Instinctively, I knew that her promise wasn’t worth much. But I also knew that I needed to know what was going on before I went back to Houston. I had no intention of going to the police, but I needed to know who was behind this whole mess. I needed to know who I could trust.
A part of me was afraid Lucien was more deeply involved in all of this than anyone knew.
I unlocked the door with the key she’d kept conveniently on a hook beside the door. She looked suitably abashed as she stepped out, her eyes moving curiously over the clothes I was wearing.
“I’m sorry about your wrists,” she said, almost flinching when she noted the bandages wrapped around my sore, raw wrists. “I wanted to use something a little less uncomfortable, but we were in a hurry.”
I gestured for her to take a seat at the breakfast bar in the center of the large kitchen. She brushed her hips as she sat as though she were wearing a long skirt or something. Always a proper young lady.
“How do you check in with your partners?”
She pointed to a drawer in a small cart against the far wall. “There’s a cellphone in there.”
I walked over and opened the indicated drawer. Sure enough, there was a small flip phone with a sticker that announced the name of one of the companies that specialized in throwaway cellphones. I grabbed it and handed it to her.
“No tricks.”
She nodded.
She opened the phone and drew up a text box, and sent a quick text that had only one letter. K.
“That tells them that everything’s okay and we can proceed.”
I took the phone from her and looked through other messages that had been sent on it. There weren’t many. Multiple messages with just that one letter. A couple of messages with one word messages. Here. Now. Yes. But there were no incoming messages.
“How do they contact you?”
“Calls mostly. They don’t want anything in text that can be traced back to us.”
“Smart.” I set the phone down and studied her face. “Who is ‘they’?”
She blushed. “You don’t understand. You think that we’re trying to steal something, but we’re really just trying to get something back.”
“And what’s that?”
Rachel’s eyes moved slowly over mine. “I’m sure Lucien told you what a loser I am. How I dropped out of college this past week, how I’m always doing all these stupid things and expecting everyone else to bail me out.”
I shrugged. He had told me something like that.
“That’s how Lucien sees me. But the truth is, I’m more than that.”
“Aren’t we all? What does that have to do with you kidnapping me?”
Rachel ran the fingers of both hands through her hair in a gesture that reminded me a lot of Jacob. She leaned back and crossed her legs as though we were just having a normal conversation. As though she hadn’t clocked me over the head and kept me tied up in the pantry of her parents’ beach house.
“I’m good with computers. My father runs an oil business. My mom helps him out there, running numbers for him. I think it started as a way for them to spend time together, but my mom proved to be really good at her job. So I spent the bulk of my childhood hanging out in boardrooms. When you do that, you pick up a lot, you know?”
I grew up watching my father solve robberies, so I knew what she was talking about.
I gestured for her to continue.
“Computers are a big part of any business these days. My dad’s personal assistant taught me how to use Windows when I was five. I started surfing the net shortly after. And then I got into all kinds of things from there. You would be surprised the kinds of websites a kid can gain access to on a business computer. Things that would probably shock my parents. I taught myself things that I’m not even sure Lucien learned in school, and he was always a tech nerd.” Rachel smiled softly at the thought. “No one ever really paid much attention to what I was doing. They didn’t really care.”
Again she brushed her hair out of her face, burying her fingers in it as she stared off into the past, her eyes so much like Lucien’s, lost in thought.
“I interned at Jacob’s company a couple of summers ago, mostly so that I would be out of Mom and Dad’s hair. I delivered the mail, ran errands, that sort of thing. One night, Lucien was working late, doing something on his computer. He got up to deal with something Jaime brought to him and I got to looking at the code, and I just seemed to know exactly what it was he was trying to do and exactly what he needed to fix it. So I fixed it. He didn’t even realize it until the next day. And then he assumed his computer tech, Tito, had done it.”
“And this was for what, exactly?”
“The pancreas. He was trying to find a way to integrate all the different elements required to make such a thing work. Right now, most companies are just trying to take existing pumps and CGMs and make them work together. What he wanted to do was integrate all the different elements of these devices and turn them into one device. But to do that, he had to solve a number of problems, the least of which was how to teach the device the difference between a high sugar and a low one. I solved the problem.”
“Did you tell him it was you?”
“Yeah. Even showed him how I did it.”