Page 11 of Hidden Falls

Lei pulled the laptop over and found several different screenshots and threatening messages Malia had saved under the folderMean Crap from Haters.

“We can follow up on those, but to be honest, and we need to be in this situation—the way Malia was taken seems professional.” Lei made eye contact with Harry. “Can you think of any reason pros would have to snatch her?”

Harry dropped her face into her hands. Her shoulders hunched.

Peter, sitting beside her, rubbed her back. His blue eyes were red-rimmed as they met Lei’s. “I have no idea.”

“Harry? Anything you can think of?” Behind that question pulsed the secret Lei had been sitting on for years.

“No. Nothing,” Harry said, into her hands. “Maybe it’s the drug dealing case at the schools.”

“I’d talked with her about that,” Lei said. “She had some leads, but I didn’t think anything was popping yet. Let’s see what she had going on the blog.”

The four adults clustered around the laptop’s screen and read Malia’s latest post. A fun blend of animated cartoons and polls, the post solicited information on something to deal with“feeling foggy in the morning before class . . . what can I do?”

Encrypted replies were collected by the post, but Lei was stumped on how to access them. “Where are these answers going?”

“Allow me.” Marcella turned the laptop toward herself.

Lei admired her friend’s immaculate French manicure as the FBI agent scanned around the open tabs until she identified a portal that was the backdoor to the blog. She input the username and password Harry had provided on the legal pad, then pressedEnter.

The screen spiraled open on a black background filled with links and comments. “This is a lot to sift through.”

Peter turned away with a muttered curse. Harry got up and walked through the grass, pacing back and forth.

Malia’s parents were obviously stressed by seeing the flood of potentially dangerous information Malia had elicited, and what it might have meant for their daughter.

Lei swallowed, torn between comforting Harry, who dug in the pocket of her shirt for a pack of battered Virginia Slims, and paying attention to what Marcella had uncovered on the computer. Maybe there was a way to cover all of the bases.

Lei approached and touched Harry’s arm. “Why don’t we let Marcella weed through that info cache for the most likely leads, and the three of us go inside and discuss next steps?”

“Sounds good.” Peter was clearly eager to get away from the evidence of the trouble Malia had stirred up.

Marcella shot Lei a grateful glance.

Peter took Harry’s arm and helped her up, giving her a side hug as they walked to the back door of the house. Lei followed the couple inside. She’d have a little time alone with them to probe more deeply into the family’s private business.

7

Marcella squinted at the laptop display; sunlight was beaming down from above and it made the screen too shiny to read. Mindful that she needed the Wi-Fi from the Clarks’ house, Marcella picked up the laptop and moved into the shade of a large, scraggly hibiscus bush. Propping her back against the rough painted wall, she set the laptop on her knees and dug in her bag for a pair of earbuds. A bit of fiddling later, she had audio hooked up through the laptop to use Wi-Fi calling.

She opened an email to her FBI account and created a portal to copy items from her search to the case file. She then began clicking on the links students had sent in to reply to Malia’s solicitation for a morning pick-me-up substance.

Several of the answers were innocuous: links to caffeine drinks and natural supplements. A few were lewd suggestions and dick pics. Poor Malia, having to sort through all of these!

Some of the messages included numbers to the burner phones of prescription drug connections on the island; a few went to underground sites where every kind of stimulant was available to buy right through the mail.

This cache was too much for Marcella to tackle as she sat outside in the shade of a bush with an ant trail making its way toward her ankle. She stomped her foot, and the ants changed direction. “I need help with this.”

Marcella hit a speed dial to her friend Sophie, a tech wiz and expert on everything to do with the Internet but thought better of it and canceled the call. She had no permission to involve Sophie as a private contractor with this case; that would have to be okayed by both her boss and the parents, who probably couldn’t afford Sophie anyway.

Marcella would have to make do with Special Agent Bateman, the Bureau’s in-house tech support specialist. Bateman was no Sophie, but he was able to do this kind of background work.

She called the agent on his cell. “I need a laptop cloned, and a lot of tracking done on contacts generated by a website,” she told him.

“Give me remote access to the laptop,” Bateman said. “I’ll send you a link.”

“Okay. I’ll need a summary of these different websites and names and locations connected to a bunch of phone numbers. Please package it all up and add it to the Malia Clark kidnapping case. Once you update, I can retrieve the info from here.” She gave him the case number.

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