“You’d do that? I’d compensate you, of course,” said Scarlett. “What if you get caught?”
He snorted. “I’m not getting caught. And yeah, I’d do that for you. For free. Sounds like fun, and I’m curious.”
“Yeah!” Beni punched the air, and Scarlett couldn’t help but laugh.
Cass grinned at her husband. “You love this revolutionary shit.”
“I love you, my subversive beauty,” he said, blowing her a kiss. His phone pinged, and his eyes lit up as he took in the message.
“What?” asked Cass.
“Remember how I said I’d try with your stepmother?” he asked, eyes on Scarlett. He burst into laughter. “I may have just gotten the passwords to her email and her bank accounts.”
Scarlett shot up. “That’s amazing! How?”
He showed Scarlett his phone. “The dumbest way. This morning I sent her an offer for half-price youth-enhancing injectables if she purchased an entire year’s worth of injections at once. She filled out the form five minutes ago.”
Beni hovered behind Scarlett as she read the very realistic email Tyler had sent from an address that would’ve fooled even her. It looked just like something Laylani’s aesthetic spa would’ve sent.
“Ha!” Beni high-fived Tyler.
It was the lightest Scarlett had been since Brayden’s arrest. “Incredible work,” she said.
“Well done, babe,” said Cass, who’d joined them. She leaned over Tyler’s shoulder. “Shall we see what she’s packing?”
“We’ll look while we work on the bureau’s system.” He laughedmaniacally.
Scarlett wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t done anything yet,” he said, still chuckling.
“Thank you for trying,” she said, straightening. Finally, she was getting the upper hand on Laylani and Moira. She was gaining control. Leveling the playing field. If only Brayden were with her, she’d be on the cusp of total triumph.
With Cass and Beni behind them, Scarlett sat next to Tyler while he worked his magic. He put a bot to work on the bureau’s intranet and opened up Laylani’s accounts on two different screens.
“What are we looking for here?” asked Tyler.
“Anything to do with my dad’s death, my abduction, bribe-sized payments to Dr. Turner, or—and this one’s a long shot—the murder of my mother thirteen years ago,” rattled off Scarlett. She’d lived through it all, but she could hardly believe the list as she summed it up for Tyler.
“Nothing major, then.” He frowned at the screen as he did a couple of quick searches. There were too many mentions of Jules for her dad’s name to work. Nothing came up when he tried searching for “Turner.”
Tyler’s attention was on the bank account, while Scarlett scanned Laylani’s inbox for anything particularly damning, but all she saw was a bunch of online shopping receipts, RSVPs for social functions, and dinner reservation confirmations.
A ping came from Tyler’s computer. “We’re into the bureau’s system.”
“Damn, that was quick,” muttered Scarlett, making a mental note to propose security upgrades for the government websites. For now, it was a good thing security was lax.
Finding exactly what they needed proved more difficult thansimply gaining access. After the first thirty minutes, Beni and Cass sat on the floor playing cards. Scarlett remained next to Tyler, scouring the screens in front of her for anything she could use.
An hour passed.
“It’s a matter of figuring out where the files might be stored,” murmured Tyler. He had a script running on his computer searching the bureau’s files one by one for mentions of Sigur Viður. He and Scarlett opened promising-looking folders together. There were many mentions of the country across the bureau’s internal system, but so far, they’d seen a lot of irrelevant top-secret documents.
The script stopped, blinking an alert.
“Another hit—looks promising.” Tyler’s eyes lit with excitement.
Cass and Beni got up off the floor to see what he’d found.
