And he hadn’t said boo about it. He had to have figured out that my “tech expert” could help me access my work systems. But he’s sent no emails, voicemails, or interoffice e-messages.
“We should at least set up a group chat,” Mai was saying.
“Won’t work,” Ben said. “I’ve already blocked Wheeler’s number.”
I held up my hand. “What did you say?”
Ben grinned at me. “That I already blocked Wheeler’s number.”
I shook my head and looked at Mai. “Whatyousaid. A group chat. A chat.” My thoughts were coalescing, pulling on a memory I’d buried because I hadn’t thought it was important. “Devlin used to contact me through a chat app he asked me to download on my phone. I only kept it for a month because I thought it was creepy. It kept asking me for permissions I didn’t want to give it and trying to get me to pin my location for it.”
“Chat-o-gram?” Ryan asked.
“That’s it,” I said. “Have you used it?”
“No, but I’ve heard of it,” he answered. “No wonder you think it’s creepy. It’s known as the stalker app.”
“Use it a lot, do you?” Ben asked.
Mai and Kyle laughed.
Ryan took it in stride. “I would never use it because—Savannah’s right—it wants access to all your private data. And as far as tracking your location, most apps have the capability to do that, but Chat-o-Gram makes uncovering that information easy.”
A shiver ran up my spine. “You mean every time I responded back to Devlin on that app, he could see where I was?”
“If he knew how to set up that feature, which is literally just checking one box in the account information,” Ryan said.
I hoped Devlin hadn’t known. After all, I was just learning about it now, more than a year after using it. Then again, he had suggested the app. In fact, he’d insisted we try it. My anxious stomach roiled in my gut. I pushed away the thoughts and their implications. I would have to sort through those another day.
“If I deleted the app from my phone, could I still receive messages?” I asked. “Could they be sitting out there, somewhere on a cloud?”
“If you canceled your account, I doubt it,” Ryan said. “But if you closed the app without canceling, I’d think it would continue receiving messages.”
The five of us went silent and looked around at each other. Then we pushed through the kitchen door en masse and headed for the conference, all calling at once, “Pasco!”
31
BEN
Sunday afternoon, I stared across the conference room at the only other occupant. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like anything except Savannah,” Wheeler said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“I think you have me confused with Lang.” I pointed to the page we’d printed and hung on a whiteboard.Meet me on Sunday, 6:00 p.m.“But I’m talking about this. What’s his play?”
The message had been waiting on Savannah’s long-since-abandoned Chat-o-Gram account since Friday night. Devlin hadn’t sent a location for the meeting, so we had to assume the geotag that came with the message was his intended rendezvous point. Our scramble to uncover the lair where he planned to lure her had uncovered nothing more than a community center, a plain white building in a midsize town half an hour east of us and fifteen minutes north of the L&M office building. The center manager didn’t know who the group was that had rented the space or what their twice-monthly Sunday meetings entailed. All she knew was they were very polite, always paid cash, and never forgot to put away the folding chairs before they left. We could connect the dots, though.
We’d been over my concern about Devlin’s motive a hundred times, but that’s what prepping for an op meant.
“How many fucking times do we have to go over this?” Wheeler said. Apparently, Airmen didn’t have the same work ethic as Rangers. “He’s invited Savannah to one of his cult meetings because either one, he wants to threaten her in person to return the information and not go to the police, two, he wants to plead his case in person to return the information and not go to the police, or three, he wants to recruit her to his cult. In which case, she’ll be inclined to return the information and not go to the police.”
“Or he could just want to win her back,” Bloom said as he entered the room, carrying a plate with two enormous pieces of pepperoni pizza.
“Should you be in here with that?” Wheeler and I said together, then looked at each other.
I glared at him, and he grinned at me.
“You two ever think of getting a room?” Bloom asked. “I’m staying over here, away from the papers and computers and whiteboards. Pizza’s in the kitchen, if you want some.”
