“I HOPE SO,” JOE SAID. “If we don’t know who the culprit is in an hour, I’m going to have to cancel the show altogether. I can’t risk anyone getting hurt.”
Joe walked away and I turned to my friends. “Let’s go someplace quieter,” I said.
A few minutes later we were sitting in the Coffee Cabin, sipping iced teas. It was technically closed, but George had a set of keys and her boss didn’t mind if we came after hours as long as we paid for our drinks and left everything exactly as we had found it. It was a huge perk of George working there. We considered it our unofficial clubhouse.
“We need to go back to basics,” I said. “I feel like we’re not approaching this case from the right direction. The biggest problem in my mind is that we don’t know the motive. Is this culprit trying to get Brady’s show canceled? Are they trying to destroy Brady’s career?”
“How do we figure that out?” Bess asked.
I took a long sip of my iced tea. “I don’t know,” I sighed. “But I think the tweet is key. It kicked this whole situation into another gear. But if it’s not Joe and it’s not Tami—and I think we have pretty good evidence that it’s not either of them—how do we figure out who it is?”
“I have an idea,” George said.
We all turned to look at her.
“Have you guys ever heard of something called social engineering?” she asked.
Neither of us had.
“Well, social engineering is when instead of using computer programs to hack into someone’s account, people use their knowledge about that person to guess their password.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ned. I was glad he asked, because I wasn’t sure I was following.
“Well, a famous example is a few years ago, when a man in Florida broke into the e-mail accounts of a lot of celebrities, but he wasn’t a computer programmer or anything. He was just a really big fan. He read everything he could about the various famous people and learned everything he could—what street they grew up on, their pets’ names, and so forth—and used that to guess their passwords. He got into the private e-mails of about twenty movie stars. He tried to argue that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He claimed what he did wasn’t actually hacking, since he’d used only public information.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Bess said. “That’s like when Jessie at summer camp tried to argue that she hadn’t done anything wrong reading my diary because it didn’t have a lock on it.”
“I agree,” George said. “And so did the courts. He’s in prison now.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked. “That we should social engineer the Twitter account?”
“Yeah, but like reverse social engineer it,” George said. “Even though this person is tweeting in the voice of Brady, they can’t help but let aspects of themselves through. If we read the tweets, we can pick out information about the culprit and start to paint a portrait of him or her.”
“George, you’re a genius!” I exclaimed.
George blushed and shook her head. She always gets really squirmy if you try to give her a compliment.
“It says here that the Brady Owens—with a zero—account has made four hundred tweets,” Ned said.
“So what if we each take a hundred tweets?” I said. Everyone nodded. “Let’s go clockwise, so George, you take the first hundred, Bess the second, Ned the third, and I’ll take the last.”
“I’m glad tweets are only a hundred forty characters!” Bess said.
“Me too,” I agreed. “We only have forty-five minutes to do this! Start reading!”
We all went quiet and bent over our phones. If anyone looked at us through the window, they would think we couldn’t stand talking to one another, as we all ignored the others and stared at our phones. I quickly scrolled to the bottom of the fake Brady’s account and started reading.
It was exhausting reading tweet after tweet from this account. They were all so angry. Most of them just felt whiny, like the whole world was out to get the operator of the account. Explaining how to use the remote to my grandma for the hundredth time, one tweet read. “Feel like I’m stuck in Titian’s painting of Sisyphus.” I didn’t know the painting, but I did know that Sisyphus was a character from Greek mythology who is punished in the underworld by having to push a boulder up a hill over and over again, unable to actually complete the task.
“Hey,” Ned asked. “What day was the water main break on Maple that caused that flooding?”
“Oh,” Bess said. “Wasn’t that in early April?”
“Yeah, April twelfth,” George confirmed after a quick search online.
“Well, on April twelfth, this account tweeted that their street was flooded. ‘Beginning to look like Claude Monet’s Flood Waters here,’ ” Ned read, before looking up, excitement flashing behind his eyes. “I think that proves that the culprit lives in River Heights. This isn’t someone who came from out of town.”
“Wait,” George said. “Claude Monet’s a painter, right?”
“Ya,” I said. “A French impressionist.”
“Because I saw some tweets in my batch that talked about art too. Actually, one mentioned The Zebra Finch,” she said, “which is kind of a weird coincidence. Here, let me find it. ‘Waiting for the cable guy to come and fix my TV. Said they’d be here by twelve thirty. Two o’clock still not here. Feel like the Zebra Finch, chained to my perch.’ ”
“Mentioned art in a bunch of mine, too,” Bess chimed in.
“So our culprit lives in River Heights and is into art,” George said.
