Page 78 of Unexpectedly Wanted
Austin took one swing, the head of the ax planting right in the wood of the door next to the handle. I wasn’t sure what he was aiming for. Just then, the door to the elevator opened. I turned to see Cade walking in. The moment he laid eyes on the scene, he stopped.
“I have a key. Will that help?” he asked, moving fast to get to us.
“I was having fun,” Austin joked, but it lacked his usual humorous and cocky tone. He yanked the ax out of the door and then stepped back to give Cade room to open it.
I pushed between them to get into Milo’s office. The lights flickered to life. Standing there, I took everything in for a second, not really sure where to begin. Then I moved around and sat in his chair, booting his computer up before my ass was down all the way. My eyes caught on the cans in the waste bin. I counted five, and knew he must have been digging hard into something today.
Within seconds, I had his log-in screen up. And absolutely no clue what his password might be.
“I need a password,” I said.
“Fuck,” Cade breathed out. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but when shit like this was happening, sometimes your mind forgot about the little things.
“There’s something on his phone,” I said.
I brought the images up again. I handed it over, hoping one of them would have a clue about what was going on there. It was just a bunch of numbers.
“GPS coordinates, maybe?” Austin suggested. “I’ll start looking them up. See if it will help with anything.”
“Does anyone know what he’s been working on?”
“The Sons of the Holy Fire case, mostly,” Kyle said, coming into the room and surprising the shit out of me. “But don’t ask me more than that. I have no clue. I’ll pull up all the files he shared with me.”
Then he was gone again.
“Shit,” I blurted out, suddenly remembering that Milo’s parents were here and that I’d basically run out on Harold. “I have to call his parents. What am I going to say?”
Cade and Austin stared at me. Clearly, they didn’t have a clue.
Since I didn’t have either of his parents’ numbers, I figured I might as well use Milo’s phone. I pulled up his father’s number, then hit the call button.
“Milo? That you? Got us real worried here,” Harold answered, and yeah, he sounded worried.
“It’s Remy,” I said. “I found Milo’s phone. I’m not sure if he dropped it on accident and just didn’t realize it.” I was sure that wasn’t the case.
“Don’t lie to me. Something has happened to him, hasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure. But I’m going to find him.”
“Your job and his… it’s not what you two lead people to believe it is.”
“Not quite, sir,” I said, but I wasn’t going to give any further explanation.
“Please, find him,” he pleaded.
“I will,” I promised him. “I have to go.”
I hung up before he could say anything back.
Time seemed to speed up and slow down after that. The minutes ticked on quickly, but we were getting nowhere.
I had no idea what those numbers were, and if they happened to be GPS coordinates, they didn’t give a location of anything that would help us. Forests. Vacant lots. In the middle of random fields with nothing around for miles. It made no sense to me.
Reed finally got there, and the smart man that he was, he had a code that would get into any of the systems there. He’d added that in for situations like this. But now that I was in, I didn’t know where to begin.
“So there was this spyware that he built. But he got kind of stuck, so he asked me to work on it.” Kyle was looking down at his laptop as he spoke. There were five of us crowded in Milo’s office, and a few more of the team had shown up over the last three hours. Everyone was doing what they could, trying to find even the littlest thing. “Anyway, I basically took it apart and recoded it. It was mostly finished. My point is, I see here that he opened it recently. What if he used it?”
“Do you think he did?” I asked.
