His eyebrows quirk. “How was she texting her own phone?”
“She had another phone. Her mother’s, probably. All the texts she sent came from someone named ‘Mom’ in her contacts.”
Uncle Gavin calls out, “Caesar?” After a few moments, the office door opens and Caesar and Frankie both walk in. They must have both been standing in the hallway outside the office. Frankie looks slightly abashed, as if Uncle Gavin has caught him eavesdropping. He glances at me, then looks away. Caesar maintains his frown.
“I need you to look at a phone,” Uncle Gavin says to Caesar. He gestures to me, and I stand and hold the phone out to Caesar.
Caesar doesn’t even look at the phone. “Is it turned on?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
“Because if it is—”
“It’s off,” I say. Unless the phone is on or plugged into a power source, it cannot be accurately located.
Caesar gives me a look of disappointment, even disdain, like I’m a promising student who has failed the most basic test. “Next time wrap it in tinfoil,” he says. “Blocks the radio signals—”
“Like a homemade Faraday cage,” I say. “I know.”
We eye each other, like gunslingers waiting for the other to make a move. I’m still holding the phone out to Caesar. Frankie looks from me to Caesar and back again. Slowly, still maintaining eye contact with me, Caesar reaches out and takes the phone out of my hand. He glances at it, then raises an eyebrow at me, presumably because of the pop-art phone case. Then he slides it into a pocket, nods at Uncle Gavin, and walks out the door. Frankie trails him, glancing back at me, and I take that as an invitation to follow them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the tiny lot beside Ronan’s are two parking spots. Uncle Gavin’s Lincoln Navigator, a newer model, is in one. To my surprise, Frankie’s old Trans Am, the Frankenstein, is in the other. “You kept it?” I say.
Frankie shrugs. “My pop kept it for me,” he says. He gets behind the wheel. Caesar opens the passenger door, flips the seat forward, then steps back to let me in, his expression as inviting as a drill bit.
We drive to a refurbished industrial area where Tenth Street dead-ends into the rail yards, old brick warehouses converted into hip new restaurants, art galleries, and furniture stores. Frankie pulls the Trans Am behind one such warehouse, all red brick and black iron, and we get out of the car. At this hour, the area is pretty deserted, the streets filled with heat and light and not much else. I stop midstep as I realize where we are. A mile south of here is the Bluff and the abandoned house where we found Susannah and Luco. I glance at Frankie, wonder if he is remembering that night, but he doesn’t seem to be on the same wavelength, instead inserting a key into a padlock on a garage door. He pulls the door up with a metallic ratcheting, and Caesar walks inside. Frankie follows, then halts and beckons me to come in. I step inside, and Frankie pulls the garage door down behind me with a crash.
The room’s ceiling is two stories above us, windows high up on the wall letting in the clear morning light. The rough brick walls contrast with the polished concrete floor. A spiral staircase in the corner leads up to a shadowed loft. Caesar flips a switch on the wall, and one of the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling illuminates with a harsh hum. Beneath that light on the far wall is what seems to be a workstation, a metal table with a laptop and what looks like a countertop microwave and an assortment of electronic equipment I don’t recognize.
Caesar takes Marisa’s phone out of his pocket, places it on the table next to the laptop, and sits in a space-age office chair, the back of it a mesh of black webbing and anodized aluminum. “You try the pass code?” he asks me while booting up his laptop. “Or try to jailbreak it?”
“No.”
Caesar grunts and starts typing. A window opens on the laptop screen, displaying what looks like machine code.
I look at Marisa’s phone and feel the back of my throat go dry. We are about to try to break into another person’s phone. Not we, I think. Me. The fact that Caesar is the one actually doing something with it is irrelevant. “Can you hack it?” I ask, hating the anxious whine in my voice.
Caesar barely spares me a glance before he picks up the phone and removes the pop-art case, then examines the phone carefully. He holds the power button down until the phone lights up, then opens the door to the microwave. Inside, a lightning charger cable sticks out of the back wall of the microwave. Caesar picks up the phone and plugs the lightning charger into it, then puts the phone into the microwave and closes the door. I almost say something, afraid he’s going to nuke the phone, but I manage to hold my tongue. Caesar picks up a cord protruding from the back of the microwave and plugs that into a black box the size of a hardback book. Then he takes a USB cable from that box and plugs it into the laptop. As soon as Caesar plugs the box into the laptop, strands of alphanumeric code start cascading down the open window on the laptop.
“This will take a minute,” Caesar says, his eyes on the code. I look at Frankie, who motions me to step away with him, and we walk across the room toward the spiral staircase. Underneath the upstairs loft area is a kitchenette with a sink and a refrigerator. Frankie takes a bottle of orange juice from the fridge, hesitates, then holds it out toward me. I shake my head, and he closes the fridge door.
“He likes to work alone,” Frankie says.
I look across the room at Caesar, the light
