Chapter 20 #3
“I don’t know,” I said, not letting my own tone convey how I was feeling. I wasn’t ready to show my cards. “You look. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.”
Eli spent twenty minutes going through different papers.
Finally, he gave up on finding anything.
Standing in the middle of the room, he scanned the mess of boxes and papers strewn around us.
“If there was a point to all this, I can’t see what it was.
All we know is that whoever Emily was talking to, Janus Vault or Glass Spire or whatever name he was using, he’s long gone. ”
“And we can’t tell if he ever met with Emily,” I added, putting aside my own feelings for the moment, and wishing I hadn’t handed that Creed Global folder over to Eli. He held on to it with a tight grip but led me back to the loading bay door we’d crawled in through.
We looked back at the room.
“See the way the papers on the floor are piled?” he asked. “As if someone walked around the room and dumped all these boxes upside down. But no one stepped in the piles or disturbed them. Like they went one by one, dumping them out, and then left.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “This wasn’t ransacked. No one was in a rush. It’s not destructive.”
“Just meant to look that way,” Eli finished.
“Another dead end?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Why does it feel like we were meant to find that file?” I looked at it in Eli’s hand, and again, the shutters fell over his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The ride back to Sinclair Security was long and silent.
Eli tried to pawn me off in the elevator with, “Why don’t you go up to the apartment? I’ll just drop this file off. Then we’ll get some lunch.”
“No, that’s okay,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’ll come with you.”
I thought I could hear Eli’s teeth grinding together, but I was tired of being left out—tired of them talking around me and over me. And if I was being honest with myself, I was both mad and hurt that Eli didn’t trust me the same way I’d trusted him.
The end result was the same. I had questions, and I wanted answers.
I followed Eli back to our temporary home base in Hacker Central to find Maddox, Emmett, Wren, and Ryder, who seemed to be the de facto head of the crew, though I’d only met him once when he’d been passing through while we’d been going through files.
“What’d you find?” Ryder asked.
Eli gave a quick report, leaving out what I’d found.
“Show them the file,” I prompted, more than curious if it would shut down the rest of the Creed Global team the way it had Eli.
Emmett, who wasn’t part of their team, plucked the file out of Eli’s hands and flipped it open before Eli could protest. “Interesting,” he said, flipping through the employee packets. “This was just sitting there?”
He looked to me, and I nodded. “It was under a box that had been turned upside down.”
“And this was the only file you found like this.”
“Like this, meaning tossed on the floor under a box, no. Pretty much the whole room was like that. But if you mean the only file with info like that? Then yes,” I said.
Emmett looked to the rest of the group. “Then the question is, what does Silas’s disappearance have to do with Emily Shaw?”
At Emmett’s blunt question, all the missing puzzle pieces fell into place.
Eli’s team wasn’t investigating Emily Shaw’s death for a mysterious client. This was about Silas Creed—their missing mentor. And he wasn’t just off the radar. He’d disappeared.
A stab of empathy for Eli warred with my newly bruised heart.
Eli glared at Emmett.
“When were you going to tell me?” I asked, shifting to stand in front of Eli, staring up at him until he met my eyes.
“It’s not a big deal,” Eli said, his eyes barely touching mine before snapping back to Emmett.
“What,” I said, “that you lied about having a client and this is really about Silas Creed?”
“Sylvie, that’s not what’s happening.” His glare narrowed on Emmett. If his anger could have fueled laser beams shooting from those eyes, Emmett would be toast.
I took a step back, horror spiraling through me as I realized what this could mean. “Are you trying to find out who killed Emily and blew up my van, or are you trying to find Silas?”
Because it had just occurred to me that the missing Silas might have been the last person to see Emily Shaw alive. They’d been in communication. Silas’s team was here. Emily had been coming here.
“What if Emily wasn’t coming to see Sinclair Security?” I asked, directing my question to Emmett, the only person here who wasn’t part of Creed Global. “What if she was coming to see Silas?”
“Silas was already gone by then,” Ryder said.
“As far as you know,” I shot back. “But he’s not dead, right?”
“Not that we can tell,” Wren said quietly.
“So how do you know she wasn’t coming here to see him?” I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to brace as the ramifications of this hit me. “It makes sense. You’ve got records of her communicating with Silas, right?”
Maddox gave an abrupt nod.
“And none of her communicating with Sinclair Security,” I went on.
“Correct,” Maddox said, rubbing his big palm over his shaved head.
“So, you’ve just been using me as a shield to investigate Emily?” I stabbed a glare at Eli. “When really, you don’t give a shit who killed Emily Shaw or who tried to kill me. You just want to find Silas.” This time, the anger showed. I couldn’t believe I’d been so na?ve.
“Sylvie, it’s not like that,” Eli said. “It’s not?—”
“It isn’t,” Wren added. She looked at Eli and then at me. “We do want to find Silas. But we also want to find out what happened to Emily Shaw—partly to get answers for her, and partly so you’ll be safe. It’s not just about Silas. Not anymore.”
I looked to Eli. “I wish I could believe that.”
He reached for my hand, and I stepped to the side, dodging him. I needed to think, to take a breath, to get my hurt and anger under control so I could work through the logic of what I’d figured out when all I wanted to do was punch Eli and then run off bawling.
I turned my back on him, shutting him out. Emmett had said something before he gave us the address to the office park. I crossed to face him. “You said there was something else you were working on, but it wasn’t solid enough yet. Is it solid now?”
“Not yet,” Emmett said, but I caught the slight drift of his brown eyes down to the surface of the desk behind him. They landed on a bright pink sticky note with an address written on the front.
86 Ren Pkw NE
Emmett followed the track of my eyes and slid his hand over the sticky note.
“I pinpointed the address of the person who got into your socials,” he said. “I still have to do some follow-up, but we’re closer.”
I was suddenly very glad that I had an excellent memory—and that I’d gotten a glimpse of that sticky note before Emmett covered it up.
I had some planning to do. I didn’t care about Silas Creed, but if I wanted my life back, I had to find the man who’d killed Emily Shaw, even if I was the only one looking.