Obviously, Kevin would know we’d been there the moment he got home, from the broken doorknob and our scents lingering on everything we touched. Though by the time he got home, a little B and E would be the least of his worries. But at least this way no curious neighbors would cut our little snoop-fest short. Or call the police.
“What a slob!” Jace whispered, eyeing the sticky countertop and sink full of dishes.
“Like you’re one to talk.” The guys could sterilize an entire house from carpet to ceiling in less than an hour. But they rarely put forth so much effort unless it was truly necessary. Not that I could blame them.
We snooped quickly, opening drawers and reading mail, pawing through Kevin’s fridge, his trash, and his one file cabinet as carefully and as quietly as possible.
The first bedroom held a bed, dresser, and a chest of drawers with a twenty-four-inch television on top. The bathroom was…too gross for words. But the room off the hall, the one that should have been the extra bedroom, held a computer desk and chair, with all the usual complements: printer/scanner/fax combo, telephone, external hard drive, etc….
But there on the desk, in front of the flat-screen monitor and to the left of the optical mouse, sat a palm-size device with a short, thick antenna and a two-and-a-half-inch display. My heart began to gallop as I sank into Kevin’s desk chair, and it bobbed briefly beneath my weight. Could we really be so close to locating Marc?
“Think this is it?” I picked up the device and turned it over while the guys gathered around me. It was thicker and broader than my phone, but weighed about the same, and would easily slip into a good-size pocket. There were three buttons on the sides and top edge of the machine, but none on the face. It was a touch screen.“It has to be.” Jace reached around me, and his arm brushed mine as he pressed a flush-set button on the side of the device. The tracker beeped, then the screen blinked to life, showing a logo I didn’t recognize. A couple of seconds later, the logo dissolved and a start screen appeared, in full color, asking for a five-digit tracking code. “We need a code,” Jace said, reading over my shoulder. “It looks like each chip has its own tracking number. What’s the dead guy’s name again?”
“Adam Eckard.” I turned to see Dan already heading for the filing cabinet. “Look for a code associated with Adam Eckard.” On second thought… “Pull anything with the name Calvin Malone, too.” Just in case. Because we’d have to be able to prove the connection to make it stick.
Feldman stood completely still in the center of the room, his face frozen in an angry scowl. “May I see that?”
I spun in the chair and handed him the tracker, watching his reaction closely. He examined the device, turning it over in his huge hands and finally pressing a couple of on-screen buttons. Then he handed it back and met my eyes. “You were right. I apologize for not believing you.”
“Don’t.” I hoped he could see the sincerity in my eyes. “You had no reason to believe us, and I’d have done the same thing in your position.”
He shrugged broad shoulders. “Still, I’m sorry. And when I find Kevin Mitchell, I’ll kill him.”
“Um. We kind of need to take him alive,” Jace said, laying one hand on the back of the chair I sat in. “Especially if we don’t find proof that any of the other Alphas are involved. We’ll need his testimony. And we don’t have permission to execute.”
Feldman’s frown deepened and he started to reply, but Dan spoke up from a squat beside the bottom file drawer. “Speakin’ of proof, there’s nothin’ here.”
“You sure?” Jace crossed the room toward him as Dan stood.
“Nothin’ but a bunch of old receipts and check duplicates. ” While they went through all the papers again, I turned back to Kevin’s desk and searched the cubbies in the hutch over the computer monitor. I found staples, rewritable CDs, a box of business envelopes, a stack of printer paper, some empty manila envelopes, and an unopened printer cartridge. The drawers held various computer cables and wires. But I found nothing with any kind of five-digit number on it, much less a convenient list of strays’ names and corresponding codes.
“Maybe he took it with him,” Feldman suggested, turning from the small closet he’d been searching when I threw my arms up in frustration.
“Why would he take the list, but not the tracker? What good would the numbers do without it?”
Dan shrugged and dropped an old check register into the top file-cabinet drawer. “Maybe this one’s an extra.”
