I didn’t have a problem with that. We needed all of our focus on finding Emily’s killer and getting my life back. Letting everyone at Sinclair Security know we were sleeping together would be nothing but a massive distraction.
Eli’s eyes flicked above, to a light that I guessed was also a security camera. “For now, yeah.”
I followed him down the hall after a wave at Alice on the phone at the front desk, and we found Emmett and Maddox working at a table in the middle of what Eli called “Hacker Central.”
At first, I was distracted by being in the center ofSinclair Security’s team of computer experts. Eli had explained that while most of their job was performed at a keyboard, every single person here was fully capable of working in the field as well. I’d been a touch surprised yesterday when he’d mentioned so much of their work was on the computer. Hearing that they all were as badass as Eli was fascinating. In my mind’s eye,in the fieldconjured up images of everyone clothed in black, scaling buildings and breaking into server rooms or whatever.
It was mostly quiet, the crisp clicks of mechanical keyboards and low murmurs occasionally interspersed by an exclamation or something shouted in jargon I couldn’t translate. Over half of the desks and offices were empty.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Lucas, the head of the division, took a chunk of the team with him for joint training with the Sinclair office in Las Vegas. It’s a lot louder around here when everyone is in-house.”
Eli pulled out a chair for me at the table in the middle of the room and sat beside me. Maddox and Emmett were both working in an oversized cubicle behind us. They’d shoved a laptop in front of me filled with lines of—not code, they said, but logs of communications. Not the communications themselves, but just a record of bytes going back and forth. It didn’t mean much to me, but Maddox had explained that it didn’t need to. I was looking for numbers. Numbers that indicated one IP address had connected to another.
“Are you telling me you guys couldn’t just write a program to search for this or something?”
They shared a glance, then Maddox said, “Could. Did.” He pointed at my screen. “That’s the result.”
“You couldn’t get the program to narrow it down more?” I asked.
“We’re looking for more than the numbers,” Eli said. “We’re looking for patterns. It’s not just that you want to find this and this,” he said, pointing to two different ranges of numbers scribbled on a notepad beside me. “But if you find them, we want to look at how often they’re showing up, and when, and the relationship. Too easy to miss the details with a search query. In the long run, it’s more efficient to use human eyes for this.”
I wasn’t sure I bought that. Not completely. But Eli was sitting beside me doing the same job, so if it was a waste of time, I couldn’t imagine they’d be wasting his as well as mine. Considering all they weren’t telling me about Sinclair Security’s interest in Emily Shaw’s death, I wouldn’t have put it past them to divert me with useless work—but not Eli. He actually knew what he was doing. So, from that perspective, his time was too valuable to waste.
I’d made it through one log file they’d given me and another, highlighting where I’d found the numbers, when I pushed the laptop away.
“This is really boring,” I said, looking over at Eli.
His eyes looked glazed from the monotony of scrolling, making notes, and scrolling some more. “Sometimes it is,” he said, “but this, I agree, is more boring than anything I’ve done in a while. This is all we’ve got.” He sent his files to Maddox, snagging my laptop to do the same. “Did you make any progress with the letter I brought back from the post office?”
Emmett and Maddox exchanged another long look.
“Haven’t looked. Other stuff,” Emmett said cryptically, I thought.
He held up a black square. I didn’t know what it was—it could have been a hard drive. I wasn’t sure, but Eli’s eyes sparked. Clearly, he knew what it was.
“You think whatever that was, it’s in here?” Eli asked, reaching for it.
Maddox shrugged one shoulder, raised an eyebrow, and rubbed his palm over the top of his shaved head. “Maybe. I doubt it’ll be easy to find unless what he scribbled on that page is a file name.”
Eli’s eyes narrowed on Maddox, and it felt to me like something went unspoken between them that led to Maddox turning away.
“See what you can do with it,” Maddox said. “In the meantime, Emmett and I will see what we can shake loose.”
Maddox looked to me, the intent in his dark eyes bringing me to attention. For a while, I’d felt like a sidekick, not really relevant to the conversation. It made sense, since I didn’t understand half of what they were talking about. It was unnerving to be the sudden recipient of Maddox’s full focus.
“We’re still working on figuring out who got to your bank accounts,” he said. “We haven’t forgotten.”
I gave him a faint smile. “I didn’t think you had,” I said.
He nodded and turned back to whatever he was working on with Emmett.
“What’s that?” I asked Eli, looking at the hard drive in his hand.
He plugged it into his laptop. “A shit ton of files, one of which might match what was in that envelope I found in the post office.”
“Okay, what do we do?”
