Rude Awakenings: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 2)

Chapter Eight: Al, Sunday

Al stared at Lauren as he tried to digest what she said. "What the fuck is going on?"

"Call her again," she said, grabbing her own phone. "I'll try Joe. One of them has to pick up."

He called. The phone rang and rang and went to voicemail. "Rachel, it's Al," he said when prompted. "We're here, at home, Lauren and me. Where are you? Are you with Joe? We need to know you're okay. Something happened that we can't explain, and we're hoping you might know something. Call me back as soon as you can."

He hung up just as Lauren started leaving a similar message for Joe. When she hung up she turned to him. "Anything?"

"No. Do you think... should we call the police?"

"I don't think we can. Not yet. They're adults and they haven't been gone long enough to file a missing persons report. Rachel's message may be concerning, but nothing in it suggests a crime has been committed. There's another reason I don't want to alert the police yet."

"What's that?"

"If Joe and Rachel have been involved in something criminal, I don't want to bring police attention to it yet before I can assess the situation. It's like the body we got rid of two years ago. His death wasn't our fault, but we had to get rid of it or be implicated in the aftermath."

Al remembered that horrible night. He remembered the weight on his shoulder of the body wrapped in bed sheets, then in a shower curtain, then in a rug. The psychological weight of the deed was much worse for him, though, and he'd had nightmares about it long after. Joe and Lauren had had it even worse than he had, because all he'd done was help carry it to the back of their van; the two of them had driven the body to a construction site Joe was overseeing and buried it in poured concrete foundation, all the while worrying about being spotted. They had much more to lose than he had, and part of the psychological weight he felt was the guilt of knowing this. Fortunately for all of them, they'd gotten away with it; the wife of the deceased had fled the country to escape possible embezzlement charges, and no one ever suspected that he himself hadn't fled with her.

"What can we do, then?" he asked. "I can't just sit here and wait for them to call back."

Lauren said, "There's one thing I can try. Do you know what Find My Friends is?"

"No."

"It's an app that Apple just released for its iPhone. It allows you to locate other users of iPhones if you know their phone number or email connected to the phone, as long as the phone you're looking for is on." She tapped a button on her phone and said, "I just hope wherever Joe is, his phone is on, and he's in range of a cell tower."

"It can do that?" he asked, amazed. "I thought only the police were able to ask cell phone companies to locate phones."

"Welcome to the age of decreased privacy," she murmured, watching her screen. She looked up at him with a gasp. "But good for us! Look!"

She showed him her screen, where a map was displayed, showing a red dot.

"That's Joe's phone," she said, pointing to the dot. "It's showing that it's in... Abbotsford?"

"What are they doing over there? Assuming they're together."

She shook her head in bewilderment. "I don't know anybody that lives out there. That's over an hour's drive away."

He leaned in to look closer at the map, and realized their heads were almost touching. He had to be very careful with himself now. He needed to keep his head in the game and concentrate on finding Rachel and Joe, and any awareness of Lauren as anything other than his friend had to stop. It was hard to keep that focus though, because he smelled that fruity scent again, and with that came the memory of the feel of her in his arms and, more recently, that blush in her cheeks when he mentioned wishing he could remember what they did, that rush of excitement that was even sexier than her being unabashedly naked in front of him...