Set You Free

by Jeff Ross

  “You don’t know Tom,” I say. “He wouldn’t ever do anything. You don’t know him at all.”

  Detective Evans stands. “I think you need to ask yourself, Lauren, how well do you know your brother?”

  “Better than…”

  Detective Evans holds her hand up, and for some reason I stop speaking. Like it’s not my house. Like I’m not in the right. Like I’m nothing but a stupid kid who has no idea what is going on in the big bad world.

  “Really know him, Lauren. Stand outside of everything you think you know about your brother. All the memories and time spent together. Stand outside all of that and look at him as we are. And then tell me, how well do you know him right now?”

  “I know him,” I say. “I can’t step outside all of that because he’s my brother and I know him.”

  “So where is he?” Detective Evans opens the door. “Please call us if you think of anything about Benjamin, or if Tom contacts you.”

  As she’s closing the door, I yell, “No one calls him Benjamin!”

  FIFTEEN

  TUESDAY

  I’m halfway to school on Tuesday morning when I notice what looks like an unmarked police car following me. There’s every chance I’m being paranoid. With reason, of course. But I turn down an alley anyway and pop out on the street behind the school rather than in front of it. I sit down on a bench and pretend to be looking at my phone. Sure enough, half a minute later the same car rolls past, sporting tinted windows and those little police-issued hubcaps.

  I stand as it passes, my head still down. I text Grady: Need to meet with you.

  I begin walking back around to the front of the school. I’m almost at the side door when my phone buzzes. There’s a text from a number I don’t recognize.

  Starbucks, 5th and Main, twenty min? G.

  K, L., I text back, then slip my phone into a pocket and enter the school.

  “I thought I could do it,” I tell the school office administrator, Mrs. Rankin. “But after all that’s happened…”

  “Oh, I know, dear,” Mrs. Rankin replies. Of course she knows. Everyone knows everything. My family is an open book as far as people are concerned. The freak son. The daughter who used to be so good, but now…

  “And last night someone threw a brick through my window. I think I should be home with my mom.”

  “Of course you should,” Mrs. Rankin says. “I’ll inform your teachers. You go home. Be with your family.”

  “Thank you.”

  As I’m leaving, I spot JJ Carter. Luckily, he doesn’t see me. He has his hand on a locker, blocking in Katie White. Katie is smiling, but I’ve heard her talk about how JJ scares her. How he’s too aggressive sometimes, and even though she likes him and everything, she can’t see herself ever dating him.

  I keep my head down, clutching my backpack to my chest, hoping I don’t see anyone who feels the need for a conversation. The bell rings, and the halls are a cacophony of motion. By the time I push through the front doors, the school sounds as though it might explode behind me.

  Outside, I feel an unbelievable sense of freedom. I inhale deeply. It’s warm and sunny, and the very thought of being inside a classroom is torture.

  The Starbucks is a fifteen-minute walk away. I look behind me now and then, expecting to see the unmarked car. When I don’t, I wonder if whoever is tracking me went off to do some actual work after I entered the school.

  Starbucks is filled with a midmorning mom-and-kid crowd. There are strollers everywhere and tired-looking women exchanging longer-than-necessary hugs.

  “A large coffee, please,” I say, defying the Starbucks ridiculous size designation.

  The girl behind the counter examines me, then says, “Lauren?”

  I don’t know who she is. “Um, yeah.”

  “Grady asked me to take your phone. And for you to meet him around back.”

  “Oh,” I say, looking down at my phone. “Really?”

  “I promise I won’t do anything with it.”

  The girl has thick round earrings, and colorful tattoos creeping around the edge of her blouse. Her hair is streaked with purple.

  “Okay.”

  She hands me a coffee, and I slip my phone across the counter to her.

  “This place will be packed for the next couple of hours,” the girl whispers.

  “Okay,” I say, though I’m not certain why this matters.

  I thank her and back away from the counter. I squeeze past a couple of mothers jiggling their babies and step out into the back alley.

  An old Ford Fiesta pulls up, and the front passenger door opens. I lean down to look inside.

  “Come on,” Grady says.

  “What’s with all the spy stuff?”

  “Hurry,” he says.

  I get into the car and Grady pulls away as I’m closing the door. “This one smells okay,” I say. Grady signals left, away from the Starbucks. As we pull into the intersection, I spot the unmarked cruiser idling across the street.

  Grady sniffs. “Just a hint of wet dog.”

  “So, seriously, what’s with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?”

  “You’re being followed, right?”

  “Sure, but why couldn’t you meet me inside? And handing my phone over to that girl…who is she?”

