Catherine Nelson - Zoe Grey 02 - The Trouble with Theft by Catherine Nelson Read Free Book Online Page A

into the toilet, which hadn’t been flushed. I was also right about
the upset-belly thing.
    I stepped off the
toilet and stood beside it, pulling the collar of my t-shirt over my nose and
mouth. The kid in the bathroom came to stand beside me. We both looked down
into the toilet for a long moment. My phone wasn’t even visible.
    “Man, that sucks,” the
kid said.
    “I don’t suppose I
could talk you into reaching in and getting it, could I?”
    He slowly shook his
head. “Don’t suppose you could.”
    “All right, do you
have any of those yellow cleaning gloves?”
    He thought about it
for a moment then snapped his fingers and looked up from the toilet.
    “As a matter of fact,
I think we do.”
    “I’m also going to
need a plastic baggie.”
    __________
     
    “What’s this?”
    The salesman reached
for the plastic baggie as if to open it.
    I stood across the counter
from him in the Sprint store. There were two other employees and half a dozen
customers in the store, all of them eyeballing the baggie with suspicion, all
of them curious to see if the guy helping me would reach in and grab the phone.
    “I wouldn’t open that
if I were you.”
    “Why not? What
happened to it?”
    “It fell in the
toilet.”
    “Oh, okay, so you’re
worried about water damage. Did you try drying it out?”
    “Water damage is the
least of the problems.”
    He stared at me for a
long moment then pulled his hands away from the baggie.
    “Ah,” he said. “I
understand. Well, we can get you set up with a new phone.” He turned to the
computer and began punching some keys. “What’s your phone number?”
    I recited it.
“Actually, I have insurance. Can you order a replacement?”
    When I was seventeen,
I’d worked in a nursing home. I’d dropped my phone in the toilet there once. That toilet had been flushed, but that didn’t make any difference to the phone, only
to me when I had to reach in and fish it out. After that incident, I stopped
carrying my phone in my front scrub pocket and started carrying the expensive
kind of insurance on my cell phones, the kind that specifically covers damage
by toilets.
    He searched the
computer screen for a moment then looked up. “Yes, we can do that. But it’ll
probably be a week. Unfortunately, we don’t have any loaner phones to give
you.”
    “Of course not,” I said
with a sigh.
    Ten minutes later, I
left the Sprint store and got back in the truck. I drove east on Harmony to the
library on Council Tree, where I went in and found a computer. It wasn’t very
busy, and I didn’t have to wait.
    The internet has
revolutionized the power of information and ease of obtaining it. Some of this
has been good, but there are always two sides to every coin. Certain kinds of
crime are increasing at alarming rates because of the incredibly personal
information bad guys are now so easily able to find out about people. But, that
is a two-way street. People like me are able to find out just as much information
about the bad guys.
    My first stop was Facebook.
Bad guys usually don’t make time for jobs or court dates or other
responsibilities, but somehow they can always make time for Facebook. I don’t
have a Facebook account, mostly for the reasons I just gave, so I logged in as
my friend Jill who uses her dog’s name for all her passwords, no matter how
many times I’ve warned her against it. I did a quick search of the name
Danielle Dillon. Nothing came up.
    Playing a long shot, I
looked up Cory Dix. It was my very good luck Dix had a page, and he didn’t have
it set to private. A couple minutes of searching netted me his current place of
employment, the Starbucks on College and Walnut. I also learned he had a
girlfriend, a sophomore named Megan Rice. A little smarter than Dix, Megan had
her page set to private, and I didn’t get much from it that I couldn’t already
guess. Still, neither a job nor a girlfriend had been listed in the file I’d
been given on Dix, so I had at least made