Cold Case

Chapter 8

"Holy fudge cakes. I didn't think I'd be meeting my half-sister today," she said and ran over to give Jessa a hug.

"It's nice to meet you too."

"I now see why my mom can't get involved with this. I'll help you fill in any information that you need. I'll have to leave by 5 though."

"That's fine. Could you come tomorrow?"

"After school, yes."

"Perfect."

After a few hours, they compiled everything that they know from the two girls. Noelle left to go back home, while the rest of them created a board with all the evidence and people involved.

"All of this still leads to nowhere," Malachi said.

"No duh," Gianna said. "We don't have enough evidence to prove anything at this point."

"She's right, and you should know that because you're the agent," Jessa said.

"Well I'm sorry. I can't think straight at this hour. It's already 11:45. Let's go to bed and we can come up with another plan tomorrow," Malachi said.

The next morning, they sat around the dining table in hopes of coming up with something.

"Does anyone have a plan on how to get Autumn in this plan without letting her parents know about any of it?" Cody asked.

"I was thinking about this, and I came up with two ways to do it, but both ways involve school so we'd have to wait a few days. The first way is we can get her principal in on the plan and get her that way. Or we can take her from school," Malachi said.

"Her principal would never let us take her out of school to do this. That's not how the school system works," Jessa said. "Taking her from school is risky, but I have a plan for that. I can go to the school and blend in with everyone, and attempt to get her from there. Are any of you good at hacking in school systems?"

"Heck yeah. I've done it many times," Malachi said.

"Wait, what?" Cody said.

"Don't ask. It's complicated."

"Hack into the school system. Then I can take over from there," Jessa said.

After about 10 minutes, Malachi got in. He then handed his laptop to Jessa, and she continued from there.

"Any information you find, say it out loud so we can record it in case we get kicked off the system," Cody said.

"Okay. I found her on the files. Her name is Autumn Emerson Lopez, she's 14 and her birthday is on September 9th. She has classes in blocks 1, 2 and 3, off in block 4, then there's lunch, then she has classes in the rest. She has been suspended 3 times this school year and 4 times in previous years. She has also had 4 in-school suspensions. Despite her behaviour, she has gotten straight A's every year," Jessa said.

"We know that she's a rebel, but also a genius," Malachi said.

"Which means that the school will most likely not let us take her out to help us with this," Gianna said. "How are we going to pull this off?"

"Her attendance is really iffy though," Jessa said. "She skips class really often, and even when she does go to class, she doesn't pay attention in class. The school board has considered expelling her for this behaviour but decided against it because she's in the top ten highest marks for her grade at her school, so it makes them look good. Her record doesn't make them look good, but they don't really look at that as much."

"Jessa's plan would work for this. She could go on there and sneak out with Autumn. From what it sounds like, Autumn might be hard to convince," Cody said.

"But it also sounds like she'll jump on any chance to skip school," Gianna said.

"Good point," Malachi said.

"In order to put Jessa's plan to work, we will have to make a fake schedule, fake school ID, and all that stuff," Cody said.

"I'll work out all of that stuff," Gianna said.

"And I think it might help if we put my name in the school system, in case someone doesn't recognize me and searches my name on the system," Jessa said.

"But how?"

"Malachi can do that. Right?"

"Sure. It'll be hard but I'll figure it out."

"Then you can get Autumn and since she's a master at sneaking out, get out of there. We'll deal with the rest after we have Autumn."

"So let me get this straight. Our jobs for the next few days is Malachi on hacking the school system and Gianna on getting fake documents, so what are we doing?" Jessa said to Cody.

"You're the one going to be executing the whole thing, but in the meantime, you and Noelle have to figure out as much as you can about this girl. I don't care if you guys use social media or, lack of a better word, stalk her in another way, just figure out simple things like what she looks like, popularity etc. I'm going to try and connect the dots about this case based off the information we currently have."

"Let's get to work!"