Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(61)

Earlier in the fall, shortly after Beth had purchased her new laptop, she’d been sitting outside one afternoon enjoying the crisp fall weather when her phone had slipped out of her jacket. When she finally noticed that the phone was missing, Jenny had shown her how to use her computer’s Find My Phone app to do just that. A few minutes later, they’d located the missing phone, lying in the grass exactly where it had fallen. Dismissing the idea of talking to Ron, Jenny decided to go looking for the phone instead.

When Beth had first purchased both her phone and her computer all those months ago, she’d been completely inexperienced in their use and had turned to Jenny for help. Jenny had aided her roommate in setting up her devices, including creating accounts and establishing the necessary collection of passwords. Worried about possibly forgetting passwords, Beth—against Jenny’s advice—had written all of them down on a single Post-it, which she kept in the top drawer of the desk.

That night Jenny was supremely grateful Beth had disregarded her password-protection advice. With the Post-it in hand, Jenny typed in the laptop’s log-in code. On the start-up screen, Jenny noticed that Beth had eighty-seven new message notifications and thirty-five new e-mails. That seemed excessive, but intent on something else, Jenny ignored them. Instead she went straight to Finder, located the Find My Phone app, and turned it on.

Moments later the app had pinpointed the location of the missing phone, marking a spot on a map with a pulsing green light. Jenny was able to expand the map until she could see that the phone had to be right there on campus, probably within a matter of blocks of Conover Hall. Had Beth tripped and fallen? Jenny wondered. Was she lying unnoticed in a snowbank somewhere nearby, unconscious and possibly freezing to death?

Desperate to find Beth before it was too late, Jenny pulled on her boots, grabbed her coat and the laptop, and raced from the room. Using her own phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot and carrying the open laptop in her arms, she headed out of the dorm and marched purposefully across campus, keeping an eye on the moving red dot on the computer screen as she went.

Eventually the red dot on the computer and the green dot came together as one. Looking around, Jenny saw nothing—no sign of Beth and no sign of her phone either.

Standing on a stretch of cleared sidewalk and hoping to be able to hear the phone ring, Jenny dialed Beth’s number again. There was no sound, but when she looked around, she saw a small pink glow pulsing just under the topmost layer of icy snow.

Pawing through the pile, Jenny quickly located the phone and dug it out. When she looked at the glowing screen, she discovered there were now ninety-three new messages and fifty-four notifications. Was there a chance one of those might offer a clue as to Beth’s whereabouts? Joanna had brought the password Post-it along. Digging it out of her pocket, she keyed the proper code into the phone. Once logged on, she went straight to Messages, where she opened the first one, from someone named Calvin. What she read there made no sense, so she opened the next one. That one came complete with photos, and as soon as she saw the first image, Jennifer Brady realized she had just stepped into a cyber nightmare.





Chapter 26





It was almost ten o’clock at night. The kids were in bed, and the kitchen was clean as well. Over the course of the evening, Butch had made two batches of candy—fudge and divinity. “I can bake cookies in a crowd,” he had told Joanna, “but making candy is a solo operation.”

Now they were seated in the beautifully decorated warmth of their living room enjoying glasses of wine and a bit of adult conversation.

“So you took on the DEA and scored a win,” Butch said. “Who’da thunk it?”

Joanna smiled back at him. “Indeed.”

“So what’s next?”

“We need to figure out if Williams had anything to do with Madison’s showing up at Leon’s house prepared to knock him off. We might not be able to get either one of them on an attempted-murder charge, but conspiracy to commit might do the trick. Now that we know scopolamine was involved, I think that increases the chances that Randy was in on it, too.”

“That he was possibly the supplier?”

“Possibly,” Joanna agreed. “The problem is proving it.”

Joanna’s phone rang. A call at this hour of the night usually meant a callout of some kind, so she gave her wineglass a wary look as she set it down and reached for her cell. When Jenny’s face showed in caller ID, Joanna felt a wave of relief.

“Hey there, daughter of mine,” she said cheerfully, switching the phone to speaker. “What’s up?”

“Oh, Mom,” Jenny blubbered into the phone. “It’s awful. I don’t know what to do.”

Relief turned instantly to alarm. “What’s the matter, Jen?” Joanna asked as her motherly mind sorted through a list of dreadful possibilities. “Dad and I are both here,” she added. “You’re on speaker. What’s going on? Are you hurt? Did you have an accident?”

“It’s Beth,” Jenny sobbed.

Beth, Joanna thought. Thank goodness it’s not you. Aloud, she said. “What’s happened to her? Is she all right? Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know if she’s hurt or not. She’s missing, Mom. I came home and she wasn’t in the room. I’ve been calling all night long, and there’s no answer. I finally used the Find My Phone app. I found her phone and not her, but what’s on the phone is so terrible—” Jenny broke off and sobbed even more.