“An extra eight-thousand-dollar piece of equipment?” I held the tracker up for emphasis. “Kevin works in retail. At least, he did last I heard. There’s no way his pockets are deep enough for redundant systems.”
Jace shoved the bottom drawer closed and pushed himself to his feet. “His pockets aren’t even deep enough for primary systems. But we’re not talking about his pockets. We’re talking about his father’s bankroll. Because even if Cal is involved, his money probably isn’t. Stingy bastard.”
Jace’s stepfather was not exactly rolling in cash, even though he required the highest Pride dues of any Alpha in the country—a full quarter of each of his Pride cats’ earnings. My dad only took ten percent, all of which went to pay the enforcers and to cover the expenses we incurred in the line of duty. I had no proof that Calvin Malone was misappropriating funds, but I would not have been surprised to learn that was true.
Milo Mitchell, however, had no reason to bother—he was high up in the executive ranks of a medical sales company in Washington State. He wasn’t fabulously rich, but his mid-six-figure annual salary no doubt generated enough cash to cover the cost of a few extra state-of-the-art GPS tracking devices with which to subvert the civil rights of an entire population of strays.
Which only supported my opinion that money is most often wasted on the wealthy.
“Okay, so he might have an extra tracking device. But only the one list he took with him?” I sighed and let my hands fall onto the arms of the swivel chair. Had we wasted twenty minutes of Marc’s life searching for a list that wasn’t even there?
“Surely he’s not the only one with a copy of the codes,” Feldman said, leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed over his chest. “If Kevin’s really working for his father, wouldn’t this father have a list, too?”
“Probably.” I spun slowly in the chair, my eyes closed, thinking. “Unfortunately, Milo Mitchell lives in a suburb of Seattle, so our access to his filing cabinet is kind of limited.”
Feldman cleared his throat pointedly, and I opened my eyes to see him smiling, one brow raised. “Kevin’s access would be just as limited, right?”
I nodded slowly. Then more eagerly, as his point sank in. “So Kevin would have e-mailed the list…” I spun the chair around and caught the corner of the desk with one outstretched palm to halt my turn, then punched the power button on Kevin’s CPU. His computer was newer than Marc’s and his Internet connection was much faster, so in under a minute and a half, I had Kevin’s browser up and running.
And that’s when we caught a couple of big breaks in a row. First of all, Kevin’s in-box was set up as his homepage, so we found his e-mail account with no problem. Beyond that, the computer was set to “remember” him, so we didn’t have to mess around with guessing his password. If I’d known he was that careless, I’d have checked the computer first.
Unfortunately, his in-box was empty, except for four messages that had come in that morning. Two were spam—porn, based on the subject lines—and the other two were advertisements from Popular Mechanics, which made Kevin sound smarter than he was, and a video-game site. He clearly kept his in-box cleaned out pretty well.
Not so with his Sent folder and his virtual trash can. Among the messages Kevin had recently deleted, I found one from his father, dated three days earlier. I opened it and scanned the contents, while all three of the toms read over my shoulder. It was in response to an e-mail Kevin had sent his father several hours before—along with a Word attachment titled “Updated tracker codes.”Jackpot.
I opened the attachment while Jace turned on the printer and checked the paper tray. I printed four copies—one for each of us—then forwarded the message to myself, my father, and Michael, just to make sure that the evidence of Milo Mitchell’s involvement was well disseminated, in case something went horribly wrong and none of us came out of the hunt for Marc alive.
“Shit, Dan!” I glanced at him with both eyebrows raised, the paper still warm in my hand from the printer. “Your name’s top on the list. They implanted you first.”
Dan frowned and started to say something. But then Jace cut him off. “Eckard’s fifth from the top,” he said, and I skipped down five entries on the list. And there it was. Adam Eckard—tracking code 44827. I rolled forward in the chair and reactivated the tracker, which had gone into power-save mode, then typed in the five-digit code. Within seconds, information flooded the screen, including the current longitude and latitude of Adam Eckard’s GPS microchip.