There had to besomething.
Think, Aiden.
My hands started moving before I was fully conscious of it, pulling up the email serves for Clarity magazine. Not Trinity’s email, but Tracy’s. If Tracy pissed them off enough for them to kill her, there might be a trail. I hadn’t gone down this path because my first assessment of the car crash was that it was an accident.
While those messages were downloading, I set a program running with Trinity’s picture on a wider crawler looking for any and all images of her, and seeking a pattern.
A new picture of her popped up from two days ago at the fight. When Bastian had been pointing at her. It was a professional photo, and a good one. Part of a standard batch of press photos uploaded to one of the aggregators.
Images of her popped up from security and traffic cameras. Most of them I’d already seen because of the programs I had running. And nothing gave me a glimpse of whether my Omega was in danger.
I loved the photos an event photographer had gotten at the surfing competition. Not solely because she was sitting between my legs in some of them, but because she looked as comfortable sitting there as she was in her nest.
The photographers had been moving up and down the beach for the entire competition. I remembered them because they had been dressed in black and stood out against all the brightness and color.
I’d seen them the next day before we snorkeled, too.
Something tugged at my memory.
I scrolled through all the images of Trinity that I’d already seen, grainy security and traffic cameras. Why the fuck couldn’t I have been born with a photographic memory? My memory was good, but not perfect. So why?—
There.
The date was the day after Trinity and I had had our first scene. When I made her come so many times she was delirious. She’d gone to get waffles with her friends, and some street cameras caught her walking back to her car. Past a group of photographers dressed in black.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
The best way to hide a crime was to have someone who wasn’t connected to you do it. It was rare and almost impossible to severallconnections, but people tried.
They were there. In several of the security shots, there were men with cameras around Rin. They were subtle enough not to be immediately noticed. But as soon as I added that parameter? The photos started lining up on my screen.
The first instance with cameras made my stomach churn. It was before we met. On the beach at sunset. If this was the day she got the flash drive…
But who were they? How could I find them?
A new chirp as my programs found a connection. Could it really be that simple?
The connection it made: the photos of Trinity from the surfing competition and the fight night were taken by the same company. A deeper search told me event photos weren’t their specialty. Headshots were.
Corporate headshots.
Including some of the very companies Trinity was targeting.
It was a strange sensation to have a wave of relief and a rise in fear at the same time. I found what we needed, but what we needed meant that Trinitywasin danger.
We’d been with her most of the time she was in public, or she’d been with her friends. The DuPonts always had discreet security for Ocean, so Rin was in a protective bubble there as well. Which meant her only unprotected travel was to and from work and her friends.
A beep drew my eye to the newly downloaded files from Tracy’s server. It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for. An anonymous email address and a grainy photo of Tracy from a very familiar angle.
The email was a single line:
Back off. They know.
I knew that angle because I’d seen it just days ago. It was the security camera at Port Sunset that I’d deleted for Trinity.
I traced the email address. It bounced off nothing, now inactive, but all the other communications were there too. Including the one Trinity had used to arrange her meeting with the contact. So that was how they knew to tail her. The email had already been compromised and Rin had no way of knowing.
