“What’s she doing at a women’s refuge?”
“I did some digging while I was waiting for the Tube. I couldn’t find anything current on our cipher except a name, and I was lucky to get that. No surprises there. But I did find these.” He clicked on a tab and brought up a list of recordings. “Historical emergency calls.” He clicked on one, and the calm voice of the operator and a trembling voice of a child echoed through the speakers.
“Nine-nine-nine, what’s your emergency?”
“Please come quick. He’s hurting her again.”
“Who, sweetie? Tell me what’s happening.”
“It’s Daddy. He’s hurting Mommy again. Dinner was too cold and it made him angry.”
“I’m sending someone straight away, sweetheart. You stay on the line with me. Are you safe?”
“I’m hiding in the cupboard. He never finds me here.”
There were distant sounds of yelling, a crash, a woman’s scream and the line went dead.
“There are more. A lot more. All similar. There are records in the UK police database of officers attending the home of a Jiehong and Huiyeng Lee, multiple times. They offered to press charges, but each time Huiyeng claimed she’d”—Louis tapped the keyboard and brought up one statement after another—“fallen down the stairs, tripped and hit a door, wasn’t watching where she was going. The list goes on. On record is their daughter, Mei Lin, as a regular nine-nine-nine caller.”
“Mei Lin Lee.”
“She goes by Melinda Cheng now.” Louis clicked on another tab, revealing a black-and-white photo of a woman in her forties. She wasn’t smiling, and her face had the resigned look of someone who’d accepted her fate.
“Is that from an obituary?”
“Oui. This is Huiyeng Lee. She died of a stroke at forty-three. Constant beatings from her husband probably helped that along.”
Pierre studied the photo. “Melinda has her eyes, and her chin.” He took a sip of hiscaféandstared at the sad eyes of Melinda’s mother. “So, she couldn’t help her mother, no matter how many times she called the police, so now she makes it her mission in life to create fake identities for other battered women? Giving them a chance to escape the life her mother never managed to free herself from?” He frowned. “If that’s the case, where does Cordelia King fit into this? The only thing she’s running from is us. And she deserves to be running.”
“I don’t imagine women from a government-funded refuge would pay well. We’ve been watching Melinda for three weeks, and there’s no evidence she does anything but hacking.” Louis pointed to the women’s refuge on the screen. “My guess? These are her passion projects. Something she does because she wants to. Because she’s called to do it. Cordelia could be how Melinda makes her money. Taking on other clients.”
Pierre stared at the long list of calls to nine-nine-nine. It was telling she’d chosen her mother’s maiden name. She could have given herself any name and disappeared completely into the ether. She could’ve hacked into the police data system, as Louis had—she was good enough to do it—and removed all the evidence of her childhood, but she hadn’t. No. She’d deliberately chosen to leave it there. Like an act of defiance against the man who’d tormented her mother. Melinda Cheng was a crusader.
Pierre rose and paced the floor, his hands fisted at his side, his claws threatening to punch through into his palms. That Cordelia would hire hackers to elude them wasn’t unexpected, but of all the ones she could have chosen, that she’d picked one with heart, a White Hat, to do her dirty work, made him want to rend and destroy.
“Pierre?”
“Mm?”
“You were growling.”
“I was?” He was?What has got into me today?He was on edge, his whole body prepped for a fight and his wolf hovering close to the surface. He scrubbed his chin. “This would be so much easier if our hacker were some pimply little male.”
Louis closed his laptop, and swiveled to face him. “How so?”
“We could break into his apartment, tie him to a chair and beat the answers out of him. Or, at the very least, keep him quiet while we crack the encryption on his tech.”
Louis eyed him. “I’m not sure why that isn’t still an option.”
Pierre rubbed at his chest. It was what they’d planned. Why did he suddenly feel so uncomfortable about it? Because she was a woman?
Louis shrugged. “Alor, we wait until she goes to the refuge again and break into her apartment while she’s gone.”
“Her security on her tech will be almost as good as ours. We’d need days.”
Louis shrugged. “Then we take her tech. We’d have all the time in the world then.”
“Think, Louis. We do that, she contacts Cordelia, and the witch cuts off all ties and disappears. Any information we glean will be useless. We’d be back at the beginning again, hunting down another of her hackers, at the ass-end of the world in Australia or Russia. I don’t speak Russian, do you?”
