It was stupid and unrealistic to think that I could keep her in the dark. Add my father to the mix, and the secret was out.
The look in her eyes when she’d said that the door was blown wide open… It’d flayed my heart open. She wasn’t dumb, and I wasn’t trying to treat her as if she were.
I just wanted to make sure I had something before I told her anything. A solid case. Plus, knowing about the adoptions, this was about more than just Maya, Elias, and Colter. It was big, andthe best thing we could do to honor Maya’s memory was make sure no one got away with selling children.
I grabbed the nearby water bottle and gulped it. “What’s going on?”
“Maya’s phone.”
“You got something?”
Thomas took a seat on one of the weight benches. “I thought you’d want to look at it with me, so I just glanced over it some.”
“What was wrong with it?” I asked as I dried the sweat on my face and sat next to him.
“Well, first the battery was dead, and then once it was charged, we had to get past the face ID. After that, we had to break into her cloud drive. Maya had done what she could to keep whatever she had… safe.”
“How’d you crack the face ID?”
Thomas pulled the phone from his pocket. “Actually wasn’t that hard. People don’t realize that face ID stores multiple angles of your face. Since Maya and Cora are sisters, there’s enough facial similarity that we were able to use some photos of Cora from different angles to train the system. Took about six tries, but it worked.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s either genius or terrifying.”
“Both.” He unlocked the phone and held it between us. “The cloud storage was trickier. She had two-factor authentication enabled, but the backup codes were hidden in her notes app—encrypted with a simple cipher. Smart girl.”
“What kind of cipher?”
“Nothing fancy. She shifted each letter by the number of letters in Elias’s name. Five positions forward. So ‘A’ became ‘F’, ‘B’ became ‘G’, and so on.”
The screen lit up with Maya’s home screen—a photo of Elias sleeping. My chest tightened. I’d fallen in love with that little boy.
“So what are we looking at?” I asked.
Thomas swiped to the messages app. “Text threads, mostly. But here’s the thing. She was paranoid about digital surveillance. Look at this.” He showed me the settings. “She had her messages set to auto-delete after seven days, and she was using Signal for sensitive conversations.”
“Signal?”
“Encrypted messaging app. Military-grade encryption, disappearing messages. The kind of thing you use when you don’t want anyone reading your conversations.” He scrolled through the contacts. “She’s got maybe twenty people in here, but most of the conversation history is gone because of the auto-delete.”
“Except?”
“Except what she screenshotted and saved to her photos.” Thomas opened the photo album. “She was documenting things, Jason. Look at this.”
He showed me a screenshot of a text conversation. The contact was listed as “C” with a skull emoji.
C:You tell anyone about tonight and you know what happens
Maya:I won’t say anything
C:Good. My stepsister will pick up the package tomorrow at 3. Don’t be late
Maya:What package?
C:The one that’s going to make us both rich. Just do what you’re told
The time stamp showed it was from two weeks before Maya died.
“Package,” I muttered. “Stepsister’s involved.”
