“He’s my uncle.”
“He is?”
“Half uncle, to be precise,” she added, clicking out of her confusing windows of code. “On my mother’s side. Don’t worry, though. He doesn’t know anything about BRS.”
“What does he think we’re doing down here then?”
“Running a drug front.”
“God, please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Of course I am. Ben doesn’t ask questions, okay? He trusts me.”
“That’s not shady at all,” I said with a roll of my eyes.
“Whatever,” said Lauren, spinning in her chair to face me. “At least we’re safe, right? Do you have O’Connor’s phone?”
I swung the black backpack off my shoulders and set it on the desk, digging O’Connor’s ruined phone out of the front pocket.
“Wow, what a hunk of junk,” she said, experimentally tapping the power button. “This thing is ancient. Why couldn’t O’Connor just have an iPhone like everyone else?”
I took the digital camera out, switched it on, and scrolled through the pictures of O’Connor’s car. “Look at these.”
“Not very comforting,” she commented, observing the photos with a frown. She plugged O’Connor’s phone into her laptop and clicked around. Nothing happened. “This doesn't bode well.”
“No luck?”
“Usually, you can rescue data from a damaged phone using some kind of recovery program, but I think O’Connor’s phone is way past its expiration date,” said Lauren. She turned over the phone in her hand. “It’s old for one, and what guy O’Connor’s age updates his phone software regularly? We might be out of luck on this one.”
I tipped my head back in frustration. “What if he backed it up?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. On his personal computer or something.”
“Do you have access to his personal computer?” asked Lauren, her brow raised quizzically.
“No.”
“Then there goes that plan.”
“But I know his wife.”
“O’Connor’s wife?”
I nodded, a plan forming in my head. “I met her several times at events for Waverly when I was O’Connor’s teaching assistant. Her name is Eileen. O’Connor had to have used a computer at home, right?”
Lauren bit her lip, thinking. “Are you sure you want to involve another innocent person in this garbage?”
“I don’t think we have much of a choice.”
“That won’t be an easy visit.”
It certainly wouldn’t. The general public had never been updated on O’Connor’s actual condition, which meant that O’Connor’s wife was probably still holding out hope that he would return home any day now.
“I’ll figure it out,” I muttered, though doubt whispered conspiratorially at the back of my mind. “In the meantime, we need to keep looking for Wes. Where else do you think they could’ve taken him?”
Lauren spun around again, opening up a fresh window on her computer monitor. “Lucky for you, I’ve already made some headway on that front. As you know, my father’s company owns a ton of different businesses and properties.”
She scrolled through what appeared to be a never-ending list of titles owned by the Lockwood parent company. I recognized several well-established brands that I’d never known Lockwood Inc. had been a part of. “Okay. So?”
“This is how my dad operates,” explained Lauren, still scrolling. “All of his assets are spread out so any illegal BRS business is hidden beneath layers and layers of legal activity, but obviously, he can’t hide everything. I tapped into my father’s computer.”
“You did?” I sank into a nearby armchair to watch Lauren work. “Did you find anything?”
“It took a while, but I managed to hone in on a series of emails that kept referencing this location. The emails were coded, but between my inside knowledge of BRS and my general level of genius—”
“Modest, aren’t you?”
“—it was easy enough to decode them.” She clicked on one of the businesses, bringing up the home page for the local branch of a company called Paulson Media. The office was located in the downtown area, across town from Lockwood Inc.’s main office building. “The first email is dated around the same time O’Connor went missing, and there have been three more new emails since his body was moved from BRS headquarters.”
“So you think the Raptors marched into a local business with a body and hid it in the CEO’s office or something?” I asked, skeptical.
Lauren shrugged. “By now, I wonder how you can question the possibility of any scheme that the Raptors might concoct. They make shit happen. It’s why the society has been so successful for so long. Besides, it’s the only lead we have.”
I blew out a sigh. “Fine. We’ll check it out. But I’m going to O’Connor’s first. Maybe his wife can shed some light on the situation.”
Lauren waved me off. “That works for me. It gives me time to write your résumé.”
“My—what?”
“You can’t just go marching into one of my father’s offices and demand to know if they have a dead body hidden somewhere,” said Lauren in a flat voice. “You need a cover story. I can hack into their system to get you an interview. You go in disguised as a happy-go-lucky intern waiting to speak with the hiring manager, make some excuse, and search the building.”
“Wow, that sounds foolproof,” I deadpanned.
“You underestimate me,” said Lauren, rolling her eyes. “Go check on O’Connor’s wife. By the time you get back, I’ll have the next part of the plan underway.”
Groaning, I pushed myself up from the armchair, wishing I could stay in the safe, comfy basement forever. “It’s going to be a long day.”
O’Connor lived in one of the neighboring suburbs around the Waverly campus. I’d been to his house more than a few times, usually to pick up a stack of student papers or because he’d forgotten to bring the answer key to a history exam with him to work. As his teaching assistant, I’d gotten used to running errands for him. His wife, Eileen, was one of the sweetest people I’d ever had the pleasure of interacting with. Together, O’Connor and Eileen’s relationship was one that I aspired to emulate with Wes. They were polar opposites. O’Connor was brusque, taciturn, and a hard guy to get to know. Eileen was warm
