Dial Em for Murder (32 page)

A wave of panic knotted my stomach so tightly I fought back a wave of nausea.

She was dead.

Ms. Pierce had been skilled enough to hide her insanity from her Emptor Academy colleagues, but even she couldn't cheat death. Not when Force had delivered the final push. There was also one person Ms. Pierce hadn't been able to trick—not completely—and I clicked on the camera icon to see the world through the eyes of a dead man.

The first image on the screen was me.

It wasn't the most flattering of photos. My face was scrunched with annoyance, my eyebrows furrowed, as I glared at the screen of a bulky laptop, tuning out the mid-afternoon Starbucks crowd. It was strange seeing myself at the table where it all began. The girl in the photo deserved to have “BEFORE” plastered over her forehead in giant block letters. She looked blissfully ignorant of her own danger. Clueless that in a handful of minutes her world would shatter all around her.

Unprepared to be terrorized, hunted, and nearly shoved out of a third story window.

I zoomed in on my face, wanting to study the girl Frederick St. James had chosen to drag into this mess. My index finger traced the thin lines of frustration that bracketed my eyes, accidentally leaving a trail of bright green dots in my wake. Instead of fading or disappearing when I failed to give the Slate a direct command, a tiny book graphic appeared with moving black squiggles as it flashed:
Loading. Loading. Loading.

Loading
what
, I didn't know.

The book enlarged until it consumed the whole screen before transforming into a detailed case file. In the top right corner sat my unflattering high school photo, and beneath it was a stalker's treasure trove of information.

I skimmed the rest, which included every crappy apartment building my mom and I had shared and every single report card I'd received in school. My soy allergy. A list of my favorite bands, books, and movies. There was some information that I hadn't known about myself. Apparently my stern-faced elementary school teacher Mrs. Wolff thought that I displayed great maturity.

I wasn't sure Mrs. Wolff would stand by those words if she could see me now.

There was more—so much more—but the massive amount of text made the individual sections blur together in my mind. I scrolled down the page, pausing only to read a handful of other teacher evaluations, before I found the statement that Officer McHaffrey had taken from me right outside the Starbucks. Right beneath it was the file Detective Dumbass appeared to be compiling on me, although the Slate had helpfully added the words
in-progress
on the tab.

Numbly, I scrolled back up to my basic statistics and tried to click on my dad's name. The Slate refused to link to a new page. My mom's name required only a brief loading session before it spit out all of her financials, her tax statements, her job recommendations, even the scripts with her lines as Bored Waitress #2 highlighted in yellow. They weren't even
good
lines.

An unabridged account of her past was spread out before me, and yet the most I could find for Daniel Danvers was a copy of my birth certificate and a name-change form for my mother. She claimed to have taken his name simply because “Danvers” was better for her acting career, far more memorable than Smith. The one time I had pointed out that it made them sound married, she'd merely shrugged and said that the assumptions of strangers weren't her concern.

I had always thought it might be her way of trying to bring him back.

Not that it had worked, as evidenced by the section inside her file devoted to all her loser boyfriends.

My dry eyes burned as I forced myself to stare at the sweatshirts hanging in Ben's closet.

It was too much to take in. The names, dates, and figures merged into a tangled mess as I struggled to make sense of the information resting in my hands. To understand the full impact of everything laid out before me.

The Slate had access to information it shouldn't be capable of discovering.

Things that only law enforcement should be able to see after going through all the proper channels to obtain a warrant. Otherwise it was a total invasion of privacy that couldn't possibly be legal. It
definitely
wasn't ethical for me to be prying into other people's secrets this way.

So why had the old man given it to
me
?

For that matter, how had he even come to own it in the first place?

“Not good. Not good.
Not good,
” I mumbled to myself as I paced from the closet back to the bed. “You can't use this, Emmy. You need to make Ben's bed, grab your stuff, and resume your life as a normal,
sane
member of society. That means no checking into your mom's credit card history to satisfy your own curiosity.”

My fingers yanked on a corner of the bedspread, sending the photo album toppling onto the floor with a muffled
thump
. Every muscle in my body stiffened.

There must be something
important
that you're not telling me
.

I'd turned over Sebastian's comment so many times in my head that it felt as smooth as sea glass. It had sounded absurd when he'd first said it and nothing that had happened in the interval had changed my mind. If anything, the files on the tablet made it even more painfully obvious how little I knew about
anything
.

I curled into a ball on the floor, reliving those panic-fueled moments before Ms. Pierce had kicked down the door as an excruciatingly detailed set of flashbacks. The glow of the Slate's screen as I'd keyed in my Hail Mary of a password. The blinding flash that had spots of color spinning before my eyes. The extreme disorientation I'd felt right before the door exploded.

I'd assumed the Slate had been programmed to incapacitate me as revenge for all my failed attempts, but the Slate hadn't triggered any other emergency protocols. It hadn't instantly shut down in the library like it had in the computer lab for Audrey. The screen never blackened.

Instead, it had
identified
me with a retinal scan in an unlit room.

The blinding flash must have been part of the design, specifically created to compensate for the darkness of the room. A feature that had completely backfired last night. Although there was no way any tech engineers could have foreseen that particular flaw in the design, since most people went their entire lives without being stalked by homicidal private school teachers.

There must be something
important
that you're not telling me.

