Pretty Wanted Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Look, like I said before: We’re not here to solve the case. I want to know who she was.”
    As we crossed the street, Aidan’s face grew taut with seriousness. “I’m not sure we can separate out who she was from what happened.”
    Maybe he was right, but I didn’t need him to protect me from it, either. “Can you just help me find a computer?”
    He held up his hands. “As you wish.”
    I’d led us toward the Washington University campus. We were now walking through the gate and moving along a tree-lined path. The wide lawns on either side were frost tinged and covered with patches of snow.
    “Why don’t we try one of these buildings?” I pointed to an arrangement of brick-fronted buildings around a clock tower ahead of us.
    His eyes widened. “That looks like dorms. You’re suggesting we use the computer in there?”
    “Unless you have a better idea,” I said, feeling the giddy spark I always felt when I was about to pull a maneuver. Of course, breaking in was wrong—I knew that—but we had a purpose. As long as I could say that to myself, I could justify what we were doing. Unlike the apartment building, this situation called for Sly Foxing.
    He grinned, accepting the challenge. “All right. Let’s see your magic.”
    We circled around the building, doing our reconnaissance, looking for doors, peering through windows. We could see that the front entrance was flanked by a desk with a receptionist-type person. Even if it was a student, and it probably was, we couldn’t take a risk going in that way. The windows were tightly sealed, I could tell without trying. There were fire escapes leading to the second floor, but that seemed a little too dramatic for the circumstances.
    Finally, we traversed a parking lot and came around to a back door by the loading dock. A row of bikes was chained up to a rack and I instantly felt a pang. I still missed my poor vintage bike that I’d abandoned back in Paradise Valley during a scuffle with the cops. Tre had rescued it and kept it waiting for me, but even so, bikes were a painful memory of how this all started and what I’d had to leave behind.
    “That’s a magstripe device,” Aidan said, pointing to a black card reader mounted outside the door. “Old school. I can’t believe they don’t use RFID here yet. We can try to crack the programming code and reprogram the magnetic stripe, or we can break the wiring on the reader—”
    “That won’t be necessary,” I said, nodding toward the two girls coming down the pathway behind us.
    I was thinking of one of Tre’s lessons, which was that in a lot of cases human error was the simplest way in. Besides, we didn’t have time for Aidan’s schemes, not when two human-shaped keys were right in front of us.
    The girls were deep in conversation: “So, you know, the other night at Jasper’s? How he totally blew me off when Lara was there?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Well, he did it again yesterday in the dining hall.”
    “I can’t believe it.”
    “I know.”
    I removed my sunglasses and hat, and Aidan did, too, as we stepped right up behind them. Girl A removed her ID card and swiped it through the scanner. Girl B opened the door, barely looking over her shoulder as she held it open for us.
    In we went, like it was our business to be in the dorm building, which was basically a maze of white-painted concrete walls. To our left was a deserted laundry room. We ducked in there and let the girls get some distance ahead of us.
    “If you were a computer, where would you be?”
    Before he’d gotten kicked out of Valley Prep, Aidan was a typical college-bound senior. “Everywhere,” he said.
    That didn’t exactly help. My pulse was speeding, skittering along as I led us toward the stairwell.
    I had to remind myself that it was only trespassing. Not nearly as dangerous as breaking into a house, stealing money from the bitchy girls at school . . . or ripping off the FBI, for that matter. This was Pee Wee League. The