“The fake-boyfriend act is pretty goddamn believable,” Vivian said.
Rhys pinched the bridge of his nose and looked back into the living room again. Jules and Abigail were both ignoring their ice cream.
He’d totally screwed up. Suddenly, he felt a possessive urge to explain that everything they had seen or read about was real. This was a job. He’d agreed to a stupid stunt. Somewhere between the beach and the bed and her laughing at his jokes, it had stopped being either of those things. Yet there he was, angry, possessive, and fucked. “Guess I’m doing a great job. Can we forget about that and talk about our plan?”
“The risk assessment is clear,” Vivian said. “Whoever is behind this mess has officially transitioned from annoying to dangerous.”
“Agreed,” Rhys muttered as he paced the white stone patio.
“They have money. Resources. Access—”
“And we don’t know how,” Rhys bit out.
“Actually,” Dean said.
Rhys stopped pacing. “Actually what?”
“We found something.”
A hint of relief deflated some of his anger. “Lead with that next time, brother.”
“Yeah, well, when you’re dropping details aboutyourbungalow, it throws me off.”
“What’d you find?”
“Basically, for an app called Anonymous, they do a crap job at anonymizing their traffic.”
“Meaning?” Rhys pressed.
“The app doesn’t store identities, but its back-end servers log technical data like IP addresses, time stamps, device type, error logs. Et cetera.”
A glimmer of hope appeared. “We have everyone’s IP addresses?”
“In theory, they do. Though most users probably use a VPN.”
His shoulders dropped. “Then it’ll look like everyone is in Amsterdam. Great. How’s that any help?”
“Their app sends push notifications. Those are called tokens, and tokens are attributed to specific devices. Sometimes, they’re tied to an email. Though those are probably throwaways, so that’s pointless.”
Rhys’s patience was running thin. “What’snotpointless?”
“Two things. Even when someone uses a VPN, their device may still send DNS requests and website lookups to their localinternet provider. That doesn’t tell us much unless we know where to focus.”
“Do we?”
“Let’s assume there are a relatively manageable number of new Anonymous subscribers per day. Of those new users, most used a browser to access the site instead of downloading the app.Of those, we take a look at who’s posting in our desired location. Where you are. Not many Anonymous, as you can imagine. A small handful within the last week or so, and within the last forty-eight hours, there’s one user who was as clever as a teenager using a VPN to hide porn from their parents.”
Another flicker of hope rose in his chest. A name. A face. Anything to figure out what asshole was hellbent on scaring Jules. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“The post on the Caribbean forum originated from the greater Los Angeles metro region.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, shuffling what they knew like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to make sense of it and see the big picture.
Someone with money. Someone from where she lived. A crazy neighbor? A local fan? A scorned lover—or whatever Mason could be classified as. But how did that tie together with wanting Jules to leave show business? “I don’t get it.”
“The FBI has everything, and they’re working it.”
Titan wasn’t investigating. They’d dug up evidence and passed it along. Rhys couldn’t expect more than that, but he wanted to be in the thick of figuring it out. Helplessness weighed his arms down. The person screwing with Jules was hundreds of miles away. How did he fix that?
