Page 14 of To the Grave

I nodded.

“Was this his only phone?” Aloha asked.

“As far as we know,” Otis said.

I frowned. “Why? Do you think he might have had another one?”

Aloha shrugged. “Weird there’s no email.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“There’s no email on the phone,” Aloha said. “I know you young fuckers like to use fucking WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging, but it’s hard to do any-fucking-thing without email. Can’t even order takeout without it. Doesn’t make sense not to have it on your phone.”

We’d discovered Blake’s phone in Daisy’s car after she’d been kidnapped. The discovery had been followed by the frantic search for Daisy, her rescue, and then all the shit that came after that. We’d searched the phone for clues about who he’d been working with to traffic the girls, but it hadn’t occurred to us to look for whatwasn’tthere.

And Aloha was right: no email was weird.

“He had another phone,” Otis said, like he was just coming to the same conclusion. “A phone with his email.”

“Probably,” Aloha said. “If you find out what it is, I can give you more.”

“Just his email?” I asked. “Or do you need the burner number too?"

“Email’s all I really need. The password would help, but I can get around that part.”

“More like what?” Otis asked. “You said you can give us more with the email.”

“More like a lot more,” Aloha said. “Where he went before he died, websites he logged in to, that kind of shit.”

“How does email tell you that?” I asked.

“Takeout,” Aloha said.

“Takeout?” Otis looked as confused as I felt.

Aloha sighed and turned to face the bank of monitors on his workstation. He typed something into the search bar and a long list unfurled on his computer: logins and GPS locations and internet searches, all stamped with dates and times.

“Our devices track every move we make,” Aloha said. “You can delete the data but most people don’t even know it’s being stored. I delete mine every twenty-four hours, but I haven’t done it yet today.”

I looked over his shoulder and registered what I was seeing: a DoorDash order, website logins, an online purchase, Maps hits for Cassie’s Cuppa, the deli, the strip club outside town.

“Wait… are you saying our phones record this for everybody?” I asked.

“Yep,” Aloha said. “You can even get text and call transcripts if you have an Android.”

“Not for other kinds of phones?” I asked.

Aloha shook his head.

Damn. Blake had an iPhone.

But still. The email was another piece of the puzzle. A missing piece, but a piece just the same.

We just had to find it.

Chapter 13

Daisy

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