Page 112 of Dark Endures

Everett flexes his fingers and sits down. “The thing about hacking blocked numbers is you need to go all the way back to the person that pays the bills.” He starts typing faster than he can talk. “Find the company and you find the—That’s odd.” Everett leans forward as his fingers fly. “It’s blocked.”

We all know that. I step over to his side, looking even though I have not a single clue what he’s doing.

“No. It’s blocked like it doesn’t exist anywhere. No company owns this number.”

“So, are you saying she’s at a military base somewhere?” The spy joke might not be one. Mindy, a spy? Impossible.

Everett laughs. “No. This isn’t military. They have a certain flair to how they encode their stuff. It’s blunt andefficient. If you try to force your way through, they attack you and send a hit squad to finish you off.”

What does this boy know about military encoding and hit squads? Who did I let into my neighborhood?

“This coding makes it like a ghost. A whisper that disappears every time you try to look for it.” He smiles, and his forehead wrinkles. “It’s a thing of beauty.”

Screens flash and disappear.

“It’s like a game with no rules and no way to win. As soon as I think I find it, the rules change. Whoever coded this is a genius. The genius. Your system is good, but nowhere close to what I’d need to even start thinking about finding out where that number came from.”

“What do you need? I’ll get it for you.”

Everett laughs again. “You can’t. Not unless you stole it. Or broke me into one of the world’s best security companies. The computer I’d need doesn’t exist for the general public. Even the top research schools don’t have one strong enough. The person who created this could have created the internet. It’s just that sophisticated. I’d love to pick his brain.”

“That means—”

“It’s a dead end. I can’t help you.” Everett doesn’t stop typing on the computer. “At least not with that. But I can track her movements.”

“What?”

“The last phone call made on Mindy’s phone was to a Dahlia Steel.” He clicks a few buttons, and an image is pulled up on the screen. “That’s Dahlia arriving at the location just an hour later. The car that brought her doesn’t leave. It stays waiting for her.”

Enzo moves in closer. “How did you get that? There were no security cameras facing her apartment. I checked.”

“These aren’t from security cameras. They’re images from dash cameras in people's cars. So many cars record non-stop now. You mash them together and you can make a video recording.”

“How did you do that so fast?” Enzo’s practically drooling at this point.

“Oh, I’m not doing that. I hacked into a government program that does it all the time.” Everett’s grin goes wicked. “They’re doing it for me. Spy stuff. All I need to do is press here to fast forward.”

Everett hacked into government spy software in less than five minutes. I don’t know whether to be scared or impressed. But I do know when all this is over, we’re going to have a conversation.

“There, Dahlia leaves. Fast forward again and there. That could be Mindy. Her face isn’t visible, so I can’t be sure. Let me check to see how many women in the building are the same height and build as her.”

I lean closer, studying the image. “That’s her. She was wearing that shirt Sunday.” When she got in my face. “What time was this picture taken?”

He clicks a few buttons. “Time stamp for this is four fourteen Monday morning.”

She’s alive. He didn’t kill her.

But she walked out of his apartment wearing the same clothing as she did the night before, with her hair looking like—Rage and relief war inside of me.

She’s alive.

Mindy’s alive.

Did he rape her? Is that why she ran away?

Death by a thousand cuts sounds too kind.

Wait. “Where is she? Where did she go?”

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