Chapter Thirty-Six
KENZI
“That son of a bitch!” Alex’s voice snapped as she kicked open the door to Luxe. She kicked it because she had her laptop open in her hands.
It had been four days.
The cops had closed the kidnapping case and opened a fraud and grand theft one.
Cassie and Santi were wanted people. It had made the news, and I had needed to answer about ten thousand questions from customers who had seen the news, who were wondering about the safety of their credit card numbers and all that.
I couldn’t even blame them, though there hadn’t been one single instance of her cloning cards.
In fact, it seemed her only target was me. No one else had come forward. There were no old friends or family members who suddenly realized that money was missing or items were stolen.
It was just me.
Which made it hurt all the more in moments of vulnerability. All the rest of the day, though, it filled me with an almost blinding rage. Anger was always an easier emotion for me to handle.
I couldn’t help but obsess over it, wondering where our friendship stopped being real, when I became a mark to her.
Was it maybe when she met Santi? Was he a bad influence?
Was it way back when I opened the store, and she was maybe pissed that her name wasn’t on the lease? Did it go back further than that?
I had to give her props; however long it had been going on, she had played her part perfectly. There hadn’t been one moment she had slipped up, one wrong look, one badly turned phrase. And, believe you me, I had gone over every single interaction I could remember as the days passed.
She deserved a fucking Academy Award for her role of best friend and business partner, when all she really was was a criminal.
I wasn’t even someone who looked down on all criminals. I understood the desperation that made some people steal; I truly did. But that was different. Cassie made decent money. She had full health benefits. She had a nicer wardrobe than I did. She was not hurting for money.
She was just a selfish bitch.
But that reality didn’t make the situation any easier to swallow.
Tig was sitting behind the desk with me, answering an email on his phone, waiting for me to close up so we could head over to Chaz’s and have a round with my brothers, sister, and mother.
It had been his idea, actually. He wanted to get to know them outside of a rough situation.
He wanted them to like and respect and trust him with me.
That, well, it did the melty thing to me again.
“What son of a bitch?” I asked, folding one of the shirts from the new shipment, waiting for the only customer left to get out of the changing rooms. I was pretty sure she had tried on every piece of clothing in the store, but I couldn’t complain because she did it every other week and usually ended up buying at least half of it.
I was only half-paying attention because Alex was calling some random asshole online a ‘son of a bitch’ pretty much weekly.
She passionately chased jackasses, perverts, child abusers, criminals, wife beaters—the works—around the dark web and then either exposed them or in some other way fucked with their lives.
She and Jstorm shared the passion. It was commendable, really.
“I haven’t been able to freaking sleep this week because I am so obsessed with this jackass who did the films and Bitcoin scam on you,” she admitted, and I knew that was true because when I talked to Paine, he said her man, Breaker, had been bitching about it.
“Alex, no one is going to think any less of you if you can’t track him down.”
She looked up then, brows drawn together. “I would.”
And it really was that simple for her. She had devoted her whole life to cyber investigation, way back when she started as a teen with the hopes of bringing down the man she blamed for her mother’s death.
She had started with no skills and slowly built them over the years until she was, undeniably, one of the best around.
She refused to be beaten. She had to find the jerk.
“Alright,” I said, putting the shirts to the side and giving her my attention as my door opened and Jstorm walked in, dressed in her Hailstorm garb—deep green utility pants and a tight black wifebeater.
Combat boots were on her feet, and her face was flushed.
She had likely been training. “Hey, Janie,” I greeted, giving her a smile.
“Hey. This better be good, Al; I almost had the bastard.”
“Which one?” Alex asked, clicking around on her laptop. “L,” she admitted, surprising me. “He doesn’t look like he does, but that guy has some major fighting skills, and I almost had him on his back. So this better not be a dead end.”
“It’s worth it this time, I swear,” Alex said, turning her laptop to show a black screen with endless lines of code.
“So this is the code I have gotten about the video, right?” she asked, and Janie nodded, but gave me a look that said this was a waste of time.
“I couldn’t find anything off, any signature.
Because, well, nothing looks out of place, right? ”
“We’ve gone over it a hundred times, Al. Nothing is out of place.”
