scrunched up her face again. “Maybe we should search the desk.”
Persey pulled open a drawer and rummaged through the contents. “Stapler, Post-its, pens, ruler. Seems pretty normal for an office drone.”
As Persey worked her way down through the desk drawers, Neela flipped through folders neatly lodged in a desktop file organizer. “Accounts payable,” she said, perusing the contents. “Vendors, employee expense reports, monthly statements. If these are even remotely accurate, Escape-Capades was rolling in dough last year before…before the Prison Break fiasco.”
“Find anything intriguing?” Wes tried to sound casual as he asked the question, but his intonation was too high. He stood in the cubicle next to them, and though he pretended to be interested in something, Persey noticed that he stood very close to the wall, as if trying to catch a glimpse of whatever she and Neela were looking at.
“Not really,” Neela answered.
Shaun walked by, heading for the next potted plant. “Just that whoever works at this desk had the date of the Brownes’ suicide circled on a calendar.” Had he heard that from the opposite corner of the room? Maybe he really was an android.
“I’m sure that has nothing to do with us,” Wes said quickly, then exited the adjacent cubicle and went to join Mackenzie at the water cooler.
“Which of course,” Neela said, dropping her voice to little more than a whisper, “means that it does.”
Persey liked the way she thought.
The second drawer had more personal items from its supposed occupant. A movie stub for the latest Fast and Furious franchise offering. Scattered packets of fake sweetener in pastel paper packages of yellow, pink, and blue. A singer-dancer audition notice for one of the casino floor shows. Several receipts, all from a bar called Shangri-La at the Lotus Hotel. A Halloween photo of two guys and two girls dressed up as members of the band Kiss, and on the back were written the names “Antonia, Jessica, Todd, and Brian.”
“Now this is interesting,” Neela said, a file folder spread open between her palms. “Credit card statements. Personal, not business. Five different cards, all maxed out. This person does not understand the usefulness and inherent pitfalls of extended credit.”
“Is there a name on the bills?”
Neela shook her head as she flipped back through the pages. “The top of each statement has been cut off.”
“Seems super sketch to me,” Kevin said as he whizzed by their cubicle. “Keep searching.”
“Like we need his permission,” Persey grumbled as she began to search the bottom drawer, wondering who the statements might belong to—Antonia, Jessica, Todd, or Brian—and how that information might be relevant to the challenge.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Same voice from the video presentation,” Neela mused, still rifling through files. So Persey wasn’t the only one who noticed. “Empty parking lot, only one other employee here. Doesn’t it feel like Leah put this whole thing together herself?”
Doesn’t it? “You make it sounds so ominous.”
“Silly, I know,” Neela continued, “because even though it’s Sunday, there must be people working here somewhere, especially since the average Escape-Capades room requires at least three or four people to control and supervise, so it feels a little weird that so far the only people we’ve seen are Leah and—”
“What’s this?” Persey straightened up as she removed a leather case from the back of the bottom drawer. It was a medium-size zip pouch, like the kind Persey’s dad would have packed his toiletries in for a business trip, and it felt so out of place in the office drawer that it immediately drew her attention.
“Should we open it?” Neela asked, excitement growing in her voice.
Persey grinned in response and slowly pulled the zipper open.
“What did you find?” Mackenzie appeared from nowhere, hand outstretched toward the pouch like a teacher taking possession of classroom contraband. “Let me see.”
“You see with your eyes,” Arlo said from the whiteboard. Could everyone hear them? “Not with your hands.”
Persey turned her back on Mackenzie. “We’ve got this. Thanks.”
“But we’re supposed to work together,” Mackenzie whined. She wasn’t used to not getting her own way. “Leah said—”
“Someone is really into newspaper clippings,” Persey said, cutting her off as she carefully lifted a stack of crinkly paper from the pouch, clipped together at the center. “And…” This time she pulled out a tangled knot of four small metal hoops and held it up to Neela.
“Looks like a key chain,” Neela said. “Or an elaborate bracelet maybe.”