Salvar took the phone in his hand and inspected it the way a person handles something they aren't entirely convinced is real. He slowly turned it over, running his thumb along the edge. It was an unremarkable-looking thing.
Cheap, deliberately so. The kind of phone designed to be forgotten.
He clicked the power button.
The screen came to life.
"It doesn't have a lock?" Salvar asked, glancing up.
"It does have a lock," Mr. Tafan replied, smiling mildly. "Pattern lock."
Salvar looked back down at the screen and nodded. The staff room was dim, the kind of dark that accumulated in rooms nobody spent time in and the screen's glow barely reached the edges of his palm.
He took out his own phone and used the torch, angling it low across the surface of the burner phone's screen.
The patterns came clear under the light. Faint smear trails left by fingertips, crossing the grid in a path that had been traced enough times to leave a record.
