Emily Locke 01 - Final Approach

for a moment.
    “I also found out investigators get case assignments on their computers, flagged in order of priority. Priority Ones are urgent, so they’re addressed immediately. Investigators have a few days to address Priority Twos. The missing babies he couldn’t find? All Priority Twos…the ones that could wait a few days.”
    “Sorry to be so thick, but—”
    “If Trish knew David’s caseload, and wanted to snatch a kid, she could do it
days
before Meyer ever even tried to look for the kid. Later, Meyer could look high and low for weeks and never get warm.”
    “But surely parents would report their missing baby.”
    He hesitated. “What if she takes out the parents? Anyone who looked into it would have to assume the parents were trying to avoid a CPS interview. It’s a nearly perfect crime.”
    I opened my mouth. The words on my tongue were “it’s impossible to believe,” but they disintegrated as soon as the thought formed. Eliminating parents, stealing babies. I thought of Eric and Casey Lyons. It wasn’t hard to believe at all.
    Jeannie hadn’t returned by the time the call ended, so I ate without her. Eventually she returned with a yellow plastic sack from which she produced a pre-paid cell phone.
    “For you,” she said. “Otherwise, when your battery dies we’ll be screwed.”
    I shrugged. “There’s always Kurt’s phone.”
    She looked at me like I was an idiot. “They could cancel service anytime.”
    “So I have to carry three phones?”
    She pushed it across the table with a stack of twenties and fifties. “There’s a bank in the next parking lot so I got more small bills too. You never know.”
    That much was true. I unzipped the backpack and dropped the new phone and extra bills inside.
    ***
    “Why do I have to do it?” Jeannie asked, as we walked into the offices of the disk recovery people.
    On the drive north to Houston, she’d helped herself to my cheap cosmetics and a pair of sunglasses scavenged from Inez’s glove box. The glasses disguised her swollen eye well enough for her to appear stylish, maybe even rested. It was another eerily masterful transformation.
    “You should do it,” I whispered, walking with her toward the counter, “because you’re older than me. They’ll believe it if you say it.”
    “I’m not that much—”
    “Shh. Here he comes.”
    A lanky associate in Dockers and a polo shirt stepped up to the counter in front of us. A plastic nametag said BRAD. He didn’t look old enough to shave.
    “How can I help you this morning?”
    Jeannie stepped up to the counter and grimaced. “This is embarrassing.”
    The technician gave her a dopey grin. “We pass no judgments here at ResusciData.” He chuckled.
    She produced the hard drive I’d given her.
    “I caught my teenager visiting an…inappropriate chat room. When I grounded him from the computer, the little shit password protected our machine. Now I can’t use it either. Can you fix it?”
    The tech suppressed a smirk. I wondered if he’d done something similar in his formative computer geek years.
    “Does the password box come up when you boot the machine or when you try to get into a particular application?”
    “When she boots the machine,” I answered.
    Brad swiveled his head toward me and seemed to notice me for the first time.
    “Let’s have a look.” He took the drive from Jeannie, dropped it into an electrostatic discharge bag, and carried it to a workbench.
    “The protection you described is probably in the system’s BIOS.”
    Jeannie looked at me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark glasses, but the creases in her forehead and the skeptical twist of her mouth said it all: “Huh?”
    “If I install your drive as a secondary drive in another work station,” he continued, “we should be able to get to your data that way.”
    He took a seat on a stool and we watched him use a ribbon cable to connect the drive to an open CPU and turn on the computer.
    “Go ahead and have a seat,” Brad said. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
    Jeannie and I sat in chairs along the wall. Current issues of
PC Gamer
,
TidBITs,
and
Linux Today
were spread over the surface of an oblong coffee table with uneven legs. Jeannie dug through the magazines and curled her brightly painted lips in disgust.
    I relaxed into my chair and stretched my legs. I let my eyes close. It’d been almost thirty hours since I’d slept. My leg throbbed and a headache was coming on. Or maybe I’d