12. Wolf
Chapter 12
Wolf
I yawned in the passenger seat of Otis’ blue Corvette Stingray as it careened around the sharp mountain corners on the way into town. It was early — before ten a.m. — but I was still getting used to our new schedule.
Otis and I had agreed to get up with Daisy and drive her into the gym every morning, both because we didn’t want her running around town alone and because we wanted to give her moral support, wanted to keep her from falling back into the darkness of her depression.
But I missed the days of sleeping in on her days off, kissing her awake, listening to her trade verbal jabs with Jace over coffee.
I missed Jace too. It was weird not having him around.
I wondered if Otis felt the same way, but there were things Otis and I didn’t talk about and Jace was one of them.
We passed through the north side of town — bustling with tourists on their way to apple-pick or leaf-peep and locals grabbing coffee before work — and then entered Southside. The vibe was different here, sidewalks empty, shops still closed, the Orpheum looking like no one had set foot inside the place in decades, probably because everyone was either hungover or nursing bruises.
Otis pulled up next to the curb and turned off the car. I got out and stretched, fighting another yawn, and we made our way into the abandoned warehouse where Aloha kept his cyber lab.
“She’s doing better,” Otis said.
He didn’t have to tell me he was talking about Daisy. We were always talking about Daisy.
“I think so,” I said. “She seems more like herself.”
We entered the old parking lot, separated from an empty lot by a rusted chain-link fence. The warehouse loomed on one side of the empty lot, a giant brick building with a ramp and metal roll-up doors. Once upon a time, trucks had used the ramps to pull up to the doors and load the floral wire that had been made here.
“She didn’t go to the cemetery yesterday,” Otis said as we walked up the crumbling concrete steps to the metal door set into the brick.
“I noticed that.” I pressed the buzzer, then glanced up at the security camera mounted above the door, a small light blinking red.
The door buzzed and we stepped into the shadowy ground floor of the warehouse.
“Think it’ll stick?” Otis asked.
“I hope so.” Watching Daisy sink into depression after Jace’s wake had been a fucking nightmare, like watching her slip beneath the surface of a fathomless black sea. Like grasping through the dark water for her hand only to find her gone a second later.
We’d been losing her, and nothing in my life — not killing Blake, not going to prison — had ever scared me more.
We made our way across the concrete floor of the warehouse toward the metal wall that stretched across the back third of the cavernous space. We waited outside another metal door and showed our face to another security camera.
Then we were buzzed into the massive metal box that was Aloha’s cyber lab.
I blinked, willing my eyes to adjust to the lack of light, because as dim as the rest of the warehouse was, the cyber lab — windowless and lit only by the array of computer screens — was a hundred times darker.
We found Aloha where we always found him — parked in front of several computer screens, including two laptops. He was wearing the darkest glasses I’d ever seen, the lenses entirely blacked out, and staring into space.
“Wait,” he said.
What the fuck?
We stood next to him, and I lifted a hand in greeting to the gorgeous bald woman who always seemed to be working with him. He’d never introduced us, and since this wasn’t a place where you pushed introductions, I didn’t know her name.
For a long minute, the only sound in the room was the hum of the computer equipment and the quiet tapping of computer keys. Then Aloha took off the glasses and turned to look at us, blinking like he was trying to clear his vision.
“Are those the new Vitures?” Otis asked him, tipping his head at the glasses.
Aloha nodded. “The resolution is sick.”
Sitting down, he almost looked like a normal-sized human, but I knew we was huge, well over six feet tall with the meaty muscle of a former football player. His shaved head gleamed in the light from his monitors and his salt-and-pepper beard was well trimmed.
“How’s it going with the phones?” I asked.
Aloha spun around in his chair, reached across his work station, and spun back with two phones in his hand. “This one was a cryptic motherfucker.” He handed me Blake’s phone. “That’s the one you want back, right?”
I nodded.
“Was this his only phone?” Aloha asked.
“As far as we know,” Otis said.
I frowned. “Why? Do you think he might have had another one?”
Aloha shrugged. “Weird there’s no email.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There’s no email on the phone,” Aloha said. “I know you young fuckers like to use fucking WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging, but it’s hard to do any-fucking-thing without email. Can’t even order takeout without it. Doesn’t make sense not to have it on your phone.”
We’d discovered Blake’s phone in Daisy’s car after she’d been kidnapped. The discovery had been followed by the frantic search for Daisy, her rescue, and then all the shit that came after that. We’d searched the phone for clues about who he’d been working with to traffic the girls, but it hadn’t occurred to us to look for what wasn’t there.
And Aloha was right: no email was weird.
“He had another phone,” Otis said, like he was just coming to the same conclusion. “A phone with his email.”
“Probably,” Aloha said. “If you find out what it is, I can give you more.”
“Just his email?” I asked. “Or do you need the burner number too?"
“Email’s all I really need. The password would help, but I can get around that part.”
“More like what?” Otis asked. “You said you can give us more with the email.”
“More like a lot more,” Aloha said. “Where he went before he died, websites he logged in to, that kind of shit.”
“How does email tell you that?” I asked.
“Takeout,” Aloha said.
“Takeout?” Otis looked as confused as I felt.
Aloha sighed and turned to face the bank of monitors on his workstation. He typed something into the search bar and a long list unfurled on his computer: logins and GPS locations and internet searches, all stamped with dates and times.
“Our devices track every move we make,” Aloha said. “You can delete the data but most people don’t even know it’s being stored. I delete mine every twenty-four hours, but I haven’t done it yet today.”
I looked over his shoulder and registered what I was seeing: a DoorDash order, website logins, an online purchase, Maps hits for Cassie’s Cuppa, the deli, the strip club outside town.
“Wait… are you saying our phones record this for everybody?” I asked.
“Yep,” Aloha said. “You can even get text and call transcripts if you have an Android.”
“Not for other kinds of phones?” I asked.
Aloha shook his head.
Damn. Blake had an iPhone.
But still. The email was another piece of the puzzle. A missing piece, but a piece just the same.
We just had to find it.