“More specifically, I think they’re into painting,” I said. “Did you see any mentions of sculptures or photographs in your tweets?”
Everyone shook their heads. “I think we need to go back to Erica Vega,” I said. “It feels too coincidental that the protests are being led by people who met in an art class and our culprit is passionate about painting. I think she knows more than she’s letting on.”
“Let’s go!” Ned said. “We have twenty-eight minutes!”
We quickly threw out our iced-tea cups, put the pad of paper back in the storage room, and placed the chairs on top of the table. The Coffee Cabin looked like we had never been there.
We headed back to the Arts Complex.
“Maybe we really got this case wrong,” I said. “Maybe Brady’s not the target at all. Maybe this is about revenge against the Arts Complex. Do you remember any stories about people not liking the complex or being mad that Joe Archer was hired to run it? Maybe someone wants it to fail.”
Bess, Ned, and George all shook their heads. “After the controversy over the design worked itself out, I thought everyone felt pretty positive toward it,” Ned said.
“Yeah,” George agreed. “All the blogs and everything I read thought Joe was a great hire.”
“Well, it doesn’t mean that someone didn’t feel slighted,” I said. “The board couldn’t know that Joe would want to leave his job in San Francisco and come back to River Heights. They must have interviewed other people.”
“That’s another thing to ask Erica,” Bess said.
We rounded the corner to the street the Arts Complex was on. Outside the theater, it was still jam-packed with protesters, but Joe’s extra security guards had moved everyone onto the sidewalk, so they were no longer blocking the street. All in all, it did seem more orderly. I knew that Brady was disappointed, but there was no doubt that Joe had made the right decision in assigning more security to the protest.
Fortunately for us, the back entrance that was closer to the visual arts side was clear. In the loading dock sat an unmarked van.
Bess hit me on the arm. “Do you think The Zebra Finch is in there?”
“Oh, maybe,” I said.
Bess looked like a girl staring at the boy she had a crush on. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly agape.
“You can stare as hard as you want, but you’re not going to be able to see it through the sides of the van,” George pointed out.
“I know, but just to know it’s so close . . . I can’t describe it. It’s like if you knew Sherlock Holmes was in that van, Nancy.”
“Sherlock Holmes is fictional,” George pointed out.
Bess sighed, frustrated.
I pulled on the complex’s back door and was surprised to find it open.
“That’s weird,” said George. “I thought we’d have to work a lot harder to get in.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Guess we’re finally getting a lucky break,” Ned said.
We headed down the hall to Erica’s office. George had looked up where it was before we left the Coffee Cabin. As we turned a corner, I spotted a man walking in front of us. He was sporting a suit and a baseball cap.
“Hey,” I whispered to George. “Doesn’t that look like that man on the surveillance footage who was avoiding the cameras?”
George nodded. “Same build, same outfit.”
“Look at his sleeves,” Bess hissed. I didn’t know what she meant at first. He was a good twenty feet in front of us and his arms were swinging as he walked, but suddenly it clicked.
“Gold buttons!” I said.
“Do they have anchors on them?” Ned asked.
“Only one way to find out,” I said as I picked up my pace to catch up with the man.
“Excuse me,” I called out. He didn’t turn around. I walked even faster and called out again, more loudly. “Excuse me!”
The man stopped and turned around. He had slight features and pale skin and wore glasses, but I barely looked at his face. My eyes went straight to his jacket. There, right in the middle between two other buttons, was an empty space.
“Yes?” he said.
“I think you lost a button,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the button we had found in Brady’s room.
I didn’t think it was possible, but his face went even paler and his eyes wider. I don’t know if it was the look on my face or that he knew where he had lost it, but after a second’s hesitation, he turned and ran.
I didn’t think; I just ran after him.
“Nancy! Wait!” I heard Ned call from behind me, but I had worked too hard and we were too close for me to wait.
I followed the man as he ran down the hall and through a door, which led to a flight of stairs. I sprinted down. The pale man was surprisingly fast, and I wasn’t gaining any ground on him. I could hear his footsteps echoing ahead of me. Behind me I could hear my friends hurrying to catch up.
We went down three flights of stairs until I watched another door open. I ran after him to find myself in a huge open space. It looked like it was the storage area; there were leftover construction materials, racks full of costumes for future performances, teaching supplies, and items I couldn’t identity covered in tarps.
I stood in the doorway and listened, but all I could hear was my own labored breathing as I struggled to catch my breath from my sprint.
I saw a flash of movement to my right and headed in that direction, picking my way through the jumbled maze. I couldn’t imagine where all this stuff had come from. The Arts Complex had only been open for a few months.
Suddenly there was a noise behind me, but before I could pivot to see what it was, something smashed into the back of my head and the world went black.