“Yeah, listen. Your cousin was just here in a black Hyundai Sonata, license plate Delta Charlie Foxtrot eighty-seven fourteen, rented through Hertz at the Atlanta airport.”
“Did he take anything?”
“I don’t know. I was debating whether or not to break in, but he left before I decided. He was in and out. Appeared to have a key.”
More creative cursing. “Wait. You can break into my apartment?”
“In multiple ways. Do you have a rod in the slider of your patio door?”
“Noooo.”
“Oh, good. That’s the easiest.”
Five minutes later, I’d hopped the barrier to Malone’s patio and used a flathead screwdriver to pop open his patio door. Once inside, I made a beeline for the spare bedroom.
“He’s taken the tower,” I said.
Malone cursed. “Did he take any hard drives?”
“What hard drives? I don’t see any.”
“That answers that question. I guess you’d better check my bedroom, too,” Malone was saying when I saw the walls.
At my gasp, the first thing Malone said was, “Are you okay, Stark?”
Ink and pencil streaked down the walls. It looked as though Blake had started with the bottle of peppermint essential oil and water that I’d left behind but then decided that wasn’t fast enough. I could deduce, based on the puddles on the floor and an empty pot, that Blake had repeatedly filled the pot with water and then thrown its contents at the wall.
And at the closet. The sticky notes now lay on the ground in mushy piles.
“He erased all your work,” I said.
“He what?”
“He threw water on the walls. It’s all gone.”
As much as I hated math, my heart ached for Malone. Countless hours had gone into whatever the hell he was doing with all those numbers.
Malone sighed. “And that’s why I usually keep everything on my computer. Cloud backup. Encryption.”
“So you have a backup?”
He snorted. “Don’t you worry, Stark. I have backups for my backups. I even have pictures of the walls, so that’s not as big a loss as you think. I won’t be reinventing the wheel.”
“Backups for your backups, huh?”
“Yep.”
“That’s sexy,” I said, my voice finding a new lower register.
“You got a thing for nerds, huh?” he answered with a lower voice of his own.
“Just one in particular.”
He groaned. “You are absolutely killing me, because I can’t come home to finish what we started. It’s a shitshow.”
“I figured,” I said with a sigh. “Anything else you need me to look for?”
“In my bedroom ...” he started.