“Then what is this?” she asked, stabbing her finger into a line of the green letters and numbers.
She was pointing to a small group of numbers and letters that didn’t spell anything out, didn’t seem like anything at all.
But Janie’s brows drew together slightly, reaching to scroll the screen up and down once before settling it again. “Okay, yeah, that really doesn’t belong. I might have written it off as a false code.”
“I did too. That’s what it looks like. But for some reason this morning, my eyes went right there, and it clicked.”
“What clicked? Have you seen the signature somewhere else before?”
That was when Alex’s brows lowered, her jaw tensed enough for it to look painful.
“Oh yeah, I’ve seen it before. About a million times. It was just so long ago that it became background noise in my head.”
“I’m gonna need more than that.”
“Remember when I said I was just starting out and I had help from two guys?”
“Yeah, the one Lex got his hands on and… no,” Janie said, shaking her head.
“Yeah,” Alex agreed, nodding.
“Alright, girls,” I cut in. “Let’s remember we’re in mixed company, and we are not all in on this.”
“Right,” Alex said, nodding. “So you know the night that Lex had me? When he almost… you know,” she said, shaking her head.
“Yeah, I remember that.” She and Breaker had met because Lex had hired Breaker to kidnap her, and then things escalated, and Alex was raped in Lex’s basement.
“Well, remember how I said it was an old sort of mentor of mine that turned me into him?”
“Yeah, Josh or something.”
“Joshua,” Alex agreed. “He was ridiculous about not cutting down his name.”
And then it hit me, and my eyes went to Jstorm.
“Wait, wasn’t that the guy who you saved from the house that night?”
“Had I known he was a shithead backstabber, I would have let the ceiling collapse on him,” she agreed.
“Anyway,” Alex cut in, “she saved him. We kept tabs on him, and he was in Chicago, I think, the last we checked. He had gotten himself involved with some organized crime or something. But then I saw this,” she said, touching the code again. “This is his signature.”
“Do you think this was linked to organized crime?” Tig asked, all business suddenly. Even wrapped up in the idea of at least getting some answers, bringing down one guilty party, I was able to appreciate how sexy it was when he slipped into PI mode.
“His bosses are mostly into loan sharking. There’s nothing to suggest they are smart enough to pull off extortion or anything of the like,” Alex said, shaking her head.
“Then why would they need a hacker of Joshua’s level of expertise?” Tig reasoned.
“Four pretty important members got locked up over the past few years over wiretaps and careless emails and web searches. Just genuine amateur shit. The higher-ups got sick of losing good people they knew they could trust, and wanted to bring someone in who knew what they were doing with all this shit to protect them.”
“But that is likely contract work, just here and there shit,” Tig concluded. “If he’s only working part-time, then he would need to supplement his income somehow.”
“There’s that,” Alex agreed.
“But?” Tig prompted.
“But Joshua has always had this God complex. He thinks he’s the best, and he’s definitely up there,” she conceded, “and he needs people kissing his ass. It’s why he always surrounded himself with subpar hackers.
He likes to lord over them. So maybe he’s getting a cut from this kind of work, but I guarantee you it is more for the adulation. ”
“If that’s the case, he’s got to be on the dark web somewhere. Have you searched for his signature?” Janie asked.
“I just started looking now, but I bet you that we will find an entire page dedicated to him. And,” she added, giving Janie a look, “created by him.”
“And if you find him?” I asked, unsure what the deal was.
I mean, sure, he was a bad guy. He did bad things.
He was a big part of the reason I was out a ton of money.
But he wasn’t the one who chose me as a victim.
He wasn’t the one to betray a personal trust. Did he deserve to be locked up for what he did?
Probably. But I wasn’t overly invested in seeing him go down.
“Well, we are just going to have a very nice chat,” Janie said, smirking evilly. “We have been long overdue for a reunion. I want to ask him how his leg healed. It was sticking out of his skin last time I saw him.”
“You find him,” Tig agreed, nodding. “But when you do, you tell us, and we bring him in.”
“Tig, really, this isn’t…” I started, shaking my head. A part of me was just… done. I was done with it all. I was still up and down over my anger and hurt feelings, but that didn’t change the fact that I wanted to move on. I had enough ups and downs to last me a good long while.