Chapter 5
ALEXA
Five, my ass. In terms of shittiness, the study was more like an eight. Okay, so the floor wasn’t rotten and the roof didn’t leak, but I’d already dumped four spiders out of the one window that opened, and the room smelled weird. Musty. Damp.
The house was an L-shape, and the longer, renovated wing was surprisingly habitable.
Generic prints hanging on pale walls, bland but coordinated furniture, probably Marielle’s doing.
Urgh. But the old wing? That was another story.
Peeling paint, dark wood with fine, vein-like cracks in the varnish, the smell of damp, knickknacks stuffed into every nook and cranny.
We hurried past closed-off rooms to the end of the house, and no wonder Nolan had just shut the door on the mess because where would he even start?
He hadn’t been kidding about the desk either.
It was more of a conference table, an outdated monstrosity covered in haphazard stacks of paper, overflowing filing trays, more tchotchkes, and six empty coffee mugs, with the aforementioned laptop taking centre stage.
Nolan cursed under his breath and picked up the mugs.
“These belong in the dishwasher.”
“That’s the problem device?” I asked, just to check, as I pointed at the laptop.
“When I saw the threatening note, I pulled the battery, and Brax told me not to turn it on again.”
“And you don’t have backups?”
“I thought I did, but something must’ve been set up wrong.”
Great.
Shelves lined the study walls, stuffed full of books, yet more trinkets, a globe, half a dozen baseballs, a rock collection, a set of Russian nesting dolls, several statues of Egyptian deities, and a bunch of old photos.
The dust made me sneeze, and Marielle appeared to share my distaste as she handed me a tissue.
“Nolan, we should put this room next on the list. It’s crying out for a redesign.”
Naturally, that meant I had to defend the chaos. Double urgh. “I think it has character.”
“You do?” Nolan seemed surprised.
“Half of these books are probably out of print, and modern decor can be so sterile, don’t you think?” In my peripheral vision, I saw Marielle narrow her eyes, and I hid my smile by leaning in to look at a photo. “Are these your grandparents?”
He nodded. “I don’t remember my grandma. She passed away when I was four, and apparently, that’s when this place began to go downhill.”
“She was the businesswoman?”
Another nod. “That’s what the folks in town say, anyway. She died, and then all the shit with Dad happened, and Grandpa was never the same afterward.”
All that shit with Dad. A bland, succinct way of saying his father had been outed as a serial killer when Nolan was ten.
Old enough to remember the hell his family went through, too young to have had any control over the situation.
And then Blackstone House had taken a can opener to those old wounds.
Nolan had been the first suspect in Ruby’s murder, the obvious choice because of his genes.
But I knew he hadn’t done it. The police had narrowed her death down to a three-hour window, and for those three hours, Nolan had been in the basement with Dawson and me, apart from a couple of times he went upstairs to the kitchen to fetch drinks and snacks.
But he was gone for ten minutes at most, and nobody could do that much damage to a woman in ten minutes.
The cops had accused me of lying, of protecting him or Dawson or both. But I knew the truth, and that was all that mattered.
Nolan wasn’t a killer.
He was nothing like his father.
We’d rarely talked about Eddie Calder, but I knew that between the arrest and the trial, Nolan’s mom had fled Washington state and changed both her surname and his back to her maiden name of de Luca.
Nolan never called his old man in prison, and he never visited.
But whispers still followed, and that was one reason Nolan had always tried to keep a low profile.
In a drunk moment just before Ruby’s death, he’d confided that his life ended the day the FBI showed up at the door.
That they’d hounded his mom, convinced she somehow knew her husband liked to ferry young dead women around in his car, trying to put her on the hook as an accomplice.
She’d taken an overdose the day after Nolan’s eighteenth birthday.
There was no note, but Nolan was convinced the authorities had pushed her to suicide.
Maybe that was why he’d refused to cooperate with the cops investigating Ruby’s murder?
Jez was better at bland platitudes than me. “Sorry to hear that. Where are the power sockets?”
“In the baseboards behind the desk,” Marielle supplied. “But there are only two, and the lamp is plugged into one socket, so Nolan might have to find an extension cord.”
