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I nod. The Saint Phil’s alumni and student portals have layers of security to protect the identity and personal information of the girls who attend—girls from wealthy, powerful families, ripe for kidnapping and blackmail. The tight security doesn’t end at graduation.
“Someone used my log-in information to access the site from my tablet. Not just once, Lexie…dozens of times over the last six months.”
“Are you sure?” It’s such a dumb question, but my mind is racing, and I can’t think of something smarter to ask.
“I’m sure. And I’m also sure it was Marco.”
My heart lurches, but she’s composed—more composed than I am.
Other than her back holding up the door and the dark circles, she doesn’t seem out of sorts, like she’s been, on and off, the last couple of months. Maybe the medicine is helping. I take a deep breath. “How did you pinpoint it to Marco?”
“He’s the only one besides the staff who has access to the tablet. It’s the only device I own that isn’t connected to the Huntsman network. I use it for personal matters that I don’t want the IT people to get a glimpse of, or for things like the Saint Phil’s site, where we’re prohibited from logging in to the secure areas on public computers.”
I don’t mention how there’s a connection between the last few trafficking victims and Saint Phil’s. I don’t want to alarm her. But it’s all I can think about—that and the photo.
“Did you ask him about it?”
She shakes her head. “He’s still away. And I want a plan in place before I confront him.”
Her voice is strong and controlled, without sadness, disbelief, or even anger. It’s almost eerie how calm she is in the face of what is still new information.
“The Saint Phil’s thing is troubling, but I still don’t see the connection to the caterer.”
“Once I discovered that he’d been using my log-in, for months, I purchased a new phone and a device with cellular service so that I didn’t need to log in to the Wi-Fi at home. I kept digging and digging. I found all kinds of incriminating evidence, although I’m not a tech genius, so I’m sure there’s more to find.”
She’s on a mission. That and the meds are probably what’s keeping her from a meltdown. I can’t stand talking to her from across the room. “It’s lonely over here,” I tease, patting the seat near my desk.
“Tell me about the caterer,” I continue when it becomes clear that she needs the distance. I don’t know why she feels she needs it, but it makes my heart hurt.
“A week or so before we went to the US, Marco asked me a bunch of questions about the caterer. In hindsight, he didn’t ask about things you might expect, like what kind of food she was serving or what time we were eating. Things men want to know.” She balls her hands into tight fists. “He wanted the name of the company and where it was located—that sort of information.” She pauses. “Details that weren’t readily available because it had all gone through Julia, the party planner. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“It’s a little odd.” But not so odd that she would have been suspicious at the time.
“I had Freitas, in IT, search a week’s worth of my emails to Julia—in the backup system. I recognized everything he pulled up—they were all still in my inbox. Except for the one canceling the caterer.”
My mouth is dry, and I take a few sips of water, which threatens to come right back up.
“You think he’s been using your tablet for nefarious purposes, but he didn’t use it to send the email to the caterer?”
“I think that son of a bitch wanted that email to be found. He deleted it from my outbox, but it had been backed up. He expected Rafael to have someone check my email and the backup server for evidence that I’d made a mistake. What Marco didn’t count on was that Rafael never considered the possibility. He never thought it had been my mistake.”
She stalks over to me and pulls a prescription bottle out of her pocket and spills the contents onto the desk. Her hand is shaking. Either the sense of calm never existed or I couldn’t see her trembling from across the room.
“Is this your antianxiety medicine?”
She takes out her phone and looks for something. After a few moments, she hands me the phone. “That’s the pill I was prescribed. It’s not the same as these, is it?”
I look carefully from the screen to the pills on the desk. They look the same to me. I enlarge the image, and that’s when I see the difference. The pills on the desk have a pale-blue dot at the base of the letter P. The pill on the screen has a mint-green dot.
“It looks like a blue marking on this one, and a green on this.” I gaze at her. “Is it possible it’s the way it shows up on the screen?”
“It’s not,” she replies, taking back the phone. “Look at this. Five milligrams have the green dot, ten the purple, twenty is red, and thirty is blue.”
“Someone switched the pills,” I whisper, my stomach in knots.
“To something six times greater than what I was prescribed.” Her voice is low, and that eerie sense of calm has returned.
“It could have killed you.”