  Grady shifts in his seat, sighing heavily. “Look, here’s the thing. I’m, um, known to the police.”

  “Oh,” I say. My hand goes to the door handle.

  “Not because I’m a degenerate, but because my dad’s in jail.”

  I say, “Okay.”

  “You’re not going to ask what for?” He glances at me.

  “You’re not your dad. So…whatever.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. Drunk driving. Hit a pedestrian. Pedestrian died. Dad drives away.”

  “Hmmm,” I say.

  “He claims he didn’t hit anyone. I believe him. I mean, he shouldn’t have been driving drunk. Obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But if he’d known he’d hit someone, he would have stopped. He’s not some asshole who doesn’t take responsibility for his actions. There’s a real chance it wasn’t him. Like, there was a dent on the car, but they couldn’t really prove that it was made by the guy he allegedly hit.”

  “So why is he in jail?” I ask.

  “Someone claimed to have seen the whole thing happen. But my dad was driving a Civic. Everyone drives Civics. It was a Friday night, so there were tons of cars out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So that’s awesome.” We drive in silence for a minute. “And also I might have been busted for hacking once.”

  I don’t respond. Grady glances at me, then does that shoulder-shrug thing again.

  “It was stupid. I was trying to reset the heat and lights at my middle school. Just to see if I could do it. I didn’t want to go to school that day, so I tried to jack the heat to sauna levels.”

  “You were hacking into a school’s computers when you were in the eighth grade?”

  “Seventh. Luckily, the police figured I was smart, but not that smart, and they let it go. After that I learned how to not get caught.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Do you have any pets?”

  “Pets?”

  “Cat or dog or ferret or whatever?”

  “Two cats,” Grady says.

  “Are they okay?”

  “What?”

  “Like, no one has ever put
them in a microwave or bent a little paw too far?”

  “What? No.”

  “Okay, good.”

  Grady shakes his head. “Why are you asking about my cats?”

  “Because I’ve heard psychopaths usually start out messing around with Fluffy or Patches before moving on to humans. If your cats are all right, then things should be okay for me.”

  “You’re really out there,” Grady says after a pause.

  “I’ve heard that before,” I say. The sun is warming the car in a nice way. Even the slight hint of wet dog is all right.

  “So what did you want to talk about?” Grady stops the car in front of a park. The few mothers who aren’t packed into a Starbucks are here, watching their kids eat sand.

  I take a long drink of coffee and remember what the homeless guy said about the sweetness of the heat hitting your tongue and the top of your mouth. “Detective Evans totally believes Tom had something to do with Ben’s disappearance.”

  “That seems to be the assumption,” Grady says.

  “Have you thought of anywhere else Tom might be?”

  “We mostly hung out at the warehouse and the record store.”

  “How did you arrange that?” I say, hand-cranking my window down. “Tom doesn’t have a cell or anything. Did you call my house?”

  “No, I don’t even know the number. Tom would stop by the wrecker’s and we’d set up a time, or, if I wasn’t busy, we’d just go over.”

  “He never called you?”

  “No,” Grady says. “When I didn’t see him for a while, I would worry. I’d start to think something had happened. Then he’d show up and we’d play music.”

  A kid falls off a play structure, and five mothers run to the scene. “He could be anywhere now,” I say.

  We sit in silence, me looking out the window at the kids on the play structure, Grady gazing at a cell phone in his hand.

  I finally say what I met with Grady to say. “The way I see it, we can spend a ton of time trying to find Tom and likely be no further ahead.”

  “Or?”

  “Or we can give the police some options.”

  “How so?” Grady says, dropping the cell phone and looking at me. He has a gleam in his eyes. A little sparkle in the corners.

  “You don’t believe Tom had anything to do with Ben’s disappearance, do you?”

  “Not a chance,” Grady says. “Absolutely no way.”

  “Then we need to figure out who could have.”

  Grady nods, staring out the window. “So where do we start?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” I say. “Detective Evans told me there are three main reasons kids disappear. One, they take off. But that doesn’t seem like something Ben would do. Another is that someone has snatched them. Which we can’t rule out. I mean, it’s possible. I never noticed anyone watching Ben, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t. It would be awful, and I don’t even want to think about it. So…”

  “What is the third way?”

  “Family,” I say. “That’s number one.”

  Grady smiles. “The Carters,” he says.

  “The Carters,” I say.

  “You want to dig into the mayor’s life?”

  “And of his kids.”

  “What about Erin?”

  “Erin as well,” I say.

  “I don’t know if I want to start digging into the mayor’s life,” Grady says.

  “Right now I bet Detective Evans isn’t even considering looking at the mayor or his family. She’s only got eyes for Tom. We have to give her options.”

