Nearly Found (13 page)

Jeremy shrugged. “He wants me to install it in the foyer. He made me put the key back in the flowerbed. You know, to make it easier for someone to sneak in during the night and rob us blind. Or hack us to pieces and harvest our organs so they can sell them on the black market.” He rolled his eyes. “Hey, at least we’ll get it all on film.”

Jeremy pitched the box on the bed. He cocked his head to look at me. “I’ve been cooped up in here since Sunday. My parents won’t be home for a couple hours. Want to get out of here?”

I smiled the first real smiled I’d felt in days. “Absolutely.”

I
FIDGETED IN THE PASSENGER SEAT
of Jeremy’s Civic. The seat had been adjusted differently, the seat base pulled farther forward, far enough that it didn’t fit my backpack between my feet. Probably because Anh liked to put hers in the backseat. It was like coming home after a long trip and finding all the furniture had been rearranged. But it wasn’t my furniture anymore. I reached under the seat and slid it backward as gently as I could manage. Jeremy raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything as I settled my backpack between my feet.

“How’s Bao doing? Have you heard from Anh today?” I asked.

Jeremy gave a wan smile. “Bao’s doing a little better this week. They kicked him out of ICU when he was well enough to make a pass at one of the nurses during his sponge bath. The doctors say he’ll be fine. It’ll just take time.”

I pressed my lips tight, staring out the window.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to employ my top-secret-and-most-deadly ninja-journalist skills?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“No, you’re not. Is it Reece?” I couldn’t help but hear the hopeful quality in his voice.

“No. Maybe.” I sighed as tears pinched my eyes for the second time. “I don’t want to talk about him. But there’s something else. I just have this weird feeling . . .”

Jeremy snuck glances at me as he drove. “Weird like how?”

I took a deep breath. “I have this weird feeling that the fire at Bui’s had something to do with me.” There. I said it. There was no taking it back.

Jeremy laughed. “You’re being a dork. The police know exactly how it started. The same way that pyro-kid from North Hampton set those three fires in Burke last year. Anyone can start a slow burn with a matchbook and a pack of cigarettes and walk out of a place without being seen.” His smile faded. He darted quick looks at me, and I turned to face the window.

“You can’t seriously think this had anything to do with you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Look,” he said, tapping the steering wheel thoughtfully. “I know the things that happened in June. . . the things TJ did . . . they weren’t your fault. And I know we were hard on you. We blamed you for things we shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. Maybe . . .” He gripped the wheel like he was bracing to say something difficult. “Maybe you’re internalizing too much. Maybe all that blame is making you feel guilty for things you shouldn’t feel guilty for.”

I laid my head against the glass and looked at him sideways. “You sound like a shrink.”

His lip quirked up. “Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot of practice listening to them.”

Jeremy had spent more time than usual with shrinks lately, which was also my fault. The police were the ones who figured out Jeremy had bought street drugs with the intent of killing himself. But it should have been me. I should have been a good enough friend to see how badly he was hurting inside and stopped him. And some days, that’s all I could think about when I looked at him.

“Want to hit the Baskin-Robbins? My treat. Maybe a double scoop will make you feel better,” Jeremy said.

Maybe Jeremy was right. Maybe I was internalizing too much. Getting ice cream with him sounded great. Normal even. But somehow, I didn’t think it would make me feel better. I had too many questions. And the only thing that I really wanted was answers. It may not have been my father’s body on the golf course, but it raised the question of exactly what my father had been doing five years ago around that time, or worse, the possibility that he was dead too.

“Remember when you said you would help me find my dad?” I chewed my nail, wondering how to tell him where I wanted to go. And what I wanted to do.

“Why do I get the feeling I’m not taking you out for ice cream?”

“Because I’d like you to take me to the police station instead.”

Jeremy braked and a car honked behind us. He swore and cut over a lane to let the pissed-off people pass us. “The police station? It’s not like the police know where he is, or they would have arrested him already!”

“There are answers inside that building that we won’t find on Google. It will only take a few minutes.”

He pushed his glasses up his nose, and muttered under his breath as he pulled to a stoplight.

“Please,” I asked, resting my hand on his sleeve.

He turned to me, and something in his face softened.

