“Thanks,” he mumbles, and after a long moment where he stares unseeingly at the painting on the mantle—the one that shows two boys playing on the shore of a lake—he shakes his head just like he did before dinner and looks down at the coffee table where the brand new laptop is sitting. The briefcase I gave him this morning is right next to it.
He takes a drive out of his pants pocket and gets to work.
I sip my whiskey as I watch him set up the laptop then connect the drive to it. A progress bar appears on screen, and he puts the laptop away to take out a manila envelope from the briefcase.
“So, I have—had this hacker friend. Okay, acquaintance,” he corrects himself without looking at me. “He’s really good, and though he can hack anywhere, he mostly looks for bad people. Anyway, he knew to tell me if he found something big that he couldn’t just shut down or figure out, and he found this website.” He passes me a sheet of paper with the screenshot of a website on it, and every word I read, every inch of it is disgusting. “It’s for the auctions, and that’s how I found out about the human trafficking ring. He managed to get some information off it, but not much, mostly offshore bank accounts that can’t be traced unless you hack the banks, and he wouldn’t do that.”
“How did he know it was happening in the city?”
“The one name he could link to this website was a guy named Luca Marcia, and he lives here. He assured me this Luca hadn’t left the tri-state area in years, at least not legally. He didn’t even have a car to his name. So I found him, followed him for a few days, and found him hanging out around your casino in Chinatown.”
“How do you know I have a casino in Chinatown?” I ask, worried because that shouldn’t be widely known information.
“Because I saw you walk out of there one night, when I was hoping to catch him there again,” he says, a bit dismissively, but I wonder where the hell he was that I didn’t see him—or fucking Blake. “In any case, that’s what made me think maybe you were involved, but then a few weeks later, I saw him talking to Cotroni.”
“Lucian’s second in command,” I hum thoughtfully.
“Yes, and it was clear they were friends. I saw them in a diner and managed to bump into Luca when he was walking out. All I got from his pocket was a receipt?—”
“You pickpocketed him?” I ask, beyond impressed.
“Yes,” he answers, voice all business as he once more turns to the computer. “Ah, here it is. These are the files of the bank accounts we managed to find, the usernames they’re linked to, and the even shorter list of accounts we could get more info on. All these statements are more than a year old, though, so...”
“They could still give us a name, and I’ve got someone coming in two days to help with this side of things.”
“Who?”
Andnowhe looks at me.
“Seamus O’Malley,” I tell him in an even tone.
“And you think he’s good enough to go poking around in the dark web and hacking into foreign banks?” hedemands, his back straight and looking like he’s ready to start hissing at me.
It’s an attractive look, but such an interesting reaction...
“He’s twenty,” I start, trying to keep my amusement at bay. “Like a nephew to me. And he’s probably the second smartest person I’ve ever met. Hell, he was the smartest when he was ten, but I’ve expanded my horizons since then.”
I like that not one word was a lie. I really don’t feel like lying to Colby.
“I can’t know if he can do all of those things until he gets here and we ask him, but he’s the only person I trust to help us with this. Now, since it looks like we’re going to have to go through about a million lists of endless numbers, why don’t you print everything and I’ll go get us something to snack on.”
I stand and leave before he can say anything he might regret or anything I don’t want to hear. It’s true that there’s no way of knowing if young Seamus can help, but I don’t feel like bickering with Colby because he won’t even wait to meet him.
So I go to the kitchen, grab two cupcakes from my secret stash, and make us each a coffee. I have no idea how Colby takes his, though that’s something I’m hoping to rectify, so I put together one of those fancy trays Celly likes and take it back to the library.
Colby’s watching the printer spit out paper like it’ll stop doing its thing as soon as he takes his eyes off it.
“Come here and take a minute.”
It’s a bitch that I wonder whether he does it because he feels he has no choice but to follow my command or because he likes the suggestion. Just another thing I’m not going to figure out until Iuse my words.
The whirl of the printer working keeps us from an even more awkward silence as he adds a splash of cream to his coffee and takes a bite of his cupcake.
“Jesus, this is good,” he says with his mouth still full.
“I know, it’s from my secret stash, which I never share with anyone.”
“Really? No one?” he asks, scepticism dripping from every word.
