“Yes sir,” Corbett said, backing out of Bradford’s office.
Ryan stared blankly out the window waiting for his laptop to finish booting up, as the persistent pattering of the steady rainfall on the roof filled his dimly-lit top floor dorm room with a hypnotic white noise that beckoned him back to the night of his parents’ death. He consciously shook it off; now wasn’t the time.
A brief scan of his email’s inbox revealed the typical swath of junk — offshore pharmacies, lurid invitations to meet singles in the Boston area, and plenty of the popular “(no subject)” emails from hacked accounts he hadn’t yet removed from his contact list.
But as he scrolled down the page, selecting messages to mark as spam, something jumped out at him. One of the junk mails with the “(no subject)” subject line had been sent by jared.ralston@ccf.org, J.R.’s old email account from his time at the Cleveland Clinic.
Ryan still used the same account that had been opened for him at age seven, and J.R. had been his first contact. But he hadn’t heard anything from him in years, and J.R.’s Cleveland Clinic account should’ve been deactivated a decade ago. Was it possible he was back there? Ryan knew he wasn’t in Boston any more. A search for Dr. Ralston on The Cleveland Clinic’s website returned no matches.
Suddenly a light bulb went off in Ryan’s head. He went right back to his email and fired off a message to michelle.tyler@ccf.org, which he inferred from J.R.’s address would’ve been his mother’s old email address. No sooner than the message had been sent did he receive an “undeliverable message” reply in his inbox.
For good measure he then sent another email to ryan.tyler@ccf.org. This time nothing returned. After a quick reload of the page, still nothing. With his heart now racing, he closed his browser and reopened it.
Hovering his cursor over the bookmark to his email, he closed his eyes and hesitantly clicked the left mouse button. After a long, slow, deep breath, he reopened his eyes. Once again there was only one return message — from his mom’s old account.
He immediately grabbed his walkie-talkie and began shouting for Dillon to come in.
While he waited, he searched the Cleveland Clinic website for a Dr. Ryan Tyler, on the off chance someone with the same name now worked there. No match.
“What do you want?” Dillon eventually groaned, bracing for another argument.
“I might have found something,” Ryan started, ignoring Dillon’s sour tone. “I was gonna try emailing Leonard Weinstien again about what he knew about J’Quarius Jones’s biological father when…”
“Wait,” Dillon interrupted. “Who’s Leonard Weinstien?”
“The guy who was holding the poster at the basketball game in Cleveland.”
“What? What poster? You never told me about that.”
“Yes I did. I told you about it a couple of days after the game,” Ryan said confidently.
“You did not!” Dillon insisted.
“Dillon. Really? Come on. You know how these disagreements go.”
“You think you’re always right,” Dillon scoffed.
“The conversation took place at around 9:30 PM, two nights after the game, right before you left Cleveland. You couldn’t talk long because your dad…”
“Guardian!” Dillon snapped.
“Fine, your guardian was only going to be out of the hotel room for a few minutes. I was wearing a Browns T-shirt that day that my mom made me change because it had a stain on the left sleeve from the last time I’d worn it. I had Apple Jacks for breakfast that morning, a chili dog for lunch, and spaghetti for dinner. The Indians played the Angels that day and won 6-4 with a three-run ninth inning comeback. BP announced disappointing earnings before the market opened that morning and ended up falling 2.4%.”
Dillon was silent on the other end. He hated when Ryan did this.
“Even back then I knew you didn’t know what I was talking about when I brought up the guy with the poster, but you’re so bull-headed, you had to act like you did,” Ryan said.
“Well,” Dillon hedged, knowing full well he was wrong but not about to admit it. “Whatever the case, I don’t recall your ever telling me. Just get on with it, and tell me who he is.”
“He was a lawyer in Newark from what I could find. He brought a sign to the game with an old picture of a guy that looked a lot like J’Quarius that he claimed was his dad. The sign read ‘Your father loved you,’ and it had Weinstien’s contact info on it. But that’s not why I called you.”
“Well did you contact him?” Dillon asked frantically, starting to hyperventilate.
“Yeah, yeah. A long time ago. I never heard anything back, so I gave up. I’m gonna try again. But there’s something else! I got a spam email from Jared Ralston’s Cleveland Clinic account tonight!” Ryan said excitedly.
There was a long silence.
“And?” Dillon finally said, crashing down from his previous high.
“That means his account is still active! I emailed my mom’s account and it was returned undeliverable, but the message I sent to my dad’s old account never came back! It must be an oversight by the cardiology department.
“If you can hack into those accounts, we might be able to find out how J.R. got his shares without buying them and how he ended up on my board of directors.”
“Hmm.” Dillon paused. A reluctant smile was growing on his face. He was actually impressed. “I can’t imagine it would be very hard. I’ve got a major project due in a couple of days, but I should definitely be able to get the passwords by the weekend. Give me the addresses.”
“One more thing before I give you the addresses,” Ryan said solemnly. “You can do whatever you want with J.R.’s email, but promise me you won’t look through my dad’s emails without my permission. I feel guilty enough looking through them myself.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dillon said, understanding fully. “No problem.”
CHAPTER 11
“I got ’em!” Dillon’s voice echoed off the walls of Ryan’s previously silent dorm room at two o’clock Friday morning.
Ryan reached a clumsy hand up over his head and groggily patted down his desktop, eventually knocking the walkie-talkie off onto the floor with a jarring crash.
“What?” Ryan mumbled, finally having seized control of his walkie-talkie.
“I got the passwords! Get a pen!”
“I don’t need one,” Ryan yawned.
“Are you sure? Come on, you don’t even sound awake.”
“I’m sure,” Ryan intoned lifelessly. “I’m pumped. Trust me. It’s just late. Or early. Whatever.”
“Okay. Jared Ralston’s password is CCFpassWord14. No spaces. C, C, F and W are caps. And your dad’s is RyanJr0316. The R and J are caps."
“Yep, thanks. Good night.”
“Did you get ’em? When are you going to go through the accounts?” Dillon pleaded, hopped up on his third energy drink of the night.
“I got ’em. I’ll look at ’em in the morning. Good night. Signing off,” Ryan said, turning his walkie-talkie off and closing his eyes, futilely trying to will himself back to sleep.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then twenty. He was kidding himself if he thought he was going to be able to get back to sleep. Reluctantly, after half an hour of tossing and turning, he swung his legs off the side of his bed, rubbed his eyes and let out one last yawn, before tugging down on the pull chain of his desk lamp.
Mail.ccf.org was his first guess for the Cleveland Clinic email server, which proved to be correct. Very carefully he typed in the username ryan.tyler followed by the password that Dillon had provided him. And, with surprisingly little effort, he was in.