“So are you with me?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he sighed through a smile. “I’m with you.”

I pointed at the green light in front of us, feeling eager and hopeful. “Then let’s go.”

• • •

We sat in the parked car, watching the front door of the station. “So, what exactly are we doing here?”

“We’re borrowing Nicholson’s computer.”

Jeremy’s face crunched up. “I have a computer. Why do we need to borrow Lieutenant Nicholson’s?”

I bit my lip. Maybe
borrowing
was a poor choice of words.

Jeremy took one look at my face and his eyebrows shot toward the ceiling. “No. No way in hell am I stealing Lieutenant Nicholson’s computer! Are you out of your mind?” He reached for the gearshift and I grabbed his hand to stop him. He probably thought I was crazy. I could taste the sharp, peppery bite of astonishment the minute I touched him.

“Just listen for a minute. We’re not stealing his computer. We’re just borrowing his account.”

His face was a mask of disbelief. “You’re asking me to hack Nicholson’s computer.”

I waited, still holding on to him, hoping to pick up on some shift in his feelings. A hint of something cool and confident that suggested he was still with me. That he believed we could do this.

His gaze lingered on our hands. “Why are you doing this?”

I let go of him, and turned to the window. I had to tell him about Karl Miller.

“Eric’s dad is dead. He disappeared around the same time mine did. They were friends. What if all those Google alerts we found weren’t my father? What if we were wrong, and he’s lying in a hole somewhere just like Karl Miller? What if he’s been dead all this time, and I didn’t know?”

Jeremy sighed, and I looked over hopefully. “How is getting Nicholson’s computer going to help with that?”

“They’ve had an outstanding arrest warrant for my father for five years. Which means they’ve been looking for him. And they have a lot more resources than we do. Maybe they know something I don’t know. Maybe he’s been spotted somewhere. The police must have information on those computers they don’t share with the public. I just want to see his records.”

“Then why not just ask Nicholson for them?”

Have you had any contact with your father in the last five years?

“Because if he knows I’m looking for him, I’ll lose my internship.”

“If we get caught, your internship will be the least of your worries. Maybe . . .” He hesitated, tiptoeing over the words. “Did you ever think maybe it’s better to not know?”

Of course it would be better. But I couldn’t turn away now.

“We’re not going to get caught,” I said. “Lieutenant Nicholson won’t even know we were here. He’s in a meeting from four thirty to five on the other side of the building. I know because Gena and Alex are in the same one with him every week.”

Jeremy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and stared at the door of the police station. I waited, half hoping he’d put the car in reverse. That he’d be strong enough to keep us from doing something stupid.

He took the keys from the ignition and got out of the car. “Come on,” he said. “It’s almost four thirty. We don’t have much time.”

• • •

Jeremy stood to the side as I presented my lanyard to the desk attendant behind the window. When she put her call on hold, I told her I was there to drop off some lab reports. She buzzed me through, and when she turned to her phone to resume her call, I held the door open to let Jeremy sneak in with me. Nicholson’s office was empty, but the lights were on. He was probably coming back after his meeting, before he left for the day. I closed the door behind us.

Wringing his hands, Jeremy stepped cautiously behind the desk.

“It’s okay if you can’t do this. You don’t have to. I shouldn’t have asked you to. Let’s just go—”

Jeremy held up a hand, silencing me. His gaze lingered on an old CD player in the corner, and the battered classic rock jewel cases beside it. Then slid to the leather day planner on the desk and the newly sharpened pencil that held open today’s page. A slow smile crept over his face when he spotted the plastic Rolodex beside the phone.

He picked the folded issue of The
Washington Post
off Nicholson’s desk chair and set it aside. Then he sat down in front of the computer. “I can totally do this.”

“But the security on the computers here—”

“Isn’t much different than anywhere else.”

“How will you hack in? Don’t you have to be a programmer or something?” A fact I hadn’t given much thought to before we came here. I hadn’t thought this all the way through. Not until Jeremy put his bare hands on the keyboard and began typing. His fingerprints would be everywhere. What the hell was I thinking, bringing him here?

“Ninety percent of hacking has nothing to do with technology,” he said softly, as if to himself. His hands were steady as they guided the mouse. “Hacking is mostly just social engineering.”

