Ginny frowned. "I didn't hear anything about that."
"I have a picture."
Ginny inspected the phone.
"Who sent this?"
"Vance."
Ginny gave him a questioning look.
"A coworker," he stated.
"Hm." She looked at the phone, then she plugged it into the TV hanging on the wall. The picture was scaled up on the screen, and Ginny peered at it.
"This is Photoshopped," she said after a moment.
"How can you tell?" Carter asked, shocked.
"See here around the dog? This is an old picture, and the dog was photoshopped into it."
"Where would Vance find a picture of her?"
"Facebook? I don't know, but it's definitely fake. It's not even that great of a Photoshop job," Ginny said, unplugging his phone.
He tried to call Allie, but she didn't pick up, so he texted her and hoped she would read it.
Ginny watched him critically.
"I don't know what's going on, but you need to get to the bottom of this," Ginny said as he left.
Carter nodded numbly. He had a sinking feeling that he had missed something terribly important and it was going to blow up in his face.
67
Allie
After receiving the messages from Bryce, Allie couldn't ignore him anymore.
Bryce was so fixated on revenge, not just on her but Carter as well, and the death threats were starting to sound more like promises.
Allie logged into the Holbrook servers remotely and scrolled through Carter's notes on the Halcion Drone project. A safety write-up of the worker who had died had been submitted the day after his death for an incident that had supposedly happened weeks before. She hadn't really noticed this before because they were so focused on the embezzlement.
"That's strange," she said and looked through more pdfs until she found the information she was looking for. The worker had never been written up before. Allie did a quick Google search for the employee. He had actually spoken at several conferences about safety, so why had he suddenly committed a safety violation and then have a fall only weeks later?
She clicked through the folders, looking for email messages. She had been through them before, but now she looked through the backups that the IT department made in case someone accidentally deleted their emails. Hidden in an archive folder, she found an email the employee had sent to Trent about the strange invoices. It seemed Carter wasn't the only one to discover embezzlement. Trent had scheduled to meet with the employee to explain, and it was the night of the fall.
She sat back in her chair. Trent was a murderer. She had to tell Grant. She needed to go to the police.
Someone knocked on the door. She slid off the bed. Was it Carter?
Her apartment door burst open, the metal locks bouncing off of the floor, and Bryce and his brother barged in.
Bryce smirked as he saw the shock and fear register on her face. She tried to grab for the gun under the bed, but Bryce tackled her and wrapped his hands around her throat as Trent grabbed the gun.
Allie tried to fight Bryce, but he was too strong.
He's going to kill me,she thought as Stacy walked into the small apartment.
