I shrugged a shoulder. “I can WordPress. I work with audio files and do some video editing. But I don’t really know how any of it works under the hood.”
“Then my explanation is probably not going to make a whole lot of sense,” Maddox said, leaning back in his chair and propping one booted ankle on his knee. “But, basically, everybody connects to the internet through an IP address, a series of numbers that are specific to your entry point.” He leaned forward and tapped a finger on a highlighted set of numbers from the note on the table that Eli and I had been referencing for our research.
Eli added, “That’s part of what we’ve been cross-referencing all day.”
Maddox went on. “Most sites record IPs when you log in. You know how sometimes you go to log into a site you’re a member of, and you’re in a different place, and it asks you to verify your identity?”
“Yeah.” As much as I traveled, I’d had that happen often.
“That’s because they’re used to you logging in from a certain IP address, or at least a general geographic area.Then, when you’re somewhere else, they want to make sure it’s you. Well, in this case, whoever this is, is logging in from a different IP address. They could be masking it. They could be bouncing it using a VPN. Getting into the logs of your socials is a little more work. Accessing the back end of your website, on the other hand, unless you’ve got some high-end security in place?—”
I was already shaking my head in a negative.
Emmett nodded. “Much easier. If he has a VPN?—”
“I don’t know what that means,” I interrupted.
“A VPN is a service that masks your location by bouncing your signal through various IP addresses in different geographic locations,” Eli said.
“So, if they’re doing that, we’re out of luck?” I’d heard these terms before, but I still didn’t really get how it worked.
“Not necessarily,” Emmett said. “It depends on the VPN, and it depends on how good they are.”
“Doubtful they’re better than we are,” Maddox said with a smirk.
“Agreed.” Emmett took a long sip of his green tea. “We’ll find them. The wheels are already turning on getting the fraud dropped from your bank account. You’re not clear yet, but we’re closer.”
Maddox looked to Eli again, then back to me. “Like Eli said, you just have to hang in there. We’ll figure it out.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure exactly what that meant. Hang in there for how long, and for what? What was the answer going to be at the end of this?
I wanted revenge. Justice for Emily. And the freedom to go back to my life. I was beginning to have a very bad feeling that I wasn’t going to get everything I wanted. I might have to be happy with just a sliver. I might have to accept thateverything had fundamentally changed for me when I decided to look into Emily Shaw’s case.
I didn’t yet know how I felt about that, except that I was pissed. And not able to do anything about it. Yet.
I sighed and sipped at my coffee.
“Here,” Eli said, sliding my laptop back in front of me. “I divided out that drive. Scroll through this stuff. See if you find anything that connects to this.” The sheet from the envelope with the cryptic code was sitting between us.
I sighed and dug in.
“I know it can be boring as hell,” Maddox said. “But trust me, the fun parts of the job make it worth it.”
“And what are the fun parts?” I asked.
He just quirked a smile and turned back to his keyboard.
“You don’t want to know,” Eli said.
“I kind of think I do,” I said, but he didn’t answer.
I tried to put my socials, my website, my paused career, and the rest of it on the back burner and stay alert for anything on the screen that made the clue make sense.
Hours later, having found nothing, with a headache pounding behind my eyes, my stomach growling, and the taste of coffee sour in my mouth, I sighed in relief when Eli shut his laptop and stood. “We’re done. For now, at least.”
“I can’t believe all of this, and we didn’t find anything,” I said, closing the laptop in front of me.
“Sometimes that’s how it goes,” Eli said. “You burn time ruling shit out. Now we know that whatever that clue was about, it didn’t reference any of these files. We’ll keep looking.”
