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“I’m going to check anyway. Are we calling in a cleanup?” he asks, looking at me like I have all the answers.
I scrub a hand down my face and stand back up. “No, this one’s on us.” I toss him my keys as I try to work shit out in my head. “Go grab the work truck from my place and bring it back here. We’ll deal with it. I’ll start looking at the security footage while you’re gone. Bring me my laptop from the trunk before you take off.”
“Sounds good, man. I won’t be long.”
He jogs back out of the house, and I feel a little better that he’s busy at least. No fucking idea what we’ll do with the bodies if we’re not calling on the Knights, but I’ll think of something. Or Lincoln will. We always figure it out in the end.
For now, I need to check the footage from V’s security system and see if there’s anything on there. I’m not that hopeful. Whoever this is has done a fantastic job of covering their tracks up to this point. I doubt they’d be stupid enough to leave us any breadcrumbs now, but I have to hope ‘cause it’s all I’ve fucking got.
“Laptop!” Mav calls out as he re-enters and slides my bag across to me. “I’ll be back!”
He disappears again as I grab the sliding bag and pull my laptop from it. Once I’m in the security room, I get it connected and fire it up. The firewalls on this thing are a fucking joke; it’s not a surprise someone hacked in. When we get V back, I’m going to personally revamp this bullshit.
First things first.
As I tap in, I notice a code path that leads to another server. Different. I set up a trace for all things tagged or mentioning Octavia or Stone then get back to the task at hand.
I run through the footage, and like I figured, there’s fucking diddly-squat The guy, who is easily 6’4, throws V in the back of a plateless black SUV and peels off like a bat out of hell.
Just fucking awesome.
I hack into the local police surveillance, hoping beyond fucking hope, but there’s nothing. Of course there isn’t. I take a deep breath and go over the footage again. That’s when I notice it’s been looped.
How the fuck do people who are trained to find this shit not notice cams have been looped?
This is why the police force around here is in fucking shambles. I know the Knights prefer it that way, but fuck my actual life right now.
My phone pings with a message from Linc.
Linc:
What the fuck?
I press play and I swear to fucking God my heart stops. Indistinct shadows flicker on the screen for a few moments. Then I see her.
Clenching my fists, I take a deep breath and count back from ten, trying to keep my shit in check. I dial his number and he answers before the first ring even finishes.
“You saw it?”
“Of course I fucking saw it.”
This day can go straight the fuck to hell.
I email the video to myself and start checking the tags on it. If I didn’t hate this motherfucker, I’d be impressed with his skill set, but right now, all I want to do is gouge his eyes out with my fingers.
“Is there a way to trace the video?”
I sigh and try to track V’s phone. Naturally, that’s a dead end—because that’d be way too fucking simple—so I start a trace on the video.
“We knew this guy is good, but it’s been bounced off a ton of proxy servers. Pretty sure she isn’t in Novosibirsk. It also wasn’t sent from her phone, despite coming from her number. A dozen apps can do that, so that’s a dead end too, but I’m trying. Doesn’t help that the voice was filtered. It doesn’t give us much to go on.”
Silence filters down the line, and I know Linc is as frustrated as I am. We’re not used to running into so many brick walls. That said, we’ve never gone directly up against one of the Knights before. We’ve had no real reason to. This has to be someone high up the chain though. There’s no way someone has this kind of skill and ability to fuck with stuff without being at the top of that particular food chain.
“Okay, so what do we have?”
“We know that the bodies dropped here aren’t branded. So either her stalker isn’t a Knight, or he hired privately. We also have a plateless black SUV.”
