no. He’s a butthead, but harmless. Do you think it could be some other Alpha Omega, and they’re covering for them?”
“I’m not sure they’d get their hands dirty for anyone but each other,” Laila observed thoughtfully.
“It does sound as if they’d be each other’s go-to man for help, considering the blood tie. No matter how tight they are with their frat brothers, I doubt they’d go to such lengths for anyone else—not for something like this. Is that your impression, too?” Mason asked Laila.
She appeared to think it over. “Yes. Unless they are old friends with someone else there, someone who is a part of their parents’ inner circle, too, but I can’t remember anyone special. I don’t think any of those friendships at the frat are that deep.”
“Maybe not, but do you think the opposite is true? Would a frat member cover for them?”
“That’s far more likely,” Laila said. “Given the family’s money and political connections, I can see one of their many hangers-on covering for one or both in the hopes of collecting a big favor someday.”
“Or an outright bribe,” Rosamie groused. “Any luck with the GPS data?”
Laila groaned. “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Then don’t waste more time on it,” Ransom said. “I’m sure Toya could tear it apart and inside out a lot faster. Since you mentioned it when you met her, she’s probably been working on it and is waiting for us to ask for it.”
“Why wouldn’t she just send it along?”
“So she can collect another favor for the cleaned-up data,” Mason said with a sudden grin. “The woman is an operator.”
Mason and Ransom’s guess proved true. Toya had been waiting for their call. She also collected another marker.
“Is it terrible I like her even more for that?” Laila asked Rosamie.
“No. Toya is a badass who knows her worth,” her friend said, holding up her glass as if toasting the absent woman. “If anything, it’s deepened my girl-crush.”
Laila pored over the data again. Unlike the jumble of code she’d been trying to decipher, the date had been meticulously organized into a spreadsheet with date and timestamps.
“He did leave the frat,” Laila said, comparing two clusters of data. “And it’s not on campus, more like ten miles away. I can tell by comparing it to all that cartoon penis data.”
She pointed to a cluster of GPS data points that were generated last month.
Rosamie wrinkled her nose. “Does it really form a penis?”
“A curved one, but yeah.”
Rosamie threw her head back, laughing, and tapped Ransom with the back of her arm. “Like yours!”
“Hey…” Ransom leaned way over, grabbing her chin to bite her on the nose. “You like that.”
Mason covered his ears. “La, la, la,” he began to sing. “We don’t need to know this.”
Laila laughed, but abruptly stopped, appearing surprised to find amusement under the circumstances. But she shook off the melancholy to give him a small smile.
Mason—the only one who didn’t have a second glass of wine—drove them all out to the GPS coordinates.
“It’s a bar,” Laila exclaimed with a scowl.
“And not a nice one at that,” Mason added. The Stag and Stars had the name of a classic English pub, but it more closely resembled a run-down dry cleaner than anything else. “I don’t see this as a place Dubey, or his cousin, would frequent.”
Joseph and his cousin looked more like a sports bar patrons—high-end ones, with the occasional rooftop bar to impress the ladies.
Rosamie’s face was dark. “Why would they come here at two-thirty in the morning? Especially when they would have to get behind the wheel to get here.”
“Not drinking. The last call at this dive is at two AM. “ Ransom squinted at the sign in the window. “Are we sure this is where they came? It’s nowhere near where Jasmine’s body was found.”
Laila pointed to the map they’d printed out. “They came to this parking lot, at least. It’s roughly where the coordinates dead end before they head back to campus again, and none of these other places seem more likely.”
She had circled this as the area Dubey’s phone had pinged. The radius covered the surrounding blocks. They’d already driven up and down the neighboring streets. The region was a jumble of apartment buildings and small shops that wouldn’t have been open at that hour.
Laila had figured out the range after calculating probabilities that left a wide margin of error, but the bar’s parking lot was dead center. “We should drive around and document the entire area, just