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“You haven’t had any messages since the day after you arrived, yeah?”
“Correct. I suspect they’ve traced me here, and if they have, they’ll have done some research and know what you do for a living. So maybe they don’t want to take any chances.”
“Or they’re switching to another strategy. Whitman must be getting scared. I mean, if he’s taking the risk of going after witnesses…”
Roman’s heart sank. “That puts all of you at risk.”
“We knew that going in. You were clear about the dangers from the start.”
“I know, but?—”
“But nothing has changed. We’re facing the same enemy we were before. The only difference is that he may be escalating. Well, we were expecting that too, and we’re ready for it. I’ve called in reinforcements from another company I often work with, and they’ll take over securing the house and perimeter so my team can focus on finding out all we can about Whitman.”
“I’ll pay for that.”
Wander firmly shook his head. “Jesse is covering the bill.”
“I can’t accept that.”
“You’re gonna have to find a way to because he’s not budging. It’s his house, you’re his guest, and the man has money like water. Accept his generosity, Ro. He wants to take care of you…like we all do.”
When he put it like that… “Okay,” Roman relented.
“Now I’d like you to tell me about everyone who has knowledge about this case, everyone who is officially looped in. Your office, Boston PD, FBI, anyone.”
“We’ll be here a while.”
“We’ll get some more coffee and snacks. I need to have the whole picture. When Ryan and Alex come back with names, I want to be able to cross-check them to your list to see who could be a mole.”
Roman took a deep breath. “All right. We’ll start with Julie McKay…”
16
Find out everything you can about Isabella Coldrick.
That was the assignment Wander had given Caleb, and he was on it like a fly to a pile of shit. Hmm, that was a fitting metaphor in this case because if she was Whitman’s right hand, she was dirty as fuck. He’d already found out all the basics—parents, sisters, education, résumé—but it was time to dig a little deeper. An initial Google search hadn’t revealed much, but maybe social media would be more helpful.
Both of Isabella’s sisters had a Facebook account and were sloppy with their privacy settings, which made Caleb’s job so much easier. If one made a public post and tagged someone with a friends-only profile, it would still be public and visible to all. So many people didn’t realize that, and it seemed Isabella was one of them. Caleb discovered several photos of Isabella, who went by Bella with friends, apparently.
The three had done a spa day and sported goofy smiles as they posed with neon-green face masks, looking like aliens. Roman had been right. She did genuinely care about her sisters. Everyone had a weakness, and it looked like her sisters were Isabella’s. Caleb filed that bit of information away.
Twitter didn’t reveal anything, but Isabella was active on LinkedIn. She’d kept her résumé up to date, but she also posted regularly about legal news. Nothing stood out at first glance, though. No mention of Whitman or anything related to him. She had shared an update about the Harborfront deal Roman had mentioned, with a two-sentence intro that stated she was proud to have worked on this deal and that it would be great for the city of Boston.
The post hadn’t gotten a lot of reactions, so it wasn’t much effort to track the people who had responded and check their profiles. Most of them were fellow legal professionals, and a quick look at their résumés showed some of them had been classmates of Isabella or former coworkers. Two people with the last name Coldrick had reacted. Cousins, maybe? Or uncles?
He wrote down the other names, checked a few more similar updates, and noted the names of people who had responded to those. In his experience, people were far stupider online than they realized, exposing more hints and data than they wanted to. And if they did, Caleb would find it.
Next up was Coldrick Law. Caleb created a false profile as a paralegal on various job sites and searched for reviews of Isabella’s firm. They were mixed. She’s a total bitch, one woman wrote. The kind that gives women with power a bad name.
Well, she didn’t do herself any favors there, considering everyone could see her name. Oops. Another was more forgiving, though they did mention endlessly long days, but what else is new? Indeed, law firms weren’t exactly known as relaxed nine-to-five jobs.
Wait. She had two positions open. One was for a forensic accountant. Wasn’t that interesting? What would she need one for? And the other for… Oh my god, she had posted a job for an IT specialist. Caleb sat up straight. He clicked on the job description and read it with rising excitement. She’d titled the position IT specialist, but what she was asking for was more of a cybersecurity specialist. Just when Caleb was ramping up his efforts to get into her systems, she wanted to find someone to keep hackers out.
What if he…? Whitman and Coldrick might know his name, but they wouldn’t have his picture. Caleb was a stickler for keeping his face off the Internet, and he’d even gotten a buzz cut and let his beard grow for his driver’s license picture. If he ever got pulled over, the photo still looked like him, but it would be much harder to recognize him with a casual glance now that his hair was much longer.
He’d have to create an alias, one that was solid enough to withstand a background check, but that wasn’t too hard for him. Backstopping, the FBI called it when creating a background for an undercover agent, and they’d become masters at it. Caleb had learned a lot from an agent who’d spilled some secrets on a forum—anonymously, of course.
With his hacking skills, creating a plausible background wasn’t that big a deal. The biggest challenge was a social security number, since it would have to match and show the appropriate activity. And since he had no desire to spend a life sentence in prison, hacking into the Social Security Administration wasn’t an option, though he sure would’ve relished the challenge. But he could think of ways around that.
