“Problem?” he asked, knowing there were plenty of them. He just hoped there wasn’t something new, since they were already grappling with enough.
“There’s no sign of Grace. And the phone she used was indeed a burner.” Caroline paused long enough to gulp down some coffee. “I put out feelers through old contacts.Safefeelers,” she emphasized. “I don’t want the wrong person finding her, so I only emailed people I trust.”
Good. Because they didn’t know who the wrong person was—yet. But it was possible that Grace could become a target if she surfaced.
“I also ran a deeper background check on her,” Caroline went on. “Unlike some of the other women who were kidnapped and drugged into the sex-trafficking ring, Grace was lured into it through her drug habit. From everything I’m hearing, she’s clean now, but when she was using, she was out of it. Out of it enough to turn tricks to support her habit.”
Jack thought about that a moment. “Any idea who got Grace to start turning tricks?”
She shook her head. “Nothing so far, but I think it’s important to find that out. Maybe it was one of our suspects, and if so, we could use Grace to tie Zeller, Lily or Kingston to the rest of what’s happening.”
He was thinking the same thing. But first, they had to find Grace and convince the woman to trust them. Then he’d have to persuade her to tell all and go into protective custody. No easy feat to do that when it was obvious the woman didn’t even want to be found.
Jack slid the plate with the sandwich closer to Caroline’s hand, and she glanced at it as if seeing it for the first time. Which wasprobably true. Caroline tended to get wrapped up when she was doing research.
She frowned but took a bite of the ham-and-Swiss that he knew was her favorite. “There’s more,” Caroline said, chasing the sandwich with coffee. “I did some checking on Geo-Trace—”
He groaned. “Not a good idea. The Justice Department is all over that. Please tell me you didn’t hack into their files.”
“I didn’t.” She was quick to assure him of that. “I went through my own sources, and what I got isn’t proof. More of the opinion of others like me.”
In other words, hackers. Probably many of them with criminal records. Jack didn’t groan again, but that was what he wanted to do.
“Geo-Trace could be a fake,” Caroline added after she gave him a couple of seconds to rein in his temper.
Jack went still, letting that sink in. Or rather, trying to let that happen. But he had to shake his head. “But Teagan had heard of it, and it was on the computer.”
“There’s plenty of talk about it,” she verified, “but I’m just not finding the proof that someone has perfected it enough to make it do what it’s being designed to do—cull out that kind of info from an IP address.”
Jack wasn’t a computer idiot, but he also knew this was a conversation that could quickly go over his head. “Put that in layman’s terms for me.”
She nodded, paused again, this time with her forehead bunching up. “Other than the Geo-Trace that you found on my laptop and Zeller’s computer, it doesn’t show up anywhere else. That’s an electronic red flag because you can bet that someone would have used this program if it were actually available.”
Yeah, Jack could see that. Stalkers, thieves and other assorted scum would want their hands on it so they could track thephysical location of someone simply because they were using a computer with an internet connection.
“I think the Geo-Trace was just a ruse,” Caroline went on. “Something designed to make us think my location had been compromised through the laptop.”
If so, that meant someone had set Zeller up.
“Yes,” Caroline said as if she’d known exactly what he was thinking.
Since Zeller could arrive any minute, Jack shut the office door so that Caroline and he could have the rest of this conversation without the possibility of Zeller coming in on it.
“It doesn’t mean Zeller is innocent, though,” she continued. “Maybe I’m wrong about Geo-Trace. It could be that he got his hands on a working program. And even if he didn’t, he might be going for some kind of reverse psychology. He might want to make himself look innocent by making us believe someone set him up.”
That was something he’d need to give more thought, but Jack could see it from that angle. “Perhaps Zeller or someone else put this fake tracer on your computer and his so it would conceal the fact that the WITSEC file on you had actually been hacked. Geo-Trace would be a way of covering up the hacking.”
She stayed quiet a moment, obviously giving that some thought. “It’s possible. But it would have taken some serious skills to set all of this in motion.”
Jack agreed, and that led him to the next question. “Who’s capable of doing something like this?” And one name instantly came to mind. “Grace?”
“Maybe. I don’t know how good she is. But I’ve been in touch with some of my old contacts, and one name keeps coming up. Scotty Milford.”
Now, that was a familiar name. “If it’s the same guy I’m thinking about, he’s a criminal informant.”
She nodded. “It’s the same guy. He got busted a few years ago for cybercrimes, and he’s clean-ish.”
“Clean-ish?”Jack scowled. Cursed. “Is that like being a little bit pregnant?”
