Thank God.
“Let’s start some coffee. We’ve got a few hours left before visiting starts. Let me see what else I can find out about Michalski.”
Tanner kissed the top of her head and pushed her toward the laptop, then went to make both coffee and breakfast for them. Bree didn’t waste any time. She immediately hacked back into the Grand County Sheriff’s Department system. She quickly wrote a program to send her a message anytime Tanner’s name was used by anyone in any department.
It didn’t take long to figure out they definitely knew Tanner was evading them now. There was a full search going on for him.
She winced as a new alert came across her screen.
“What?” he asked as he refilled her empty coffee cup.
“You were right. Whitaker brought Noah in for questioning.”
Tanner gave a brief nod. “Not surprising. We share a residence, and everyone in town knows how close we are.”
She knew how much Noah loved the outdoors, how much he hated people. “Will he be all right?”
“Noah can handle himself. He’ll keep it together however long he needs to. It helps that he doesn’t know a damn thing about what’s going on, not that he would hesitate to lie to help me.” Tanner’s tone was light, but there was a heaviness to his stance now.
She reached up and cupped his cheek. “I’ll work faster.”
He gave her another tight nod then turned back toward the kitchen.
Bree dug deeper into every file she could find. She had to be more careful; the sheriff’s department had obviously brought in some sort of computer specialist to try to help track her.
It almost provided a challenge.
In the end it was Tanner’s advice to treat Michalski as if hewasn’tguilty that led her in the direction she needed to go. And it definitely hadn’t been what she’d been expecting.
“Tanner, look at this.”
She turned the screen so he could see it more easily and brought up a backdoor list of all Dr. Michalski’s patient files. Including Tanner’s.
Tanner began to read.
“What exactly am I looking for here? Something specific?”
“This is a relatively sophisticated back channel intoMichalski’s files. I should have needed to build this grouping one file at a time, but I didn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means someone has already hacked Dr. Michalski’s files. It’s impossible for me to tell who from here. I’d need access to his computer. All I can tell you is that it was a reasonably well-done job.”
Tanner rubbed his fingers over his eyes. “This case just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Like there’s some puppet master pulling the strings that we can’t see.”
She couldn’t have agreed more. “Then we start yanking on strings of our own and see what happens. And I think we should start with Carrico.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kelsey Collins entered the Colorado Correctional visitors’ area right when it opened that afternoon. Bree wasn’t surprised when none of the guards who had checked her in a few days ago recognized her. Her brown hair was tucked up under a short blond wig. Her freckles were covered by a pound of makeup. Her whole posture was different than how she normally carried herself.
And they all matched the ID she’d handed the guard as she checked in. The guard had scanned it and handed it back to her when it came back clean.
Bree had not doubted it would.
Tanner, on the other hand, was a half step above a nervous wreck waiting out in the car. For a few minutes—especially when she’d come out of the bathroom in full Kelsey Collins gear—she hadn’t thought he was going to let her do this. Could almost see him trying to find a way that he could take the risk on himself rather than allow her to do it.
The fact that hereallydidn’t want her doing this had actually made her desire to do it even greater. She could practically feel Tanner’s concern and need to protect her surrounding her like a cocoon.
