Chapter 12

As soon as North was out the door, Shaw went back to digging. Virtual digging. He trawled Mark Sevcik’s LinkedIn.

“Pari?” he called to the outer office.

No response.

“I need you.”

Maybe she was in the bathroom. So Shaw sent requests to Mark’s Instagram and Snapchat accounts. He went back to Facebook and tried to drill down into Mark’s friends’ accounts. Most were locked. The ones that weren’t were bots. Or maybe Mark really was friends with that many women who needed to bend over while wearing a bikini top.

“Pari?”

“I’m studying.”

“I need your help.”

“In a minute.”

“Right now, young lady.” Shaw grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut; that sounded way too much like his father. Based on the avalanche of sound from the outer office—drawers slamming, a plate crashing (it sounded like they were down to two plates, now), the shudder of the desk being pushed across the worn linoleum—something bad was coming.

She hung in the doorway, a stormcloud of dark hair and fine cheekbones and the bindi a screaming red today.

“You can’t have any pound cake. Research shows that consuming sugar while studying—”

For a moment, Shaw was tempted to argue—surely she could spare one slice, and his blood sugar was starting to drop—but he focused on the task at hand. “Is there a way to find copies of people’s social media? Like, are there websites that archive everything? So if someone posted something and then deleted it, a website copied it and kept a version of it?”

“How old are you?”

“Well, I really don’t think—”

“I’ll help you later. After finals.”

“Absolutely not. You get in here right now and show me—”

Pari gripped the jambs, tossed her head so that her hair cycloned through the doorway, and said, “You’re a dictator just like Mussolini.”

All this because she was taking World Civ 2, Shaw thought, and he wanted to shake his head. What would happen when she took jiu jitsu?

Pari stomped back to her desk—making an awful amount of noise for someone so tiny—and thirty seconds later, two emails popped up on Shaw’s computer. The first said: There’s no way to get back someone’s deleted posts unless somebody else saved a screenshot of them. Or you have access to their account—then you can get into the archive. The second email said, Please don’t tell my mom.

With a sigh, Shaw deleted both emails. If he had access to Mark’s account, he wouldn’t have needed to ask Pari.

He opened another tab and kept searching.

Hours passed. Hours of nothing but searching, searching, searching. And Shaw kept going; he had learned a long time ago that persistence paid better dividends than just about anything else. The sun coming through the window had died to pale copper, drawing long shadows across Shaw’s desk, his hands, the chair that North had rolled across the uneven boards.

He was ready to try another white page search, when the door to the outer office opened. A low voice spoke, and a thrill climbed Shaw’s spine. He straightened in his seat. He typed a little more forcefully—opening the New Yorker, now, and feeling slightly silly even as he did it. He checked his hair, and, as usual, it was a total rat’s nest.