Kenna shrugged. “Long story short?”
“That one makes more sense. But we’re talking about Ellayna.” Zeyla leaned back in her chair. “He must have contacted her mom and requested that she come on the show.”
“I’d presume so, but someone unscrupulous might have reached out to her. Maybe Ellayna has social media accounts, and he contacted her through those.” Kenna didn’t want to thinkthat Ellayna might have reached out to him, asking to be on the podcast so she could talk about her experiences.
Who knew what was going through the preteen’s head. After a trauma like the one she’d suffered, she might be a precocious girl acting out, trying to prove herself to the world. Ellayna could already be on a spiral of self-destruction, even as young as she was. Without more information, it was hard to tell.
“How old is she now?” Preston asked.
“Twelve or so.” She glanced at Maizie. “Can you…” The girl was up to her eyeballs in work right now. Kenna didn’t need to be piling more tasks on her plate. “I’ll look for Ellayna on socials.”
“Thanks.” Maizie slid a paper over and scanned the text. “Huh.”
“What do you have?”
Now that Kenna had thought about the Rysons, she wanted to call Javier, her police officer friend in Salt Lake City, and ask if he could check on Ellayna and her family. Get a sense of the situation and maybe find out why Ms. Feathers wasn’t answering the phone.
But if Maizie had something from Shawn’s stolen files, they all needed to know what it was. What both Shawn and Gabby had died for. What someone was willing to kill to get their hands on.
Maizie slid over a paper. “From what Shawn downloaded, it seems as if the company’s AI software was cataloging information about its users. Putting them in socio-economic groups, like what their interests are, their income, and how they use their finances. Based on decisions they made, how susceptible they were to the suggestions the algorithms made, and how it affected what they bought or chose to watch.”
“So, a giant data collection operation?” Kenna scanned the page, but it looked like computer code, or some kind of foreignlanguage. She would need a bachelor’s in something she knew nothing about to decipher this stuff.
“Kind of. Only…” Maizie shifted a couple of papers. “That’s a code I know.”
Preston said, “You’ve seen it before?”
Maizie bit her lip and scrunched up her nose. “I know what this whole program does, but this line of code is like a signature that tells me who wrote it. Like recognizing someone’s handwriting or their speech patterns.”
“What is it?” Kenna asked.
“You didn’t want to do anything connected toDominatus.”
“And I’ll be so surprised to discover everything is connected to them anyway, no matter how hard I try to avoid them?” At least this wasn’t a case they’d been sent by the president. But in trying to avoid what she wanted them to work on, Kenna had fallen into the same situation, regardless.
“The person who programmed this artificial intelligence works with or forDominatus,” Maizie said, her tone cautious as if she worried Kenna would be mad. “Because they programmed the system on that deep-sea platform where you were held.”
“So, we’re dealing with an enemy vicious enough to put a bomb in an innocent woman’s abdominal cavity, and it turns out to be the people we know who are vicious enough kill a bunch of people,” Zeyla said. “I’m shocked.”
“And they have the resources to disappear.” Preston tapped his index and middle fingers on the table. “I’m going to pay the Pueblo Police Department a visit. See what I can find out about their pursuit of the kidnappers.”
Maizie sighed. “If they’re collecting invasive data from people’s lives, maybe it’s about controlling them.”
“Or it’s market research,” Kenna said. “Or they’re using the information to steer votes their way. Or public perception. Or the people being spied on are all targets. Or assets.”
Zeyla nodded. “That fits.”
“What does?”
She bit into a piece of pizza. “Everything you just said.”
Kenna would rather they narrow it down further than that. “Maybe see if you guys can figure out which it is.” She stood, pushing off the table with one hand and grabbing her phone from the back pocket of her maternity jeans with the other. “I need to make a call. Get someone to visit the Feathers’ house and find out what’s going on.”
Zeyla lifted her chin in a nod that told Kenna she was going to keep an eye on Maizie. The two of them were becoming good friends, kind of like Ramon and Maizie. Maybe Zeyla was taking the time to connect with the young woman he referred to as his little sister. The three of them might well end up being the boots on the ground division of Banbury Investigations, while Kenna and Jax stayed on the home front, so their learning how to work as a team who watched each other’s backs was a good thing, as far as she was concerned.
She pulled up her message threads and asked Ramon to check in. However it was going with MSI and their operation attempting to take downDominatusby force, she wanted to know.
Then she found a quiet spot with an armchair she could sink into and called Ryson.
