That weight of emotion pushed at my chest. Nope. I was not succumbing.
“No problem. I’ll get it done this week. That reminds me, you mentioned a threat against me. I need more information.”
He sat heavily in his leather seat, a hulking shape of a man who had once been thick with muscle. Desk work didn’t suit him.
“Male, crass, I didn’t really take it seriously.”
“It was a voice message?”
He nodded once, his gaze on his screen now. “Called in to the general line.”
“What did he say? Exactly.”
My father sighed then fished in a wire inbox, pulling out a sheet. “The transcript.”
I scanned the words.
Kenney needs to watch out for his bitch daughter before she takes a fall.
Oddly general. It felt almost as much a threat to him as me. “Can I hear it?”
“He used a digital voice in them.”
I paused. “What do you mean ‘them’?”
He huffed and found another page. I read it.
Kenney’s girl shouldn’t be left alone at night.
I raised my gaze to him. “Why didn’t you tell me there had been another?”
“I said not to go out at night, didn’t I? It’s just empty words. No heat behind it. I had one of the techs look at it, no intel gathered.”
I read them again and blew out a breath, no closer to working out if the threats were real or not. But another opportunity had presented itself.
My father had mentioned his tech team. I’d kept thinking about them for help with my Dixie problem, my final task of the day. Assuming she hadn’t carried out a secure erase, small traces like cached files or metadata could still exist, but this usually took forensic recovery software to find. Software I didn’t have access to.
But sneaking around with my father’s access was one thing. Utilising police resources like that was far less reasonable, or realistic. I was pushing my luck.
I clutched my bag closer to my shoulder. “On the subject of your tech team, I have a tablet I think was accidentally wiped. Is it okay to go to them for help?”
He tilted his head. “Why would you need to do that?”
My heart thumped, but I held his gaze. Whatever we were to each other, neither of us was above manipulation. “You know what date’s coming up?”
His thick, greying eyebrows dove together, the panic real. “Fuck, I mean, I have somewhere I need to be. Go talk to the team if you need to.” He clambered to his feet and circled his desk. “I had a case hanging on that once, and they nailed it. Something to do with calendar notifications. Put a fucker down for ten based on what he thought he’d got rid of.”
Through his babbling and obvious panic over being a parent, I stared.
I hadn’t tried that. Of all the attempts I’d made at hunting for a backup and delving deeper, there had been an obvious solution I’d somehow blanked on.
I blamed Kane. His presence had unnerved me, then his proposition had distracted me so badly I’d missed this. I felt like such a fool.
I leapt up. “Thank you.”
Out of the office, I moved back through the floor, giving Soames a subtle thumbs-up that had her sitting higher in her seat and returning a nod that she’d done the work. Then I headed back down in the lift.
I had a lead, a threat with my name on it, and a gangster in my rearview.