When she began fussing with the lamp, Nolan offered me a soft smile, but there was a sadness in it that never used to be there.
Damn, I’d missed that smile.
I didn’t like the sadness, but I’d take what I could get.
For, like, a day, because then I’d be getting the hell out of Gold Country.
“I’ll get the cord. Do you still want coffee too?”
“Of course.”
I hadn’t changed my mind since he asked earlier.
“And you don’t take sugar anymore?”
I wished. Chase had fought several battles with my sweet tooth over the years, and although he’d never win the war, I’d made a few concessions.
“No, and tell me you don’t use instant?”
This time, the smile reached Nolan’s eyes. “I don’t use instant. Jerry?”
“I’m getting the hell out of here. Sayonara, sunshine.”
* * *
The good news? In the almost-decade since I’d seen him, Nolan hadn’t forgotten how to make a passable cappuccino. He obviously had a reasonable coffee machine in this hellhole, and he knew how to use it.
The bad news? By the time I’d drained my third cup, I understood two things. One, his computer was fucked. Two, his reputation was also fucked.
More fucked.
When I was six years old, I’d begun baby coding in a vain attempt to get my father to love me, at least that was the bullshit my therapist had come up with.
Not the bartender-therapist, an actual professional.
I’d never been blessed with any deeper insights because I’d quit seeing her after two sessions that I hadn’t wanted to go to in the first place.
The whole thing had been Priest’s idea. He wasn’t my boss, but sometimes he liked to think he was, and he’d blackmailed me into seeing a psychiatrist with a threat to sideline me if I didn’t get help.
Of course, he soon realised he needed me more than I needed him and begged me to come back.
I said no. Then Jez asked me nicely, and I said okay, because let’s face it, corporate shit bored the hell out of me, and the US government did come up with some fun projects for me to work on.
Anyhow, speaking of blackmail, I’d spent most of my life in front of a laptop, and I knew ways to get around most of the ransomware that existed in the world today, but this was different.
I had a grudging admiration for whoever created Slowhand.
If I were a black hat hacker, it was exactly the kind of monster I’d come up with.
But my hat was more of a dark grey, and although I definitely wasn’t one of the good guys, I only fucked over the bad guys.
Criminals, terrorists, politicians, oligarchs, creeps who were rude to servers in restaurants—those kinds of people.
Slowhand worked in three stages. First, it suckered you into downloading it, but rather than locking your laptop immediately, it quietly chugged away in the background, encrypting your hard drive.
It also disabled the webcam indicator light and began recording.
Most victims didn’t realise there was anything wrong at this point—a handful of observant users might notice a slight lag and chalk it up to a system update, but most carried on, oblivious.
Once the hard drive was encrypted, Slowhand moved to stage two—the lock screen.
Users got a message telling them that their data had been hijacked, and if they wanted it back, they had to pay the ransom.
Standard stuff so far. Because Slowhand targeted individual users rather than large corporates, the demands tended to be small—ten thousand bucks or so in crypto—but I’d been monitoring the blockchain, and its creators had made millions.
Because their victims almost always paid up.
Most users hit by ransomware did one of two things: they tossed the computer and started over from backups, or they called in a specialist to help them undo the damage. But if they got hit by Slowhand? Their silence meant it was hard to gauge the scale of the problem.
Why did they keep their mouths shut?
Because of stage three. Under the ransom demand, there was a button marked “Early Payment Discount,” and of course, everyone clicked it. Nearly everyone. Nolan clearly hadn’t, because if he had, I wouldn’t be here.
Wouldn’t be here staring at the button, psyching myself up to press it, not only out of morbid curiosity but also because I had to know exactly what we were dealing with.
Did I mention that Slowhand liked to hang out on porn sites?
Knowledge is power, Alexa.
I clicked the button and a Bible verse appeared. Today, it was James 1, verses 14-15.
But each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
If I’d known the words were an omen of what was to come, maybe I’d have told Jez to go fuck herself or Cole or anyone but me.
But I didn’t, so I just closed my eyes and scrolled, wincing when my ears told me the situation was every bit as bad as I’d feared.
The rustle of clothing played through my headphones.
The jingle of a belt buckle. The rhythmic slide of hand against flesh.