you are.”
Mara’s phone vibrated.
Four minutes.
No words this time.
Only a photograph.
It showed a black laptop sitting on a wooden desk.
Beside it was a ceramic mug with a chipped green handle.
Mara stopped breathing.
Vale saw her face change.
“What is it?”
She enlarged the image.
The laptop was hers.
The desk was hers.
The chipped mug had belonged to her father and had survived three apartments, one breakup, and an unfortunate attempt by Mara to repair the handle with hardware-store epoxy.
“That’s my apartment.”
Vincent moved closer.
“When was this taken?”
“I don’t know.”
The laptop screen in the photograph was dark.
A yellow dish towel hung from the oven handle in the background.
Mara had washed that towel yesterday morning.
Vale said, “You’re not going home.”
“I gathered that.”
“Do you have anything there connected to Calder?”
“My work laptop stays at work.”
“Paper?”
“Some tax documents.”
“Company documents.”
“No.”
“Passwords?”
“I’m an auditor, Adrian.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“I don’t leave passwords taped under my keyboard.”
Vincent muttered, “You’d be surprised.”
Mara looked at him.
“I would not.”
Another message arrived.
THREE MINUTES.
Below it came an address.
Vale read it over her shoulder.
“That’s Harbor East.”
Mara recognized the street from the vendor records.
“Which property?”
Vincent was already searching through photographs on his phone despite the dead signal.
“Twenty-eight nineteen.”
He found something stored locally and turned the screen toward them.
A warehouse occupied most of the image.
Its brick walls were blackened near the roof, and several windows had been boarded with mismatched plywood.
“Your trust owns that?”
Vale nodded.
“Why send us there?”
“Maybe they aren’t.”
Mara looked at him.
“They sent the address.”
“They sent you an address after threatening the contents of a drive we haven’t opened.”
“You think it’s bait.”
“I think everything tonight is bait.”
A detective reached them.
“We need you three downstairs.”
Mara held up her phone.
“You need to see this.”
The detective read the messages, and the impatience disappeared from his face.
“Don’t touch anything else.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Can you unlock the phone?”
“It is unlocked.”
“I mean for us.”
Mara understood.
“You want it.”
“I want our cyber unit to preserve whatever’s coming in.”
She hesitated.
Her entire life sat behind that screen in humiliating little pieces.
Her mother’s messages.
Bank alerts.
Photographs of grocery labels because Mara routinely forgot which olive oil she liked.
A note containing three sentences she had once planned to send to an ex-boyfriend and thankfully had not.
The detective waited.
Two minutes.
Mara gave him the phone and the passcode.
“Don’t read my notes.”
He stared at her.
“I’m serious.”
“I’ll alert the Constitution.”
He stepped away while speaking into his radio.
Vincent watched him go.
“I like him.”
“You would.”
Vale looked at the drive.
“What happens in two minutes?”
Mara’s fingers tightened around it.
“Maybe nothing.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.”
Neither did he.
The strange part was that the warning had changed the problem without changing their options.
Plugging in the drive might trigger whatever mechanism the sender feared.
Doing nothing might allow someone else to erase its contents remotely, assuming that threat was technically possible and not simply designed to panic them.
The drive itself had no visible wireless hardware.
Mara turned it over beneath the emergency light.
Cheap black plastic.
Metal connector.
White tape.
M.R.
“What if it doesn’t mean Mara Reed?”
Vincent glanced at her.
“What?”
“The initials.”
“You think Warren had another M.R.?”
“I think somebody put this in my car and wanted me to assume it was meant for me.”
Vale’s expression sharpened.
May you like
“Or they wanted Warren to think it was meant for you.”
Mara looked toward the elevator where Pike had disappeared.
