Dad ripped it open and read it aloud. “‘Your first clue is within the enclosed pages. You have twelve hours to solve it. If you can’t, the results could be explosive. Good luck.’”
I glanced at my watch. It was noon, which meant we had until midnight. “Let’s not waste any time.” I pulled one strip of paper from the massive pile and held it up to my face. It appeared to have been torn from a book. After inspecting several other pieces, I decided my first guess was correct.
There were no other markings or additional writing on the slips, and Nico had confirmed that the envelope contained no further clues. We were stuck.
I sat back in frustration, staring at the clutter on the desk. “How the hell are we supposed to get a clue from this mess? It makes absolutely no sense.”
Dad slipped his reading glasses on and turned his desk lamp on. “There has to be some kind of clue within the words on each strip. We’ll have to read them, front and back, until something stands out.”
I texted Liza to let her know that we’d received the first clue and that it would be a while before I made it back to her house. The last thing I wanted was for her to worry about me or to get upset thinking that I’d decided to leave her alone again.
We spent the next hour reading over the pages until my eyes blurred. Nico’s team even brought in magnifying glasses with lights attached to help us see better, but we couldn’t make senseof any of it. It seemed like Castro had torn random pieces of paper from multiple books and mixed them up in a box.
“Maybe there’s a common location on each page, a repeated word or something. If we can find a common denominator, we’d have our clue.”
Nico’s men rolled a whiteboard into Dad’s office where we scribbled words that we thought might be on each page. Some pages did have words in common, but unless we found them on every single page, we eliminated them.
I grabbed Dad’s laptop and searched for specific passages, which then enabled me to nail down the title of each book. “I’ve never heard of these novels, but perhaps they have a common theme or maybe they’re set in the same location.”
Within the next hour, multiple security guards joined us with their laptops. It wasn’t long before Dad’s office looked like the headquarters for the FBI.
The titles of the books were scribbled on the whiteboard, and each person chose a book and searched for anything they could find about the book itself, and even the authors and publishing companies.
Some of them had recurring themes or similar locations, like a beach, but we couldn’t nail down one common word, location, or idea for all of the books.
Nico, who was always very cool, calm, and collected suddenly stood, knocking his chair into the floor. “This makes no fucking sense.”
He was just as frustrated and exhausted as the rest of us. I imagined Castro, sitting in some dark cave somewhere, watching us on a closed-circuit TV, laughing his ass off. The clue had to be so obvious that we would never consider it as a possibility.
I walked to Dad’s desk and picked up the box, examining it closer under the light, hopeful that Castro had left some small clue on the box packaging itself. There was nothing, though.
No longer able to hide my anger, I chucked the box across the room. It hit the door just as Liza opened it.
“Whoa. Maybe I should’ve knocked.” She stopped in her tracks and surveyed the room, shocked at the transformation and the sheer number of people crammed into every corner. “It looks like you all need a brain break.”
None of us could argue with her. I glanced around the room. Every single person looked like they might pull their hair out at any second. We’d been at it for hours and weren’t any closer to uncovering the clue than when we’d first started.
“I agree with Liza.” Dad stood from his chair and stretched. “We need to take a breather. We can come back in thirty minutes and pick back up where we started. You’re all welcome to anything we have in the kitchen.”
Mutters of relief sounded through the room as the guys filed out of the office.
“I’ll keep looking, Dominic.” Nico stood and pointed at Dad. “You need to get some rest. The stress isn’t good for you.”
“Nico’s right.” I was worried about the sheer amount of stress Dad was under. We could figure this out without him being in the room. He needed a break.
“If you’re sure.” Dad made his way to the door. “I’ll lie down for a moment. If you find anything, let me know.”
Once everyone was gone, Liza shut the door. “Can I take a stab at it?”
I handed her a handful of shredded paper. “Have at it.”
Nico took Dad’s place at the desk. “None of us have been able to figure it out.” He gestured to the whiteboard. “We’ve tried to think of every possible connection, but nothing has panned out.”
Liza wasted no time, spreading the sheets out on the desk and bending the neck of the lamp downward so she could get a better look. Her face scrunched up, and it took all my restraint not to pinch her ass. She looked adorable.
Liza eyed Nico. “Can you hand me a highlighter, please?”
Without another word, she went to work on the sheets of paper while Nico and I stared on. I had no clue what she was up to, but Liza seemed to have found something in common between each sheet.
