The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) by William Casey Moreton Page A

laptop is on the coffee table downstairs.”
    Archer followed him down the stairs. Glen flopped down in a recliner made of low quality, shiny leather, and propped his feet up on the coffee table. There were two ashtrays on the coffee table and a stack of magazines Archer didn’t recognize. A big flat-screen television was on with the volume down. A show was on—forgettable people making fools of themselves. The laptop was plastered with stickers and Archer could hear the hard drive churn as Glen opened a web browser window and keyed in the URL link for his service provider.
    “Pull up the last few weeks of Cecile’s call activity,” Archer said.
    Glen nodded as he typed. He sipped from a can of Diet Coke. He had blond hair and a small birthmark beneath one eye. He had narrow shoulders and his collarbone was prominent against the pale flesh above his chest. One solid punch would leave a guy like that flattened and comatose, Archer figured. Again, what had Cecile seen in him aside from a little walking around money and all the free pot she could smoke?
    Glen pursed his lips and tapped the track pad, then turned the laptop so that Archer could see the screen.
    “Here’s all her calls for this billing period. You can scroll back and forth however you like,” Glen said.
    “Any numbers you don’t recognize?” Archer asked.
    Glen wrinkled his upper lip. “I wouldn’t recognize any of them. We didn’t share friends, man.”
    “I want you to page through her incoming and outgoing calls from the past few weeks and tell me if anything stands out to you, anything unusual,” Archer said.
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. You’ll know it when you see it.”
    Glen frowned. “There’s a lot of numbers here, man.” The hair was mashed down on one side of his head where he’d been asleep.
    “Pour some coffee and get to work. Shouldn’t take you more than ten minutes.”
    Archer walked into the kitchen and sat on a barstool, resting his forearms on the countertop that looked out on the living room where Glen was hard at work and a couple of attractive but vapid twenty-somethings were enmeshed in some deep drama on TV. He snapped the rubber bands back around the roll of hundreds and placed the cash in the center of the counter. He stared at it.
    It seemed like a lot of cash for a young woman with no job and no other known source of income other than whatever expenses Glen had helped her with. Where had she gotten it? Archer quickly ruled out her mother. Ms. Espinoza hadn’t looked like she might have that kind of cash to spare. She was divorced and working as a paralegal, pulling down maybe forty a year. So she wouldn’t have been doling out fifty-five hundred bucks to a daughter she rarely saw or spoke to.  
    So where had the money come from?
    Archer went back upstairs to the bedroom Glen had shared with his bride-to-be. The plastic sandwich baggie was still on the dresser. He used the tail of his T-shirt to fold it down to the size of a saltine cracker and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans. He paused in the doorway and stared in at the bed. His stomach cringed again as he pondered whether it had ever been properly made. It was a queen, with two pillows, powder blue sheets, and a light comforter with a southwestern design printed on one side. One of the pillows had a fresh indention. The other was slightly askew. Archer deduced that the indention was from Glen’s recently interrupted slumber and the other was askew because Cecile hadn’t been home.
    Archer returned to the kitchen and Glen was pouring juice into a glass with the door to the refrigerator standing open. The roll of cash was where he’d left it. Glen pushed the door shut and added a shot of vodka to his juice.  
    “What happened to my coffee suggestion?” Archer asked, eyeballing the orange juice.
    Glen shrugged. “To each his own,” he said. “Besides, I earned this little treat.”
    “How so?”
    There was a yellow Post-it note