Dark Justice(9)

At least the music and dancing keep my mother occupied.

I slid the empty suitcase into my closet—and remembered my cell phone. I’d left it in my coat pocket. At the front closet I patted the pocket of my coat, then realized it was the wrong side. I reached for the other pocket.

Wait.

Had I felt something in the bottom of that left pocket?

I frowned. Reached inside. My fingers brushed something small and hard. I drew it out.

A flash drive.

I stared at it. Turned it over. Where had it come from? I didn’t own a flash drive like this.

Was it Emily’s? Maybe last time she came home she wore this coat. Had she meant to show me some video she’d designed, then forgotten about it?

Emily wouldn’t be caught dead in this coat.

I stared at the small black and silver thing lying in my palm. Had it been in my pocket all weekend?

A picture rose in my mind—Mom and me walking on the beach, heads down against the wind, our hands in our pockets. The flash drive hadn’t been there.

I walked to Mom’s room and opened the door. Lady Gaga’s “I’m on the Edge of Glory” assaulted my ears.

“Mom.”

She kept swaying, her eyes closed. I stepped to her CD player and turned down the volume. Mom’s eyes snapped open.

I held out the flash drive. “This was in my coat pocket. Do you know anything about it?”

My voice remained light, even as I braced myself. Mom was known to pick up items and put them down . . . somewhere else. Anywhere. Half the time she didn’t even remember—and would be very indignant if I pressed her on the subject. She did not relish being treated “like a child.”

She peered down at the drive. “What is it?”

“It’s a little thing you plug into a computer. It holds data.”

“What would I want with that?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered, since it appeared in my pocket.”

Mom drew back her head, her lips pressed. “Well, I didn’t put it there.”

“You have any idea who would?”

She thought a moment. Her face lit at an idea. “Morton.”

“Morton?”

“When I came up to you both, he was fumbling with your pocket. I saw him.”

My mouth opened. I gazed at Mom, reliving that moment on the side of Tunitas Road. “You’re right. He was doing something with my pocket.” Amazing that she’d remembered that detail.

We both looked at the flash drive.

“Can it hold pictures?” Mom reached out to touch it.

“Yes.”

Her eyes rounded. “Maybe they’re of his daughter. The one we’re supposed to find for him.”

I nodded. “Maybe so.”

“Let’s go see! Turn on your computer.”

She turned toward the door, excited. I grasped her arm. “Mom, that’ll take awhile. Why don’t you keep dancing? I’ll let you know what I find.”

Mom peered at me. A song ended on the CD, and another started. “Okay.”

Before leaving her room I turned up the volume on Lady Gaga—just enough that I hoped would satisfy Mom. As I closed her door, the music got even louder.

Standing in the hall, I stared at the flash drive. Had Morton given me this?

“Don’t tell. Be careful.”

The vague unease came over me again. Part of me—a big part—didn’t want to know what this was. But what if it was important? Morton had been so insistent . . .

Maybe it was Emily’s. Somehow I’d just missed it in my coat.

I returned to the front closet and retrieved my cell phone from my coat’s right pocket. I turned it off and placed it in my purse, which was sitting in the kitchen.

I lingered at the counter, looking at the flash drive in my hand. Should I see what was on it?

What if this thing contained contaminated files? Once I plugged it into my laptop, the virus could spread into my computer. Never a good idea to connect your computer to something you weren’t sure about.

“Please. It’s important.”

A sigh escaped me. Almost as if pushed, I found myself entering my bedroom and sitting down at the small corner desk. As my slow, over-the-hill laptop booted up I relieved the scene with Morton. The terror and despair on his face. That sense of extreme urgency, as if I were his last hope.

For what?

Before plugging in the flash drive I performed a manual backup of my files onto my external drive. It would been done automatically when I was last on the computer, but I didn’t want to take chances. And if that external drive were to go down, I had a second, online backup. Anytime my computer sat idle for thirty minutes, the online backup kicked in automatically.

I picked up the flash drive and stared at it some more. As if it would speak to me, tell me its secrets. Then I plugged it in. When the “found new hardware” prompt appeared, I clicked to view the files it contained. One appeared: “video.”