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Blood rushed in Tony’s ears louder than any tornado in a trailer park. Why the hell hadn’t Carlos shared that little tidbit? He wasn’t going to make a scene in front of a civilian, but when they got back to the office, Carlos’s ass was grass.
“It’s easy enough to clear up.” Tony said with a friendly smile, forcing himself into the pre-planned good cop role. “Let Carlos take a look at your computer.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Knock yourself out.” Waving a hand at the laptop, she marched to the desk and flopped down into the rolling office chair. Yanking out her phone, she tapped in a few numbers and a beep sounded.
Carlos snapped open the laptop, revealing the Magic Battledome home page. “You play?” His fingers clacked across the keyboard.
“Yeah.”
“Somehow, I didn’t picture you for an online gamer.” Tony tried to figure out how a hot chick like her ended up hanging with the geek squad.
She laughed. “Makes two of us.”
“It is unusual for a girl—” A split-second flash on the screen pulled Carlos’s attention. “What the hell?” His whole body tensed.
Ivy finished fiddling with her phone and rolled her chair over next to Carlos. “Oh, that drives me nuts.”
Tony leaned in closer to see what was going on. The curser on her screen jumped to another open window all on its own. As if by magic, her e-mail program opened.
“I swear I’m going to toss this piece of crap out the window one of these days.” She pushed the power button on the laptop and held it down until the screen turned black.
“How long has this been going on?” Anger sharpened Carlos’s voice to a deadly edge.
“A couple of months.”
“How often does it do this?”
“Not very often.” The words tumbled out nervously. “Usually I’m only on the laptop when I’m gaming. I use my tablet for everything else. I don’t even remember the last time I checked e-mail or shopped online with the laptop.”
“And you always turn it off right away?” Tony asked.
“Mm-hmm.” She kept her eyes on the spaceship on Carlos’s T-shirt. “At least I always mean to, but sometimes I’m in the middle of a Magic Battledome skirmish and it doesn’t work out that way.”
’Los whipped off his glasses and rubbed them with the corner of his shirt. “Looks like somebody hacked your system and has been controlling your laptop. Using your address to send Sylvie hate mail, covering their tracks.”
And throwing suspicion onto someone who actually had motive. Heat steamed Tony’s chest. Shit.
“How?” Ivy asked, clearly upset.
“All a hacker needs to break into a computer is the IP address,” Carlos explained. “So when an e-mail is traced, it leads back to your IP address and you.”
Ivy blinked. “One more time for us civilians.”
“Okay, so your IP address is like a home address for your computer. You’ve been using a static IP address with a lame firewall.” At her blank look he said, “Crap security setup. So our guy figured out your IP address, which he probably got from an e-mail you sent him, and then he used it to access your computer whenever you were online. It’s easy. You just—”
Ivy held up her hand, stopping the lecture. “I don’t need the details, just the point, Einstein.”
Carlos rolled his eyes in the universal tech guy sign for idiot. “The bad guy hacked into your computer and used it to send threatening e-mails to Sylvie. Making you look guilty.”
“Holy shit,” she muttered.
Tony yanked his phone out of his pocket. The rest of the team needed to be alerted—especially Ryder, who was keeping an eye on Sylvie while he was gone. “Can you figure out who did it?” he asked Carlos.
“Does the red shirt always die on Star Trek?” Carlos grinned and raised a hand to Ivy for a high five.
“Um…yes?” Despite the confusion in her eyes, Ivy slapped the tech guy’s palm.
“All right. Stand back.” Carlos cracked his fingers and then attacked the keyboard with the focus of a cat stalking a particularly plump pigeon.
