Page 52

I pulled up a contact I had used for clients a few times. A man who did not advertise or accept jobs from anyone he didn’t know without a referral.

“What do you need, Hayes?”

“I have a deepfake. Face of a woman I care about. Body is not hers. Someone is shopping it for fifty thousand. I need it killed, and I need to know who made it.” My words came out choppy because I was barely holding on to my anger.

“Send me what you have. I’ll run the metadata and an analysis of the video. Give me an hour.”

“You have forty minutes.” That was how long it would take me to get to Celia’s townhouse.

“Understood.”

I was five minutes from her townhouse when the phone lit. I answered on the speaker and kept my eyes on the road. “You were right. The lighting doesn’t match the room. The shadows under the collarbone are from a different source. Whoever made this used a free tool and didn’t clean the edges.”

“Seller?”

“Anonymous. Gmail created the day they sent the pitch. Crypto wallet that has never been used before this. No prior listings. No watermark. No attempt to hide the IP on the first email. They used a public network. Coffee shop in Beverly Hills. Sloppy.”

I slowed for a light. “Amateur.”

“Or someone who wanted it to look like one. My bet is a grudge with a credit card and a bad idea.”

That description fit three people I knew, but I hoped like hell it wasn’t connected to my daughter in any way. “Can you kill the offer?”

“I can flag the wallet and the Gmail so the money and messages are rerouted to me. But I can’t stop them from posting it themselves if they decide the money isn’t worth the wait.”

“Send me everything you have.”

“Already in your inbox.”

“Thanks.” My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Then see if you can get the video from the coffee shop for the day the emails started going out.”

“Won’t do much good without something to compare against.”

“Pull photos of my daughter, ex-wife, and son-in-law.”

He let out a low whistle. “Fucking hell. I’ll get right on that.”

I ended the call as my car pulled in front of her townhouse. Then I got out. She needed to hear it from me.

She’d told me just last night that I could use the key she’d given me, but I rang the bell. She opened the door with a smile that died when she saw my face. “What’s wrong?”

“Someone is trying to sell a video that’s supposedly of you. A fake. I’m already killing it.”

She went still, and the color left her face. “I didn’t⁠—”

“I know.” I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. “I watched just enough to know the body isn’t yours. I know how you move. I didn’t come over to accuse you of anything, and even if you had made a sex tape, I would’ve made sure you were the only one who had any remaining copy.”

Her hands were shaking. “How did you find out?”

“Publicist named Lucy Blake got the pitch.” I pulled her against my chest and explained how everything had gone down.

Her breath hitched, then she nodded.

“You’re not alone in this,” I promised.

The video was still for sale, but she had my considerable resources at her disposal, and that was the only part I could control.

She tilted her head back to meet my gaze. “Okay, this is not how I saw today going, but it sounds like you’ve handled situations like this before?”