“Anything for the detective.”
Ten minutes passed while she reviewed the surveillance video.
“Look at this,” Emerson said. “It’s that blond again. And he’s doing the same thing.”
Together, they watched as she fast-forwarded through the evening. Blondie cozied up to the bar, ordered a glass of white wine and nursed it. As people came and went, he’d strike up a brief conversation, but he was more interested in observing than talking.
“It’s like he’s doing a psych study,” she said. “Everyone else is totally into talking, flirting, being seen, dancing. This guy is the total opposite.”
“He wants to blend in and not be seen. I might be able to finesse the program to find him, which’ll speed up the process.”
Stryker’s report finished running and he clicked on a different screen. “I’ve got April’s phone records.”
“You’re really good with computers,” she said. “Were you, like, a computer genius as a kid?”
“No. I played competitive sports year ‘round.”
“Did you study comp sci in college?”
He could brush over her questions and stay high level, or he could tell her the damn truth. As he stared into her eyes, he opted for the latter. “I got into computers in high school because I wanted to find the person who killed my mom.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen. I became obsessed, but I didn’t know what I was doing and was terrible at it. It wasn’t ‘til college that I started getting good.”
She swiveled toward him. “But you haven’t found that person, have you?”
“Not yet.”Tell her.“In my twenties, the FBI arrested me.”
“For what?”
“Hacking them.”
“Did you go to prison?”
“I got lucky. My lawyer proposed a deal, and they accepted. I worked off my crime by hacking into their files, then helping them with the fixes, for free. That’s when I started TCS.”
“How long did this deal last?”
“Seven years. I still help them with some off-the-books jobs, but most of the time they pay me for hacking in and doing the fixes, or passing the problems along to their teams.”
She smiled. “Thank you for telling me that.”
April’s call and text logs populated onto the screen.
“Are any of these numbers Parker?” she asked.
After pulling up his employee files, he matched a number on April’s phone with Parker’s number. “That one.”
“They talked about getting together for lunch, but she ghosted on him.”
“That’s not a reason to kill someone,” Stryker replied.
“No, but she was dead two days later,” Emerson said. “Check these texts from a different number.”
Emerson read the texts out loud: “‘Let’s meet up Saturday. Park still good?’ April replied with, ‘Yes, 10am’.”
“A few days later, she got another text from the same number,” Emerson said. “It says, ‘Pics came out great! See you tonight.’ April replied with, ‘Looking forward to it’.”
