EIGHT #3
Rorke ran his hand along the panel and pressed a fingertip into a spot. It popped open.
Excited, Caryssa crowded beside him. They were staring at a safe tucked behind the false panel. It didn’t have a key slot, just a keypad glowing faint green in the shadows.
“Look for the code.” She was already twisting to check under the desk, running her fingers along the underside for anything taped down. “People write codes down. Look for a sticky note in the bottom of a drawer or taped under something.”
After ten minutes of searching every surface and object in the room, they came up empty.
She met Rorke’s eyes. “What now?”
“We need Rome.” He was already pulling out his phone.
Rome picked up on the second ring. The video connected a beat later, and his face filled the small screen. He looked mildly amused at being summoned. “What’d you two break?”
“Nothing yet.” Rorke angled the phone toward the safe. “Keypad. Six digits. No luck finding a written code.”
“All right.” Rome’s tone shifted, all business now. “Pan the room for me. Slow.”
Rorke swept the phone’s camera across the office, from the desk to the bookshelf and a framed certificate from some association.
Rome’s voice cut through. “Stop. Back up.”
He backed the camera up to a photo on the shelf. A wedding photo of a younger version of the dead man, grinning with his arm around a woman in white.
“O,” Rome called off-screen, “pull up Bill’s marriage record. I need an anniversary date.”
After a short pause, O’s voice projected into the room, distant but clear. “Give me thirty more seconds… Got it. June eleventh, nineteen ninety-four.”
“Perfect.” Rome’s face came back into the frame. “It’s probably a six-digit passcode.”
Caryssa hesitated with her finger poised over the keypad. “Zero-six-one-one-nine-four.”
“Don’t enter it that way. Flip it.”
She glanced at Rome on the screen Rorke held up. “What?”
“Flip the numbers. Four-nine-one-one-six-zero.”
“And if that doesn’t work? Seems more likely it would be straightforward.”
“You called me for answers, didn’t you? It will work.” His cocky tone would make her smile under other circumstances, but sweat was trickling down her spine.
In a surge of stubborness, she punched in the first combination. Nothing happened.
She swore the silence coming from the phone throbbed.
Taking a deep breath, she entered it backward, and the keypad’s small light changed from red to green with a soft click of the tumblers slipping into place.
“There it is.” Rome was definitely grinning.
“How the hell do you know how to do all this?” Rorke asked. “That’s the fourth safe I’ve seen you crack.”
Listening to their banter, Caryssa pulled the safe door open to reveal a second laptop tucked beside a stack of cash.
“How do you think I got the scar on my cheek?” Rome’s tone was too casual.
“Got caught breaking into my buddy’s dad’s safe when I was sixteen.
I only did it to see if I could, but he thought I was an intruder and sliced me before he realized.
His dad was a cop, friends with mine. They let me off with a warning, but you never really forget what you’ve learned. Same as riding a bike.”
“Except the bike is a federal crime,” she added. She should have trained better for this situation the way she’d honed other skills just in case. Clearly, she had more work to do.
“Un-fucking-believable.” Rorke shook his head, though Caryssa caught his grin from the corner of her eye.
Caryssa bagged the second laptop and cash before she cast a look at the face on the video call. “O, when we get back, I’ve got two laptops for you to hack.”
O appeared in the view and let out a whoop. “Two laptops? Merry fuckin’ Christmas to me!”
Their enthusiasm was contagious, and she felt her lips twitch into a smile. “What’s O short for anyway? Oscar? Omar? Oedipus?”
“No.”
“You’ll get more answers out of that safe than you will out of him. Trust me.” Rome grabbed the bag containing both laptops.
The drive back felt shorter than the drive there. By the time they made it through the tunnel and onto the base, O was already waiting, hands out, ready for the hardware, eager as a kid on Christmas morning—only he’d asked Santa for a chance to recover forensic data instead of a football.
“These are gonna keep me busy for a while.” He was already carrying them toward his setup of screens glowing in a nest of cables that resembled an electronics graveyard more than a workstation.
“Any idea what you’re looking for?” she called after him.
“Deeds, leases, anything tied to shell companies.”
“Look for a PO box too. There’s a key.”
“Copy.”
“Call me the second you find anything,” she added.
He didn’t respond or look up, already sinking into his task, bowed over the desk and fingers flying.
She stood there a second, watching him work.
The case was finally moving.
It felt good. Familiar. The one part of this week she knew how to handle.
Reid was another matter entirely.
She didn’t know how to be in a room with him. Didn’t know what came next or how any of this could possibly end.
She only knew she couldn’t figure out how to not love him.