Chapter 4 - WHAT THEY CAME FOR
“Stay in your apartment,” Celeste told her. “Lock the door. Call 911.”
Brooks was already on another phone.
Celeste stood so fast her chair rolled backward.
“I need to go.”
“You will,” Brooks said. “With us.”
The drive took eighteen minutes.
Celeste counted every red light.
Her apartment door hung crooked when they arrived. Local officers had cleared the rooms. Mrs. Alvarez waited across the hall in slippers, holding her elderly terrier against her chest.
“I took a picture,” she said.
Brooks accepted the phone.
A dark SUV.
Part of a license plate.
A man looking over his shoulder.
Celeste knew him.
Julian’s driver.
Inside, drawers lay upside down. Her mattress had been pulled from the bed. The framed photograph of her mother was facedown near the kitchen.
Celeste picked it up.
The glass was broken.
“They took the laptop,” an officer said.
Celeste crossed to her desk.
The top drawer was empty.
The black drive was gone.
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Not again.
Not another room destroyed while people told her to stay calm.
“Commander.”
Reed’s voice came from the doorway.
He had followed in another car.
Celeste turned away from him.
“I had it,” she said. “All this time. I had something, and I couldn’t even look at it.”
“You survived something terrible.”
“That doesn’t help tonight.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t. But blaming yourself won’t get it back.”
She pressed her palms against the desk.
Across the room, Mrs. Alvarez spoke to an officer.
“They tried to leave through the alley. But that little delivery truck was blocking them.”
Celeste looked up.
“What delivery truck?”
“Your friend’s. The woman with the red hair.”
Nora.
Celeste searched for her phone.
Six missed calls.
One message.
I have your soup, your ridiculous little cactus, and the thing you asked me to copy last winter. Call me.
Celeste sat down on the edge of the overturned mattress.
Last winter.
She had finally asked Nora, a former Navy communications technician, to see whether the drive still worked.
Nora had copied the damaged files before returning it.
Celeste called.
“Please tell me you still have that backup.”
“Of course I do.”
“Don’t open your door.”
There was a pause.
Then Nora’s voice dropped.
“Celeste?”
May you like
“What?”
“Someone just knocked.”
