“Oh, I can guess what the note said.” I glanced over at Sherlock’s unhappy face and gave him my best smug grin. “Regardless, I hope you call her directly.”
“Shall I?” There was a bit of panic in Jason’s tone, and then he shook his head and stared down at the floor. “I’m not sure I could. Every time I try to talk anywhere near her, I end up sounding like a complete ass.”
I stifled a laugh. “Do what you will. But why exactly are we here? And what is all this?” I gestured at the monitors.
That question seemed to brighten Jason’s mood. He copied my gesture toward his monitors, but his seemed more flippant than mine. “This is all for show. Makes my dad think I’m a superhero and keeps me flush in equipment and upgrades. This, however”—he slid a small laptop forward from the mountain—“is where the magic happens. Gotta be light and portable. Just in case.”
He threw me another bright smile that distracted me from my original question, though I was sure he hadn’t answered it. Thankfully, Lock came to my rescue.
“He’s trying to get Mallory’s log-in so we can look at your case file,” he said, sliding his hand in mine.
“Wait. MPS stands for Metropolitan Police Service? You’ve asked this poor boy to hack the police?”
Jason answered. “Don’t need to. We just need to figure out how he logs in to the website, which is run by a third-party service.” Jason spun back around and started up his rapid-fire typing again. “That gives us an IP address for both his work and personal PCs and . . .”
Watching the windows open and close on his laptop screen was both useless and a little bit dizzying. I had no idea what he was doing or how, but then he laughed and said, “It’s always so nice of them to leave their remote desktop software running for me.” And less than a minute later, he opened a window that looked like someone else’s desktop, complete with a rather arty-looking picture of Big Ben on the left side of the screen. Jason did a search for my name in the directory and copied the first few files that came up, then closed out of everything as quickly as he could.
“Okay,” Jason said. “What are we looking for?”
Sherlock leaned over the desk as Jason opened the files. “There should be something about a call log in there, with numbers from the anonymous tips.”
“Okay, we have the phone numbers right here,” Jason said. “And . . .” He stood and reached behind his laptop to switch out a couple of cables and flick a switch of some kind. “We’ve got this to tell us who they belong to.” He patted a small black box next to him. “Dad works for Vodafone. He hand-delivered one of their old servers over the weekend. With a little restoration and a backdoor to reconnect . . .” He typed for a few seconds and opened and closed a couple of screens, then seemed to find what he was looking for. “There. I’m in.”
I leaned forward as well. “Who is it?”
“One call was made from a high-end boutique on Church Street. And the other from what looks like a burner phone, though . . . yes! It’s still active!” He spun around and his eyes shone with his excitement. It reminded me a little of how Lock looked when he was closing in on something fascinating. “Hand me your mobile?”
I nodded and pulled it out of my pocket.
Jason snatched it from me and started thumbing through my screens with the same speed he’d used on his laptop. “As long as the phone is still on, you can track it.” He tapped the screen a few dozen times. “And whoever it belongs to happens to be at the boutique right now.”
“Meaning both calls probably came from the same person.” Lock pressed his fingertips together and started to wander out of the room without even a good-bye to Jason.
I wanted to apologize on his behalf, but Jason seemed more amused than offended. I reached out a hand for my phone.
“Just a minute,” he said. “I’m setting up an app that will allow you to track the burner, in case the caller leaves the boutique before you get there.”
“Thanks for doing all this.”
“Anytime,” he said, handing back my phone. “I mean it too. You ever need anything, let me know.”
I nodded and was about to leave, but at the last minute I said, “The note.”
“You really think you know what it said?” He looked down as he blushed, then peered up at me through his bangs. “Would you tell me?”
For the briefest of moments I thought I should meet this Kay girl, find out what made Jason adore her so. “It takes a good while to think of an elaborate and ridiculously flawed scheme like hers. A girl has to like her boy quite a lot to take those kinds of steps just to get him to notice her.”
Jason hid behind his glasses again and ran a hand through his thick black hair.
“You should call her.” I back-stepped to the doorway of his room. “And when she fumbles over her words and acts like a complete ass, try to be nice about it.”
He lifted his hand to wave at me again as I backed out of his room, and I was pretty sure I’d just unwittingly added matchmaker to my list of accomplishments.
Chapter 20