Chapter Thirty-Three
KENZI
You could practically taste the sour energy in the room when we walked into the office ten minutes later.
Barrett was still at his desk, his hair a mess, deep sleep bruises under his eyes.
L had vacated the guest chairs, letting the girls lounge there, both of them doing so in awkward positions, likely because everything hurt from sitting on such uncomfortable spots for so long.
Jstorm was slouched almost fully down, her shoulders barely touching the chair, her legs propped up on Barrett’s desk, dangerously close to knocking over one of his, then nine, coffee cups.
Alex was beside her, sitting across the chair sideways, her back against the cabinet lining the wall.
One of her feet was cocked up on the chair, the other stretched over the back of Jstorm’s chair.
There were five energy drink cans scattered across the floor along with some papers, both of Alex’s shoes, and L’s hoodie.
It was like a frat house.
Or, more accurately, given that they were all a bunch of computer geeks, like some dark basement full of LARPing weirdos.
I almost smiled at that, an image of Barrett and L in full-on orc and dwarf garb.
“Don’t,” Alex said, not having looked up, “take one damn foot inside this room unless you have coffee.”
“I brought reinforcements,” Sawyer assured them, pushing us in so he could pass out the goods.
Brock rolled up another two minutes later with coffee for the rest of us. I took mine, opening it, surprised to find blueberry flavor, and gave him a smile.
“Alright, let’s hear it,” Sawyer said, waving a hand at the odd crew of hackers, PIs, and cyber investigators.
“It’s fucking crazy,” Jstorm supplied, popping the cap on her energy drink and taking at least half of it down in one pull.
“I mean, I have tried every goddamn backdoor I can think of,” Alex piped in, looking our way, paler still than she usually was, and she usually was a ghost. “And I know computers aren’t your things, but trust me, I know my backdoors, and this is,” she went on, waving a frustrated hand at her laptop, “not normal.”
“So what you’re saying is…” Sawyer prompted.
“What they aren’t saying, you mean,” L corrected, surly normally, and even more so without sleep.
He had moved his laptop to the side, cradling his giant coffee between both hands.
“Look, whoever this guy is, I can’t find a trace of his profile anywhere online and trust me, the underground details on any kind of criminal activity aer extensive and detailed. ”
“L, I think we all could do without the runaround. What’s the fucking profile?
” That was Sawyer for you. Brock told me over breakfast that when he met Riya, his woman with the missing year, he had recreated the year full of holidays for her, so she didn’t feel like she missed so much.
It seemed wholly unlike the man I had always known—rude, brash, opinionated, a little, okay, a lot, annoying.
I guess love really could change a person.
But apparently only when around that person, because he was being his usual dickish self that morning.
L shrugged. “The computer shit threw me. Guys like this—base, crass, violent guys… they aren’t usually guys who can firewall their computers and sweep their traces and think to use shit like Bitcoin at fucking all.”
“So you’re thinking…”
“That there are two of them,” L concluded. “It’s the only explanation really. You have one guy with a sick obsession. Truly, there’s nothing interesting about him. He’s your typical stalker escalating to rapist and…”
“Hey,” Tig cut in, tone firm, making L’s eyes move over to us, likely picking up on the silent demand to not bring up that kind of thing around me.
But there was no need for that.
There was nothing L could say that I hadn’t already thought of myself.
My breakfast suddenly started rolling around in my stomach.
“Really? You think that’s not the first thing on Kenzi’s mind?
Never mind all the graphic calls and messages she got detailing this guy’s psyche here, but in case you haven’t noticed, she’s a woman.
And women, they live with the reality of possible rape every day.
I don’t need to pussyfoot around a topic that is literally always on her fucking mind when she lays down in her bed at night and realizes she forgot to lock the door, or leaves work and the streetlight is out, or she accidentally looks away from her drink at a bar. You…”
“Alright, alright,” Sawyer cut in, shaking his head. “Moving on.”
L exhaled. “What I’m saying is, he’s a white male in his mid-twenties to late thirties who finished high school but didn’t go to college.
He works a menial job, not likely retail, but something involving his hands.
Women find him creepy, but not dangerous.
He is likely average or slightly below average and has a taste for women who would never want anything to do with him. ”
“Guys like that are typically loners,” Brock observed.
