The radio crackles faintly with background noise. I turn onto the highway.
Somewhere behind me, back in town, GhostEye is digging.
Everything might actually be okay.
But I can’t ignore the feeling that it won’t stay that way.
33
What a fucking relief.
We’ve got a week before Ingram is back.
Ingram being out of the picture gives GhostEye a huge amount of time. I’ve seen Ava hack into university systems and small companies in mere hours. Hell, the reason she even got mixed up with GhostEye in the first place is that she won their hacking contest. The hacker who hacked the hackers. I trust that girl to dig until she reaches daylight. I’m sure she’s slept very little since Rio knocked on her door last night after mine.
I push inside the GhostEye offices. They’re humming with tension. Santi passes me on his way out, tipping his cowboy hat before heading back out to the pastures.
Ava sits at her station with three monitors lit up in front of her, face pale from the screen glow. Enzo is at his station behind her—they work back-to-back—and he taps his keyboard methodically.
Rio is at the table, and his usual, ironed, suave demeanor is slightly rumpled. There’s a condensation ring on the table near his elbow and a second empty mug beside the first.
None of them has stopped moving for hours. There’s even a blanket and pillow out on a loveseat in the corner by the coffee machine.
They’ve been here most of the night, I’m sure. They knew one thing: by morning, I could walk into this room carrying word that Freya was red-lighting the whole operation, and that would be it. They’d have to stop. Whatever they found before I arrived was gold, so they weren’t going to stop mining with what little time they might have had.
Thankfully, I’m not here to deliver that news. She and I—we’re partners. But this goes beyond that.
I don’t ask easily. I never have. And she knew exactly what she was putting on the line when she handed this to me—to Rio. Her career. Her name.
I feel the responsibility lock in. I won’t take it lightly. We need to work fast.
Rio lifts his coffee mug to me. “Morning.”
I nod. “Morning.”
He gazes at me intently, one question in his eyes: What did Freya say?
I stare him down with one answer in mine:The conversation never happened.
Somehow, in the magical silent language of men, he knows I’m not here to stop them.
I sit down on the side of the conference table nearest to Ava’s desk.
“We’ve been digging all night,” she says without looking up.
I rest my elbows on my knees. “What did you find?”
She shifts enough for me to see a monitor lit up with just code, like I’ve walked onto a sci-fi set.
“We started with Zoe’s call logs last night,” Ava says. “That was the easiest thing to breach.” She moves her mouse and opens a spreadsheet, then points at one number. “This number began occurring daily on Zoe’s cell logs about six weeks before her death.”
I lean over and see the pattern. “You think that’s our guy. Maybe Mace?”
She nods. “We’re working on that assumption for now. As you might guess, the number tracks to a burner phone. It took a while to trace, but I followed the SIM activation batch. It leads back to a store in Nevada.”
Nevada? Feels a long way for Ingram, or whoever killed Zoe, to go for a burner phone. Still, if he’s willing be part of a woman’s death, a long drive isn’t exactly out of bounds.
Ava switches screens. “We also managed to get into her bank statements last night, following the lead on the lottery win she told her parents about. There.” She points to a transaction on a screenshot. “Ten thousand dollars. If this was a scratch ticket or some other win, she would have likely deposited cash. But this sudden windfall was transferred by a Nevada LLC called Avarice Inc.”
