Page 73 of You'll Never Find Me

They stumbled as they exited the office. The security guard ran up the stairs, coughing, and said, “You’re the only two in the building, the fire department is on their way. Where’s the fire?”

Luisa said, “Fourth floor.”

Then the sprinklers came on and showered them and everything in Desert West Financial with a torrent of water.

Thirty-Two

Margo Angelhart

Jack came over to my house at nine Tuesday night with his laptop and a six pack of one of my favorite beers from Four Peaks Brewing, their year-round specialty Double Knot IPA.

“You really love me,” I said and grabbed the six pack. “Want one?”

“I’ll waste half of it. I don’t know how you can drink IPAs.”

“A meal in a bottle,” I said. My favorite beer was Four Peaks seasonal porter, but I had to wait until October for it. The Double Knot was a close second.

I pulled out a bottle, put the rest in the fridge, and found a Coors Light in the back—it’s what Rick drinks the rare times he drinks, so I usually kept some around. Thinking of Rick reminded me of our conversation today. It hadn’t been as bad as I thought it would be.

I handed Jack the can and popped open my bottle, took a long swallow. “Did you get it?”

Jack and Tess had been working with a PI in Florida to obtain the yearbooks from Jennifer White’s high school.

“Photos only,” Jack said. “The school wouldn’t give him hard copies. And even finding her high school was difficult—it’s nowhere on her employment documents, and Tess finagled it out of her college. The problem? She lied on her résumé. No Jennifer White graduated from this high school. But I considered your theory that Jennifer White isn’t her real name. Maybe she did graduate from this school, but not under that name.”

“Don’t businesses confirm all this? Run backgrounds?”

“College, maybe—get her transcript or just a copy of her degree. But unless she’s going for a job that needs security clearance, no one is going to confirm her high school information. They might not even ask for it.”

Jack opened his laptop and downloaded a large file from a cloud account.

“How does she get into college on a fake name?” I wondered.

“She’s a computer expert. Maybe she falsified her transcripts. Almost everything is digital these days and someone who knows the system might be able to do it. Or hack in? I asked Logan about her skills, and he said she’s more than capable. She has the ability now, but at eighteen?” He shrugged.

“Or someone did it for her,” I said.

Jack brought up the most recent yearbook. “This is the year she graduated high school, according to her résumé with Desert West. This coincides with when she would have started college as well.”

The Miami PI had done a decent job with the photos, taking clear pictures without any glare. The senior class had 520 graduates, and there was a total of 2,123 kids in the school. Jack first looked at all the W’s in all four grades and there was no Jennifer White.

So we started through the yearbook, looking at every senior female.

“Stop,” I said. “That’s her.”

“What?”

I pointed to a blond girl with thick glasses. Under the picture was the name Virginia Bonetti.

Jack stared. “It could be, but—”

“She dyed her hair darker and wears contacts. But that’s her.”

I didn’t doubt it. I pulled up my laptop and started searching the name while Jack continued to scroll through the yearbook photos. “She started at the school her sophomore year,” he said as he finished going through the yearbooks. “She’s not photographed or listed in her freshman year.”

“Okay,” I muttered as I scrolled through Google first. I had access to paid databases that most PIs used, but Google was always my first stop for basic information. “And she’s dead.”

“What?” Jack turned my laptop so he could read with me.