Page 48 of Tracking Wolfe

The tag had made me angry when I first saw it the other night, but now it infuriated me. This was exactly the kind of rabid media frenzy that terrified Wolfe.

Was this why he’d really run away? Maybe it wasn’t about me at all. Maybe it was fear of being discovered.

Except that wouldn’t explain why he’d continued posting.

I moved out to the rental car and pulled out my phone to call Gabe Marian. Derek and Jude’s nephew was a game developer in South Carolina, but he also had hacking skills no one really talked about. When I’d still worked for On Your Six, Gabe had helped out on several cases.

“Hey, Trace. What’s up?” His friendly voice came over the line along with the familiar sounds of keyboard clicking.

“Do you know anyone who can put extra cybersecurity measures in place around an identity?”

There was a pause while he processed what I was asking. “You know you can lock your credit, right? I mean, if you were the victim of a scam or gave the wrong person your password, you can just⁠—”

I made a disgruntled noise. “No. I mean, like someone’s identity needs to remain completely locked down, and I want to know who to hire to do it.”

“Okay, okay. Like, give me a hypothetical here so I know what you mean by locked down.”

One of Gabe’s favorite words was “hypothetical.”

I sucked in a breath and tried to get my breathing under control as panic edged in. “Hypothetically, I have a best friend, and hypothetically, he’s married to a famous musician. We don’t want anyone to be able to find out where they live, so we want to lock down their car registrations, property taxes, bank account addresses, etc.”

“All that’s taken care of for Jude and Derek already. And pretty much the entire family. Everything is done through LLCs and shit.”

F.C. Rights Management LLC.

Fuck.

“Okay, so next hypothetical,” I said, carefully choosing my words. “Hypothetically, a California LLC called F.C. Rights Management is attached to an anonymous creative who doesn’t want to be found out. How do we do the same to that identity?”

He paused again, longer this time. “Hypothetically, I might have figured that out a while ago and took a few measures at that time.”

Why was I not surprised? Gabe was a secret squirrel. As friendly and social as he was, he was also sneaky as shit. “Does the person know you took those measures?”

Gabe laughed. “No. The person would lose their shit if they knew anyone had figured out their identity.”

I ran my hand through my hair and yanked in frustration. “No kidding,” I muttered.

“So they don’t know you know either?” he demanded. “Hypothetically.”

“No. I only just figured it out. And I’m freaking out. Not hypothetically.”

Another light laugh came over the line. “You always did have a soft spot for him.”

A soft spot. Was that what this was? It sounded so benign. I thought of it as more of a giant, gaping wound that was incapable of healing, no matter how much time I gave it.

“Someone’s going to figure out who he is,” I said softly. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Agreed.”

I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes against the early afternoon sun. “What do we do?”

“We trust that he’s a grown-ass adult who understands risk and can handle hard things, Trace.”

Why was everyone pounding me over the head with the same message? It was annoying as fuck.

“I can want to protect someone I love, asshole,” I snapped.

The light laugh again. “I’m sorry for laughing, but it’s pretty clear from the way you’re growling that you don’t mean love like a friend. I’m a little giddy to hear you finally talk about it. My siblings and I have had money on the two of you for years. Pretty sure Jett’s running a cousin pool for it, too.”