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Swearing under his breath, he jogged to the guest room where his own things were stored and grabbed his charging cable before returning to the kitchen to plug in his phone. As soon as it was plugged in, a call from Quinn’s cell phone rang through.
“What do you have?” he demanded as a greeting.
“Not fucking much,” Quinn said with a heavy sigh.
“That’s not helping me.”
“I’m sorry, Sven,” Gidget’s sweet voice chimed in, proving that Quinn was likely making the call from their joint office back at Ward Security. “Geoffrey is too wonderful a person to have this happening to him. He doesn’t deserve this at all.”
“When did the video go up?” Sven asked, determined to keep his thoughts focused on the job. And right now, Geoffrey had to be just a job. If he was more, if he let himself get emotionally tangled up in Geoffrey and his pain, he wouldn’t be able to think clearly. He wouldn’t be able to protect Geoffrey and he’d have to ask Rowe to find someone to replace him. And there was no way he was letting anyone else into that house until Geoffrey was better.
“About 5 a.m. I noticed it about 6:30,” Quinn admitted.
“Then why the hell wasn’t it taken down? Why is it still up? I thought you had all the login information for his accounts.”
The silence stretched for several seconds, growing more uncomfortable with every beat of his heart. His patience grew thinner until he was sure he was going to snap and he never lost his temper. Not since that horrible day as a child.
“What?” he growled.
“The stalker uploaded the video, Sven,” Gidget said gently as if she were trying to soothe his anger. “We’ve been trying to trace where he logged in from or any other kind of identifying data.”
“We’ve also been collecting data on the people who’ve watched the video and the comments that are being left,” Quinn added. A chair squeaked in the background as if Quinn had shifted closer to the phone. “There’s a good chance that one of the commenters is also the stalker. We’re trying to see if there’s anyone in particular who is egging on the negative comments, trying to hurt Geoffrey more.”
“That behavioral analysis stuff you’ve told me about?”
“Yeah. We’re sorting all the data that we’ve collected from the video interactions and Geoffrey’s social media posts as well as the texts he’s gotten.”
“We’re trying to build a criminal profile,” Gidget said and then sighed heavily. “But this isn’t our area of expertise. It’s just so much data and we’re not sure what we’re looking for.”
“Rowe’s calling Hollis and that P.I. he works for, Shane something or other,” Quinn said.
Sven nodded, not caring that they couldn’t see him. Hollis Banner was a former cop from Atlanta who’d recently started working for a private investigator. Hollis was a good guy who loved to give Rowe shit and was incredibly protective of his boyfriend, Ian Pierce. After serving as Ian’s bodyguard twice, Sven was glad to see that he’d finally found a perfect match in Hollis.
“Does Hollis or Shane have experience making a criminal profile?”
“No idea,” Quinn admitted.
Gidget groaned in frustration. “If they don’t, there’s a good chance they might know someone who does. We’re going to get the right person for this.”
“And if we don’t, we have to kick this out to the cops and you know how the boss hates trusting anything to the cops.”
Sven swallowed back his own groan. Rowe did hate involving the police in anything. His boss was his own one-man wrecking crew. He liked to take care of things himself or let his team take care of it. Andrei was attempting to curb some of Rowe’s impulses, but it was still a struggle.
And in this instance, Sven sided with Rowe. The cops hadn’t taken Geoffrey’s complaint seriously from the beginning and only showed a modicum of effort after his vehicle was vandalized. He suspected that if Geoffrey reported the hacking and video to the cops, that same prick who’d blamed Geoffrey before would try to shame him again. No, Sven didn’t want the fucking cops involved any longer. He wanted to handle this personally.
“Do you have enough data yet?” Sven glanced up at the clock on the wall and frowned. “The video has been up for more than five hours. Can you take it down now?”
There was a pause and Sven could imagine Quinn and Gidget silently signaling to each other, arguing over whether to take the video down or who got to do it. He couldn’t imagine how they worked together some days. When they both weren’t under headphones and glued to their monitors, they were bickering about everything under the sun. Dominic teased that they were actually siblings but had been separated at birth. Rowe had offered to shuffle offices around so they could both have their own space to cut down on the arguing, but they said that they worked better in the same room.
