“I’ve still got some leads to follow,” he said. “We’ll find something.”
Jacob patted his hand on the side of his laptop. “Going through the files I, um, accessed from PeaPod has given me a couple of ideas to chase up.”
“Sounds very illegal. Congratulations,” Dev said. He glanced down at his watch and heaved a frustrated sigh. “If I’m not going to get caught sneaking back into my own house, I have to go. If you need anything, call Nora, and she can sort it out at Syntech. I’ve been locked out of the servers. You probably have been too by now, Simon.”
Simon shoved himself up off the couch, jaw clenched against the need to show pain, and walked him out into the hall. He closed the door behind them.
“You trust Jacob?” Dev asked.
Simon tipped his hand back and forth. “I trust him to have my back. I wouldn’t trust him around your wallet.”
He felt a brief pang of irrational guilt at the disloyalty, but it was the best shorthand he could come up with for his slightly… contentious… relationship with Jacob.
“The code that was stolen, the college stuff, was being used for predictive modeling,” he said. “Did it do the same job as this stuff Clayton was working on?”
Dev snorted. “It’s the difference between a moped and a Jaguar,” he said. “To be fair Harry was always good, but this new project was a cut above. I couldn’t do it.”
High praise from the arrogant.
“Okay,” Simon said. He tugged Dev into a rough hug, and thumped Dev’s back. “Be careful. They’re covering their asses right now. That’s when people do stupid things.”
“I’m fine.” Dev gave him a careful pat on his good shoulder. “You’re the one I’m worried about. Seriously. Callie’d never forgive me if something happened to her favorite uncle because of my company. It’s not worth it.”
“I’m not letting you go to jail for something you didn’t do.” Or probably even if he had done it.
“Me?” Dev asked. “Or Jake in there?”
“He hates that.”
“I know. I hate being robbed.” Dev grinned at him and then got onto the elevator. He glanced back down at his watch again as the doors closed, and a frown pinched his eyebrows together.
When Simon went back into the apartment, Jacob was slouched down almost horizontal on the couch. His hips were barely hanging on to the cushions, and the laptop was balanced across his crotch. He’d gotten a can of lemonade from the fridge and set it on the table next to the coaster.
Simon walked over, picked it up, and pointedly set it on the glass disc. Jacob glanced up briefly and told him, “Help yourself.”
“Anything useful?”
“Maybe,” Jacob said. He looked up and rubbed a fingertip over his eyelid. “Apparently I was right about the drawer. Clayton had started seeing some woman recently. He was always getting Abby to run personal errands for her—because he sucked as a boss—including, it looks like, tickets to DEF CON in Vegas next year.”
“The hacker convention?”
Jacob shrugged. “If you work with computers, you care about cybersecurity. Where better to discover the various exploits out there than a roomful of people who make them for fun and profit. It doesn’t mean anything other than she’s interested in high-level programming. It could just be a love connection for her and Clayton, but the timing is odd.”
“Do you have a name?”
“And Guest.”
“Could just be a coworker.”
“Not unless they’re going sleep head-to-foot in that king-size bed they booked,” Jacob said. “I also found evidence of some contact between Clayton and Lau. They were scheduled for an early-morning meeting, but Clayton stood Lau up. He was too busy being dead in the canal.”
Chapter Fifteen
ABBY THEoffice manager had lived her life on the computer—schedules, to-do lists, call lists, contacts, Amazon wish lists, a password manager, and a downloaded backup of her bookmarks. The only thing missing was a daily journal. While all that unpacked on the partition he’d set up on the computer, Jacob was left with a notebook and an envelope full of Abby’s expenses to go through.
“Well, Clayton’s new love interest was a woman of expensive tastes.” He peeled the wrapper off a Milky Way bar and took a bite. His stomach growled. They’d swung by a McDonalds on the way back to the apartment and ate quarter pounders and fries in the parking lot, but that had been hours earlier.
“You’re assuming it was a woman,” Simon said as he got a beer from the fridge. He leaned back against the counter and looked thoughtful as he twisted the cap off. It still wasn’t anything to do with Jacob. “Maybe it was Lau.”
