“Um, Davis had a girlfriend, but they broke up last November-ish. He has a blog, but hasn’t updated anything since his dad disappeared. I don’t know. In the blog, he seems . . . sweet, I guess.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve used your internet detective skills to determine that Davis is sweet. Holmesy, I love you, but find some info on the case.”
So I did. The Indianapolis Star wrote about Russell Pickett a lot because his company was one of Indiana’s biggest employers, but also because he was constantly getting sued. He had some huge real estate deal downtown that devolved into multiple lawsuits; his former executive assistant and Pickett Engineering’s chief marketing officer had both sued him for sexual harassment; he’d been sued by a gardener on his estate for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act; the list went on and on.
In all those articles, the same lawyer was quoted—Simon Morris. Morris’s website described his company as “a boutique law firm focusing on the comprehensive needs of high-net-worth individuals.”
“Can I get a charge off your computer BTW?” She actually said the letters B-T-W, which I wanted to point out required more syllables than just saying “by the way,” but she was clearly locked into something. Without ever taking her eyes from her phone, Daisy reached into her purse, pulled out a USB cable, and handed it to me. I plugged it into my laptop, and she just mumbled, “That’s better, thanks; I’m really close here.”
I noticed Holly had come with my to-go order. I cracked the plastic container and grabbed a couple fries before returning to my investigation of Pickett. I stumbled onto a website called Glassdoor, where current and former employees could review the company anonymously. Observations about Russell Pickett himself included:
“The CEO is skeezy as hell.”
“Russell Pickett is a straight-up megalomaniac.”
“I’m not saying Pickett executives make you break the law, but we do frequently hear executives start sentences with ‘I’m not saying you should break the law, but . . .’”
So that’s the kind of guy Pickett was. And although he’d gotten around all the lawsuits by settling them, the criminal investigation wouldn’t go away. From what I could gather, the company had bribed a bunch of state officials in exchange for contracts to build a better sewer overflow system in Indianapolis.
Fifteen years ago, the government had set aside all this money to clean up the White River by building more sewage retention pools and expanding this tunnel system that runs underneath downtown, diverting a creek called Pogue’s Run. The idea was that within a decade, the sewers would stop dumping into the river every time it rained. Pickett Engineering had gotten the initial contract, but they’d never finished the work, and it had gone way over budget, so the government pulled the contract from Pickett’s company and allowed anyone to bid on finishing the project.
And then, even though they’d done a terrible job the first time, Pickett Engineering won the new contract—apparently by bribing state officials. Two of Pickett’s executives had already been arrested and were believed to be cooperating with the police. Pickett himself hadn’t yet been charged, although an editorial in the paper from three days before his disappearance criticized the authorities: “The Indianapolis Star Has Enough Evidence to Indict Russell Pickett; Why Don’t the Authorities?”
“Annnnddd it’s happening. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Just waiting for the zip to download, yes, and opening, and . . . oh, hell yes.” Daisy finally looked up at me and smiled. Her front teeth were a little crooked, turning toward each other, and she was self-conscious about it, so she rarely smiled all the way. But now I could even see her gums. “Can I do the thing, like, at the end of Scooby-Doo and tell you how I did it?”
I nodded.
“So the first article about Pickett’s disappearance refers to a police report obtained by the Indianapolis Star. That story was written by Sandra Oliveros, with additional reporting by this dude Adam Bitterley, which is a bummer of a last name, but anyway, he’s clearly the junior guy on the story, and a quick google shows him to be a recent IU grad.
“So I made up an email address that looks almost exactly like Sandra Oliveros’s and emailed Bitterley an order to send me a copy of the police report. And he replied, like, ‘I can’t; I don’t have it on my home computer,’ so I told him to go the hell into the office and email it to me, and he was like, ‘It’s Friday night,’ and I was, like, ‘I know it’s Friday night, but the news doesn’t stop breaking on the weekend; do your job, or I’ll find someone else who will do it.’ And then he went to the fucking office and emailed me scans of the fucking police report.”
“Jesus.”
“Welcome to the future, Holmesy. It’s not about hacking computers anymore; it’s about hacking human souls. The file is in your email.” Sometimes I wondered if Daisy was my friend only because she needed a witness.
As the file downloaded, I glanced away from my screen, through the slits of the blinds to the parking lot outside. A streetlight was shining right at us, which made everything around it look pitch-black.
I was trying to shake off a thought, but as I opened the police report and began scanning through it, the thought grew.
“What?” Daisy asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and tried again to swallow the thought. But I couldn’t. “Just, won’t he get in trouble? Like, when he goes into work on Monday, won’t he ask his boss why she needed that file, and then won’t she be, like, ‘What file,’ and then won’t he get in trouble? Like, he could get fired.”
Daisy just rolled her eyes, but I was in the spiral now, and I started to worry that Mr. Bitterley would figure out how to track down Daisy, that he would have her arrested, and maybe me, too, since I was probably an accomplice. We were just playing a silly game, but people go to prison all the time for lesser crimes. I imagined a news story—girl hackers obsessed with billionaire boy.
“He’ll find us,” I said after a while.
“Who?” she asked.
“The guy,” I said. “Bitterley.”
“No, he won’t; I’m on public Wi-Fi in an Applebee’s using an IP address that locates me in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. And if he does find me, I’ll say you had no idea what I was doing, and I’ll go to prison for you, and in thanks for my refusal to snitch, you’ll get my face tattooed on your bicep. It’ll be great.”
“Daisy, be serious.”
“I am being serious. Your skinny little bicep needs a tattoo of my face. Also, he’s not going to get fired. He’s not going to find us. At most, he will learn an important lesson about phishing in a way that’s minimally harmful to his life and the company he works for. Calm down, all right? I gotta get back to this very important argument I’m having with a stranger on the internet about whether Chewbacca is a person.”
Holly came by with the check, an unsubtle reminder that we’d overstayed our welcome. I put down the debit card Mom had given me—Daisy never had any money and my mom let me charge twenty-five dollars a week as long as I kept straight As. Beneath the table, I rubbed my thumb against the callus of my finger. I told myself that Daisy was probably right, that everything would probably be fine. Probably.
Daisy didn’t look up from her phone, but said, “Seriously, Holmesy. I won’t let anything happen. I promise.”
“You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not something you wield, you know?”
“Hell yes, it is,” she mumbled, still sunk into her phone. “Ugh, God, now this guy is saying I write bestiality.”
“Wait, what?”
“Because in my fic, Chewbacca and Rey were in love. He’s saying it is—and I am quoting—‘criminal’ because it’s interspecies romance. Not sex, even—I keep it rated Teen for the kids out there—just love.”