He clicked open windows and closed them behind him. Then he paused at a blue screen. A curser flashed in the user name and password fields under a police insignia.

“Social engineering?” The term sounded dissonant to me. Like two notes that didn’t belong together. “I don’t understand.”

Jeremy pointed to the Rolodex. The stereo. “Look around. Nicholson’s a total neophyte.” He tapped the open page of the day planner. “Clearly, the lieutenant is uncomfortable with modern technology or he wouldn’t be listening to twenty-year-old CDs and keeping his contact list in a plastic box that’s too big for his pocket. Security is only as good as the people who use it. And Nicholson is the kind of user who will want to keep it simple. Simple is easy. But it’s also predictable.” Jeremy studied the items on Nicholson’s desk. He opened a drawer and carefully sifted inside. He pushed up his glasses, thinking. “He’s the kind of guy who probably uses the same password for everything. Less to remember. See here?” He flipped through the day planner. “To-do lists, grocery lists, lists of meetings . . . he’s got everything written down so he won’t forget. I’ll bet you a case of Twinkies that his password is written down somewhere in this book.” I watched, fascinated and terrified, as Jeremy touched every page, leaving his fingerprints all over Nicholson’s things. I couldn’t even think about Twinkies. Every footstep in the hall outside made me jump. But I’d never seen Jeremy so focused. He flipped the last page of the planner. Nothing. He opened the Rolodex and flipped to the letter
N
, leaving oily smudges on the dark plastic cover, a nonporous surface that would yield a snowy surface of white crystals if we ever got caught. I reached to stop him from touching anything else. This was a stupid idea.

“This is it,” he said, freezing my hand. Inside the Rolodex was a card with Nicholson’s name on it. And a user ID and password, written in the lieutenant’s own block print. Jeremy’s face broke in a wide grin.

He typed quickly. We were in. A cursor blinked in a search field.

He entered my father’s name, David Boswell. The search returned more than one.

“Which one is he?” Jeremy turned to where I leaned over his shoulder. Close enough that his nose brushed my cheek, leaving the cool burn of peppermint adrenaline on my breath.

My face warmed. I pointed to a birth date.

“This one,” I said, certain it was my father, remembering the way his candles sagged in his ice cream cakes in the July heat. The birth dates on his phony driver’s licenses had all been fall or winter or spring. They were wrong.

But this . . . This was my father. Deep in the belly of the beast.

Jeremy scrolled through my father’s record. And kept scrolling. It was too much to take in.

“Can you print it?” I asked through a lump in my throat.

Jeremy checked the small printer for paper, noting the model number. Careful to select the right one so we didn’t print to some other machine on the network in another room. The printer came to life, spitting out far too many pages. I looked anxiously between the printer and the door. Finally, the machine went silent.

Jeremy stood and handed me the stack. He didn’t let go.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a broken voice. “For everything. I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt
us
. I know I said some terrible things. I blamed you for things that weren’t your fault. I just . . . I just want us to be okay.”

He let the pages go. I wanted to put my arms around him. To tell him it was my fault too. But I was too afraid to say the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, and break us again. I held the pages to my chest. “We’re okay.”

Three quick raps shook the door.

“Lieutenant?” It opened, and Reece leaned inside. My breath caught in my chest, and for a moment, all I could do was look at him. At the rings under his eyes and the dark stubble on his jaw. At the turned down corners of his lips.

He paled, his eyes darting between me and Jeremy. Then to the papers in my hand. He swallowed. “Leigh? What’s going on?” His voice was thick with emotion.

“I needed something,” I said through a trembling breath. “Please don’t ask me what.” The less he knew, the less trouble he’d be in if he tried to cover for me.

“What’s he doing here?” he asked quietly, almost as if he was afraid of the answer.

“I asked him to drive me.” I stood so close to Jeremy, our shoulders and hips touched. Instinct told me to step away, so Reece wouldn’t get the wrong idea, but I stayed exactly where I was. Maybe then he’d know how it felt to see him with someone else.

Jeremy eased slowly out from behind the desk.

Reece shut his eyes, like he was searching for the right words. When he opened them, they looked anguished. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I know.”

“Please, can we talk about this?”