“Right. Which is why I don’t think this is a buddy thing. He contracted out. He got Cass, and maybe it didn’t have the thrill he wanted. Or who the fuck knows what. He realized it wasn’t enough. So he farmed it out.”
“And you girls can’t find a trace of who this hacker might be? Aren’t you all vain and shit? Leave clues in the code and nerdy crap like that?”
“Sure, but without anything but this email, which is clean, it’s hard to get any clue about who he is,” Jstorm said, sounding as frustrated as we all felt.
“So you’re saying that we need to go through with the Bitcoin deal and see if you can trace it from there?”
“It’s the only choice,” Alex said, shrugging.
“But you are going to ask for proof of life before you transfer,” Barrett said, speaking for the first time. I almost forgot he was even there. “And then you are going to ask about how you are going to go about retrieving Cassie. Once you…”
Everyone jumped instinctively when the door burst open behind us.
Sawyer, Brock, and Tig all stiffened, hands curling into fists, every inch of them vibrating with capability.
But Jstorm, Barrett, Alex, and L, all of whom I knew were fully trained as well, didn’t even budge from their positions as a man walked in, tall and slim, with a black hoodie with white piping and pulls walked in, the hood up, blocking his hair and a good portion of his face.
“Oh, that’s Luce. You get used to him,” Jstorm supplied, shrugging, as the man in question just barged in, ignoring the sparking intimidating energy of three of the men there, as he just walked across the room to shut himself into the bathroom.
It was perfectly in unison that Sawyer, Brock, and Tig turned back to Barrett.
“Barrett, who the fuck is that?”
Barrett didn’t have friends. That was just something everyone accepted about him. He was a loner through and through. That being said, everyone associated with someone here and there, especially when your job involved investigation. Human interaction had to happen eventually.
What was weird was that they were all working on a sensitive case, maybe doing a bunch of illegal things, and none of them, not even Jstorm and L from up at Hailstorm, seemed the least bit bothered by his presence.
“Luce, like Janie said,” Barrett said, not bothering to look up, not the least bit thrown off by his brother’s firm tone.
“And he’s here because…”
“Because Barrett has kick-ass protected Wi-Fi,” L started, “and he does sweeps every morning when he opens up, and Luce, well, let’s just say he likes making his phone calls in private.”
“Who the fuck is Luce and what the fuck is he into?” All of them shared a look. Not one of them was speaking. “I am going to need an answer.”
“You’re going to need to mind your own business,” Barrett countered, sounding bored, like he was used to his brother being invasive and having to brush it off.
Then, not two minutes after he disappeared inside the bathroom, out this Luce guy came again, walking right up behind Barrett and looking at his laptop.
“He’s using Tor and a public Wi-Fi? If he broke the chain, you guys are so fucked.” And with that, he was at the door. “Because if he’s smart enough to pull that off, he’s smart enough to have a middle man to pick up and mix the coins which will make them completely untraceable.”
And then the mysterious Luce was gone, leaving all the hackers in the room looking green. Not because it was new information, maybe, but because it was a confirmation of their worst fears.
Alex was the first to speak.
“But if he is using a middleman, that is a link. He had to have met with him, emailed him, made some kind of connection. If anything, that might even be a better lead. But to move on that, we need to get things going. Kenzi,” she said, giving me a sympathetic smile.
She and I had shared many a Sunday dinner together, most of it was me complaining about her lack of cooking skills, and her bitching at me about how sexist it was to expect her to know all that girly shit.
We liked each other. “You need to get involved now.”
In a way, though, even with nerves tightly coiled in my stomach, I was happy to get involved, to do something, to not just be standing by and contributing nothing to the whole situation.
So I moved forward, going to sit behind the desk where Barrett had vacated the seat to kneel on the floor, moving with a grumble thanks to too long in the same position.
Then he brought up my email, and had me type up a response to the address that had sent the video the night before, agreeing to the transfer, but demanding proof of life, and details for Cassie’s release.
Then we waited.
It wasn’t like some cheesy action movie where the reply was almost instantaneous. I sat staring for a good twenty minutes before Barrett got antsy and pushed me out of the way so he could get to work again.