I could relate to the frustration behind those cold words. There was a hell of a lot that I still couldn't piece together. The Slate had identified me from the retinal scan. Okay, fine. Big deal.
Welcome Emmy Danvers
sprawled across the home screen had sort of spoken for itself.

There had to be a whole lot more to the story.

Instead of thumbing through over four hundred text messages clogging up my inbox, I clicked on the Sent folder.

I stared at the simple message, time-stamped for 3:17
A.M.
with a location listed at the bottom of the message:
Emptor Academy, Library. 302L.

I dimly remembered screaming, pleading, begging, as I scrambled away from a killer with a pixie cut. Nobody had heard me. I'd been certain at the time that my fate rested in the hands of whichever security guard happened to be making the rounds that night.

I hadn't considered the possibility that my Slate called in for backup.

My mind reeled. Why had it chosen Force? Surely he couldn't be the
only
person Frederick St. James trusted to watch his back in a brawl. Was the bodyguard/driver simply the closest preapproved person within a certain radius? What if Force had decided to put on his favorite tuxedo and catch a concert at the Kennedy Center? Whose name would the Slate have pulled out of its database
then
?

The closer I came to getting answers the more questions began stacking up.

The Slate buzzed softly in my lap as the inbox rose to 439 unread messages. Probably another frantic request from yet another mysterious texter. Another mystery to be unraveled. I was damn near drowning in them.

And
none
of it was pointing me in the direction of my dad. In fact, I was starting to think that the old man had given me the Slate as part of an exercise in futility. Judging by the lack of information in my dad's file, Frederick St. James had made zero progress tracking him down.

There must be something
important
that you're not telling me.

I reached for the photo album. Maybe it wasn't something that I knew. Maybe it was something that I
had
.

Carefully, I tugged the photo of my dad's left eye out of the protective plastic cover, trying not to leave any smudges on the edges. If the Slate could perform a retinal scan in a near pitch-black room, then there was a fighting chance it could handle
this
.

Before I could overthink myself into a tailspin, I snapped a picture.

The book icon enlarged to reveal a face with only one familiar feature.

My father.

His hair was lighter than mine, a sandy reddish brown that looked carelessly rumpled even in his unsmiling snapshot. The basic information on the other side of his face made my stomach writhe like an angry snake struggling to get into striking position. My heart thudded too fast. My hands trembled unsteadily.

That was preceded by a whole list of aliases that included Robert C. Redford and Lucas Rodriguez. He didn't look much like a “Rodriguez” to me, but apparently he hadn't gotten busted for it since there wasn't a record for any prison time. Of course, it was still entirely possible he was locked up in some hellhole where they didn't document their inmates. Or maybe he was sipping cappuccinos on the beach in some tiny Italian villa, reading a lengthy biography on Winston Churchill, and smiling as he watched his other
legitimate
kids frolicking in the waves.

My pulse increased into hyperspeed, like a caffeine junkie who'd just knocked back five shots of espresso.

I had found him.

It had only taken sixteen years, two untimely deaths, and my complete loss of faith in humanity, but I'd tracked down my father. The man who had walked out on my mom without a backward glance was only a phone call away. I sat on my hands in a desperate attempt to control the shaking. It didn't help though. Not when my whole body twitched with nervous energy. I'd spent over a decade daydreaming about a father-daughter reunion. I should have felt happier at the prospect of actually making it happen. The one constant in all those fantasies was that I'd
wanted
to find him. See him. Meet him.

I'd never imagined the possibility that my emotional range would ever be stunted to the point that I vacillated between panic, fear, anxiety, and an overwhelming numbness that left no room for enthusiasm. All I could think was that this information should have been my birthright. His face should have lingered over my crib for countless games of peekaboo. Nobody should have needed to
die
for me to find one lone picture of him.

Anger rose inside of me, flushing my cheeks and filling all the empty spaces inside me. I craved the heat of outrage, embracing it like a long lost friend. It made me reckless. Impulsive. Honest. I didn't claim to be an expert on law enforcement agencies, but I'd read enough romance novels to know that FBI agents weren't obligated to lie about what they did for a living. They weren't forbidden to get married or raise kids. They might not be able to discuss their cases at home, but they could say, “
Sorry, honey, work calls. I might be out of reach for a week or two
” if they had been handed a particularly big assignment.

If my dad thought his disappearing act would never come back to bite him, then he was in for one hell of a wakeup call.

I pressed the phone number before I could chicken out, holding my breath as the Slate sprang into action.

“Um, hi,” I said lamely, my anger deflating like a cheap grocery store balloon. “I'm looking for Dan . . . uh,
David
,” I corrected myself. “This is . . .”
your long-lost daughter, your best kept secret, your least favorite person,
“Emmy Danvers.”

I swallowed hard, feeling hopelessly unprepared to string complete sentences together. I ordered myself not to panic. Not yet.

“I've got a message from Frederick St. James. If he wants to hear it, he's going to have to call me back.”

I didn't think a perky “Have a nice day!” would be the right note to end a cryptic message with my absentee father, so I simply disconnected and clutched at Ben's blankets with trembling fingers.

I'd done it. I had called him.

I had chosen my path, made my bed, fallen further down the rabbit hole—insert cliché here—but with that decision made, the worst had to be over. No more stumbling blind. No more hesitation. From this point on, I could face whatever conflict came my way without flinching.