  “This is not the kind of trouble I’m looking for,” Grady says.

  “What did you say before about not getting caught?”

  “I don’t get caught because I don’t do stupid things like investigating public officials.”

  “They have their secrets, Grady. You know they do. I mean, who doesn’t?”

  Grady laughs. “Yeah, who doesn’t?”

  “Right now the police are focused on Tom. What if something else is going on? Detective Evans would never even know. We have to do this for Tom.”

  “For Tom,” Grady says. He rubs the steering wheel. “This could be really dangerous.”

  “What, you want a nice ordinary life? You going to go code the next Angry Birds or something?”

  “That’s exactly my plan. How’d you know?” he says. “I guess I’ll have to put that on hold.”

  “So you’re in?”

  “For Tom,” he says. “But we have to be careful.”

  “I’m always careful,” I say.

  Grady looks at me with a healthy dose of eyebrow-raised skepticism.

  “What’s Tom been telling you about me?” I say.

  “Nothing,” Grady says. “Nothing at all.”

  SIXTEEN

  It is down to one police car outside the Carters’ house. We drive a block away, and Grady edges in and parks behind a minivan in the shadow of a large maple. He pulls a laptop from the backseat.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Seeing who has open Wi-Fi connections around here.” He is typing and flicking his index finger madly across the trackpad. He pauses for a moment and turns the stereo on. Horns fill the car’s interior.

  “What’s this?” I say.

  “Otis Redding,” Grady replies. “ ‘Pain in My Heart.’ ” He looks at me. “I need music to work.”

  “And what’s the work we’re doing here?” I say, looking at the middle-class homes around us.

  “The work of finding out what the Carters have to hide,” he says. “And look here, there’s a network going by the name of Carters Corner. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Can you connect to it?” I lean over and look at the screen, my shoulder pressed tightly against Grady’s.

  “I should be able to in a second. A lot of people never change the default security setting. A couple of months ago, this hacking group managed to shut down a broadcast of the president’s State of the Union address because the TV station hadn’t ever changed a router from its default user name and password.” He opens a new window on the screen. “The router is like a door into a house. People feel that having a password on their computers is inconvenient, or they don’t have anything worth stealing. Yet here we are, half a block from the Carters’ house, and their entire digital lives are available to us.” He looks at me as people do when you’ve just told them you believe in giant salamanders ruling the world. “I mean, you wouldn’t go out and leave your doors open, would you? And if you did, if you left your door open and someone walked in, they would steal your things. A TV, microwave maybe, jewelry. Leave your Wi-Fi open, and you’re letting people steal your thoughts, your passwords, your entire digital being.”

  “I lock everything down,” I say, almost defensively.

  “People are getting better, for sure. But you only have to let your guard down for a minute.”

  “You’re scary,” I say.

  “Hey, you’re the one asking me to do this,” Grady says. He pushes a finger against the laptop screen. “It looks like they have a number of computers connected. And only one has a password. It might also be a police laptop.”

  “You mean by the computer’s name?”

  “Yeah, it’s called Mobile Unit 822. That doesn’t sound like the name of a personal computer.”

  “That’s Detective Evans—822 is the number she kept saying when she called in,” I say. “Everything
was 822 responding or 822 en route.”

  Grady looks up from the laptop screen. “Tell me about Detective Evans,” he says.

  “Like what?”

  “Is she married?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She has two kids, a girl and a boy. She’s really only a step away from the picket-fence-and-fresh-baked-cookie crowd.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  I think back to my conversation with Detective Evans on Sunday morning. “Paul and Emma.”

  “Good.” Grady types something. “What else?”

  “Um, she went to school here.”

  “Which school?”

  “Leslie, I think. She said something about living in that part of town.”

  “Okay.” He types some more. “What else? How old is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He moves his finger around on the trackpad. “Thirty-eight,” he says. “How old are her kids?”

  “Ten and twelve. How do you know how old she is?”

  “There’s an article here from when she made detective. A local-paper thing. What else do you know?”

  I think, but nothing comes. “Nothing, I guess.”

  Grady is typing away. I close my eyes and breathe in the fresh spring air.

  “56 Legacy Avenue,” he says.

  “What’s that?” I ask without opening my eyes.

  “Her address. It’s under her husband’s name. Andrew Richler. She didn’t take his last name.” Grady is silent for a moment. The only sounds are the tapping of his fingers on the keys and birds calling to one another from the nearby trees.

  “Ah, there we are,” he says. “Got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “Into her computer.”

  I open my eyes and lean against his shoulder again. The desktop screen has changed. The wallpaper is now the police-force logo, and the cursor is moving around on its own.