He nodded. “Over here.”
I looked back at the closet, but he let out an ear-piercing whistle like I was a fucking Smoke. I slowly turned to face him, leveling him with a look in my eyes that said, ‘try that shit one more time and I won’t care that we’ve got an audience.’ He didn’tbudge, though. He just motioned toward his desk, so I stalked over to the corner where he kept his shit.
I didn’t bother asking how the woman was.
It was clear from where she was tucked that she wasn’t doing well.
“So?” I asked as he sat down at his desk. “What gives?”
Ranger typed around on a keyboard hooked up to the laptop. “I got into her laptop and found all of those minutes. There’s a fuckton of them, so I started with the most recent twenty since those meetings were pretty much back-to-back within days of each other. Scout’s working on getting them decoded now, if there’s anything to decode.”
I nodded as I leaned over his shoulder, crouching down. “All right, so what do you need me for?”
He continued typing around on her work laptop that was plugged up to high hell and back. I wasn’t sure there was an empty port to stick anything into with the amount of wires he had flowing in and out of that damned thing. I watched him open up files and close them out. I watched black screens with white text pop up for mere seconds before a keystroke with his fingers pulled up something else.
I was getting impatient. I didn’t have a fucking clue what the hell this was about.
Until screens filled with moving black and white pictures popped up.
“Oh. Holy. Fuck,” I said as my jaw dropped behind my mask.
Ranger chuckled. “Glad I called you in here now?”
“No fucking way,” I said as I dipped lower and moved off to his side so that I could get a better look at the images.
Good fucking God, this was a bird’s eye view of the cameras in the fucking law firm.
Insideof the fucking law firm.
“This shit was on her laptop?” I asked as I looked over at Ranger.
He nodded. “Had to dig for it, but her laptop is hooked up to all of this shit. There are multiple cameras on every level of the building, but we’ve got access to all of them through her laptop.”
I stood and raked my hands through my disheveled hair. “You mean, her laptop had the capability and you figured it out? Or?—?”
“Or,” Ranger said as he kept typing around. “The system itself is pretty rudimentary, given the money that has to be wrapped up in all of this. Black and white. No microphones. Cheap shit on the market today. The DOJ contact we’re working with says that’s pretty standard. The cheaper the footage, the less it can be used against them.”
I nodded mindlessly as I watched.
“However,” he said as he stopped typing and swiveled his chair to face me, “her entire laptop is hooked up to all of these systems. She probably doesn’t even know she’s got access to shit like this. It was buried, so I really had to dig for it. But once I opened up the program, it was just a matter of figuring out how to toggle through the cameras.”
“And you’ve got her laptop masked?”
He nodded. “Every single movement we make is masked right now. But even if they were to figure out that her laptop was active, it would just look like a dead piece of technology. That’s why I’ve got it all plugged up like this. They can’t track things like keystrokes this way.”
“Huh,” I said as I nodded and stood, straightening my back. “How long will you have her laptop masked like that?”
“Well, it’s been masked for about a day like this already, and nothing has been thrown. But I took precautions last night and unplugged everything to recycle the systems before I plugged it all up this morning and got back at it.”
“And this is what you found.”
He tilted his head back to look up at me. “Figured you’d want to know about it.”
I bent down. “I don’t want to just know about it. I want to know how in the hell I can get that camera footage on my televisions so we can have eyes on that place twenty-four-seven, for as long as possible.”
“Want to know what I’ve seen on the cameras this fantastic Monday morning?”
Oh, he clearly had more to say. I folded my arms across my chest. “Ready when you are.”
