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“Oh, I’m one of the best in the city, but if you don’t believe me, you can go find another computer specialist and that person is going to tell you the same thing. The mayor is off his nut.”
“As one of the best in the city, you wouldn’t know the steps this person might take to get access to the mayor’s home network, would you?”
Quinn rolled his eyes. “The kids.”
“How—”
“Kids are sloppy with things like passwords, websites, and who they friend on social media,” Quinn quickly explained. “You just need to get access to one of the kids’ accounts and you should be able to follow that into the household network. Another vulnerability would be anyone who provides a service to the household—like a cleaning service or landscaper or even a water delivery service. Someone who might have regular access to the house. Any one of them could have access to the household Wi-Fi and that’s an easy access point.”
“Sounds like you’ve already got a starting point.”
Quinn muttered something under his breath that Shane couldn’t quite make out, but he didn’t care. Shane had won. Quinn was in.
“There’s no guarantee that we’ll catch the hacker this way,” Quinn hedged. He dropped his arms down to his sides and rocked back on his heels and then forward again.
“True, but I am a private investigator. There are other, more mundane ways to track this person down. The mayor is a public figure, so we’ve got some options on potential enemies—like his opponent and people he’s pissed off with his decisions.”
A hint of a smile returned to Quinn’s face. “Well, that’s got to be a smaller list than what we had to go through for Geoffrey.”
Shane’s head popped up. “You worked with Geoffrey Ralse?”
Quinn stiffened. “I shouldn’t have said that. I can’t talk about that case.”
Shane waved him off. “Don’t worry about it. I followed some of it in the news. The stalker thing. I heard whispers that Geoffrey had hired Ward. I just didn’t know you’d worked that case. If you handled that one, then this one should be a walk in the park. We’re protecting the mayor’s privacy, protecting his kids, and tracking down a hacker.”
Running a hand roughly through his hair, Quinn walked back over to his chair and picked up his bag. “Fine. We’ll protect the mayor, even if it does sound like a bad comic book story. Where am I working? I’ve got to start taking apart this computer you bought.”
Shane pointed to the small desk shoved into the opposite corner of the room with the laptop sitting on top of it. Yeah, it wasn’t the best setup, and it was going to keep them in very close proximity. He was beginning to think that was a mistake.
“It’s just for now. We’re short on space and we need the conference room. We can move things around later,” Shane offered.
Quinn wordlessly nodded and set his messenger bag on the desk. Settling on the small swivel chair, he spent only a couple of minutes pulling up menus on the laptop before turning around to look at Shane, who was struggling to get his mind on his own work. “I’ll need a day, maybe two to get this computer prepped and locked down so that the hacker can’t trace anything we do back to here. I’ll then need at least a few days to get things set up with the kids’ accounts, and that’s assuming you get me all the emails, login names, and passwords.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
Shane cleared his throat and shifted a bit in his chair. “I didn’t think it would take so long to get everything set up.”
Quinn’s eyes narrowed again. “You’re one of those people who believes that Hollywood bullshit they keep putting in movies about hackers, aren’t you? Where you just”—Quinn spun around and typed on the keyboard for a few seconds in a loud clatter of keys before spinning back—“and boom! Done! You’re in. The White House has been hacked and you’re king of the world.”
“It doesn’t work like that?” Shane said, fighting to keep a straight face. He’d prodded Quinn simply because he didn’t want him to stop talking. And that nerdy sexy vibe was hot mixed with some snap.
“Fuck no!” Quinn launched to his feet but didn’t take a step closer to Shane. “Hacking anything with even a minimal security system takes time and hundreds—if not millions of failed attempts. It’s sending out millions of phishing emails to get that one jackass to click on the attachment holding the trojan. It’s praying that you can find the one idiot who’s still using ‘password’ or ‘abc123’ as his freaking password so you can get in. Hacking is almost as much luck and time as it is skill.”
“Wow,” Shane breathed and Quinn jerked as if he was suddenly aware that he had been shouting.
