Page 60 of Hunter's Hidden Camera
Oscar smiles wide and grabs the condoms. “You never know what’ll happen. Right, Hunter? Right?”
As we walk out of the room, I nod my head. “Right.”
By some miracle, Sruthi’s software cracked the PIN to Nash’s laptop (0-4-1-5). Unfortunately, his Chrome browser, which probably stores the passwords to his e-mail and social media accounts and everything else, needs a password. Sruthi is running the software to hack that.
In the meantime, as we’re all huddled around her in the back of the comic book shop, Sruthi’s looking in all his file folders. I haven’t told her or Carter T. Douglass what’sgoing on, so they don’t know what it is that they’re looking for, just “anything suspicious.”
Sruthi says, “This all looks normal. Mostly schoolwork.”
She looks in his trash folder. It’s empty.
She gets up. “You look, Hunter.”
After snooping around a bit, I get more and more frustrated, because I don’t think there’s anything on here that will help me. We need to get into his e-mail.
I move out of the way so that Carter T. Douglass can look around. Maybe he’ll catch something that Sruthi and I missed.
After a while, he says, “This is interesting.”
“What?” I lean in.
“In the downloads folder, there are all these PDFs that he most likely downloaded from e-mails he received. Your brother may be going to college, but he’s not what I would call a good student.”
OverCarter T. Douglass’s shoulder, I take over the keyboard. Nash has actually been doing really poorly at school. There are letters outlining how the school has put him on academic probation, then how he’s at risk of getting suspended, and then another one that says he could get outright expelled.
He’s been lying to our parents for years, telling them how well he’s been doing in school, how of course he’s set to graduate at the end of this academic year. But his grades have been consistently bad. It’s surprising he’s lastedthislong.
Then, all of a sudden, the laptop screen flickers and shuts down.
“What happened?” I say.
Sruthi pushes us aside and tries to turn the laptop back on. It won’t.
“Either your brother’s laptop is fried,” she says, “or he had a security program installed where he could completely shut it down remotely.”
“If he did, wouldn’t he have shut it down a long time ago?” I ask.
“Maybe. But maybe he didn’t know it was gone until now, or maybe he couldn’t get to another computer to shut it down until now.”
“Or maybe he was so high off coke, it took him time to figure out what was going on,” says Oscar.
A worried look crosses Sruthi’s face.
“What?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she says, “he didn’t shut the laptop down because he was tracking it. Maybe there’s a GPS tracking program installed, and he’s been monitoring its location this whole time.”
All of us simultaneously look out the door of the back room and into the comic book shop.
It’s quiet out there, but there’s nothing suspicious, as far as we can tell. There’s just the bearded man behind the counter and a few younger kids reading comics off of the new-releases shelves.
Suddenly, Oscar’s cell phone dings, which makes all of us jump.
He looks at his phone. “Hunter! It’s Twyla. She forwarded me the address. It starts at 9.”
“That gives us a couple hours.”
“But it’s all the way in Riverside County.”
