her, Persey picked up the basics of what had happened since the moment Leah had ushered them into the Office Drones room six hours ago.
Six hours. They’d been inside the escape room gamut for six hours. And Persey would never be the same.
It had, apparently, taken Leah a while to figure out what was wrong. Lincoln’s explanation had been correct—as soon as she tried to access the control room, she’d discovered the locked door. But with no reason to expect foul play, she assumed it was a glitch, and had gone first to her desk and then to the server room in an attempt to unlock those doors.
Soon, she realized that the system had been tampered with, at which point she called the heads of the Escape-Capades IT department and in-house security, both of whom were off on a Sunday. Forty-five minutes later, when security and IT confirmed that something really, really bad was going on, Leah had called 911.
It took the fire department a full thirty minutes to ax, cut, and saw their way through the many security doors that lead to True North, or as Persey would always remember it, the White Room. And they’d only arrived in time to save Persey and Neela.
There wasn’t much left of Lincoln Browne, just a splatter on a splatter as he and Mackenzie were joined together for eternity. Persey overheard a uniformed officer say that it would take months to sort through the evidence, longer to positively ID the bodies who went through that wood chipper. At the moment, all they had were Neela’s and Persey’s eyewitness accounts, and the video footage from True North.
But only from True North. The rest, it seemed, hadn’t been recorded.
Not that it mattered. True North included confessions by both Lincoln and Mackenzie. The room had lived up to its name—the public would now know that Derrick and Melinda Browne’s deaths had been the result of an organized campaign of theft and greed. If Lincoln had been looking to avenge his parents, he had succeeded.
Persey wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there by herself in the lobby when Neela was finally released from her questioning. She looked exhausted, escorted by a middle-aged female detective with sharp eyes and a sympathetic smile. She patted Neela on the shoulder before depositing her in the chair beside Persey.
“We’ll have an officer drive you ladies back to your hotel,” she said. “You’re free to leave Las Vegas whenever you’d like, as long as we have contact information on both of you.”
Neela simply nodded. She looked talked-out. A state that would have seemed impossible that morning.
“You okay?” Persey asked as soon as the detective was out of earshot. She might not have been able to save the others, but at least Neela was still here.
“I’m okay.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “I just keep thinking that I should be one of them. One of the bodies. The ‘evidence’ they keep referring to. As if they weren’t people. As if it shouldn’t have been me.”
“But it’s not.”
Neela turned to her. “Only because of you.”
“We got lucky.”
“Lucky…” Neela’s face clouded for a moment. “It was bad luck,” she said slowly, “that you ended up in all of this.”
“Not entirely,” Persey said. “Lincoln had been waiting for someone like me. Someone he could use.”
Neela paused again, chewing at her bottom lip. “But lucky for him, I guess, that he found you just a couple of weeks before this competition.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
Neela started to speak again, to ask a question, maybe, judging by the look of confusion on her face. But then she thought the better of it and clapped her mouth closed, leaving Persey to wonder what she’d been thinking.
A black-and-white pulled up in front of the main doors, and a tall young policemen with sandy-blond hair and an impressively 1970s mustache climbed out, triggering the automatic sliding doors as he strode up to the entrance. “Persephone?”
“Yes.”
He nodded toward his squad car. “I’m supposed to take you to your hotel. Neela Chatterjee, your ride will be along in a sec.”
Persey turned to Neela as the officer returned to his vehicle. “You’re going to be okay. This is all over.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
The question was so plaintive, so sad. Almost like a child who thinks Mom and Dad might not be there when they wake up in the morning. “Yeah, of course.” Persey tried to sound cheerful. “I’ll be in touch.”
Neela nodded pensively, then threw her arms around Persey’s neck and pressed