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The tension in the room broke, and Joey’s laughter rang through the quiet space. There was an immense satisfaction in being the one to make her laugh. She’d just revealed a different side of herself. A softer, altruistic side. Admiring her skill, intelligence, and moxie was one thing. Connecting with her heart was another altogether. The more he knew about Josephina Rodriguez, the more he was desperate to know. How had she gone from adding money to school lunch accounts to being arrested by the FBI? How had Flint managed to get her into Raven Tech and then to follow him to Black Tower?
Joey pulled the chair out and sat down. That was his cue. “I suppose I’ll leave you to it.”
She nodded and turned her gaze to the screen. “Thanks. I’ll be down in a bit.”
Reluctant to leave, he walked toward the door. He glanced back and found Joey leaning forward, her features highlighted by the light from the screen. It was a bit unsettling to see her so at home in his private space, though it was a feeling that was not as unwelcome as he would have imagined.
She didn’t look up at him. Perhaps he was losing it, simply experiencing a trauma response to the events of last night. Was he looking for connection wherever he could because he’d witnessed first-hand just how quickly life could be extinguished?
He shook his head and stepped out the door. Flint was waiting downstairs. As always, there was work to be done.
* * *
Joey stared at the screen, not really seeing anything. She could feel Cole’s eyes on her. She couldn’t look at him. As soon as he was gone, her eyes flicked to the empty doorway, wishing she hadn’t missed the chance to meet his eyes again.
Two weeks ago, the prospect of sitting at Cole Kensington’s personal computer would have filled her with glee. This was an opportunity she would have had to break into his house to get. She’d considered it, in fact. And here she was, at the personal invitation of the man, and trusted enough to be left entirely alone.
Her eyes flicked to the email icon and then to the storage drive on the desktop.
She blew out a breath and pulled one of her USBs out of her bag. Ignoring the email, she set aside the way the conversation with Cole had made her feel. Why had she told him about her school lunch Robin Hood days? No one knew that. Not even Flint. And she’d told Cole what her first illegal hacking had been?
She needed to get a hold of herself. She opened the backdoor into the Zia system she’d put in place Friday before the murder, then scoured the access logs for anything significant.
She zeroed in on a suspicious entry. That name… Hadn’t they already logged out? She scrolled back up. Yep, there it was. James Harlowe had scanned out at 5:21 pm. Then back out again at 5:45. Why would he come back? And how had he scanned out twice?
Unless… someone had used James’s keycard to cover their own tracks. She pulled all of his records to be sure, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in his history. He didn’t even work on Laura’s floor, actually. She thought back to the stairwell. With the right accomplice, someone could easily access another lab.
She wrote James’s name down to dig into further, and then turned back to the program. If she looked closely, she could see the footprint of her own illicit access. She skimmed the log and found a similar pattern. That hadn’t been her. 6:42 pm.
It was impossible to tell who the phantom record belonged to. To anyone else, it would look like just another artifact of the system, one of a hundred events in the security log that didn’t track to a specific badge.
But she knew.
How had they gotten past the Raven Tech security system?
In the six years she’d worked at Raven Tech, or in the ten years since, she’d never seen anyone able to disappear within the RT800x system the way she did.
She needed to create a list of potential contractors who would be able to accomplish something like that. For now, she closed the program and began to clean up her things. Her gaze fell on the desktop files again.
She glanced at the door. She was tucked away in the office upstairs, Cole and Flint two floors below in the kitchen.
When would she have this opportunity again? She wouldn’t.
Joey pressed her lips together and clicked into the email application, rolling her eyes when the password was pre-saved in the login screen.
She skimmed as quickly as she could, glancing at the door every few moments as her nerves ratcheted higher. Cole’s inbox was as orderly as the rest of him. A quick flip through the trash revealed that he opened and promptly deleted every marketing email from the gym around the corner. And the emails from the bookstore across town. Her own personal inbox was a graveyard of fifteen thousand unopened emails from stores, charities, and social media.
Only a handful of messages remained in Cole’s main inbox, all unopened. But nothing looked especially interesting, although her heart squeezed seeing the same daily devotional email she received.
A notification popped up in the corner. A new message.
Senator Morris? Immediately, Joey’s mind went back three months to the discovery she and Ryder had made about Senator Morris. She’d played a major role in the Syndicate targeting Fiona Raven. From what Joey could find, it all came down to money, and for Senator Morris, power.
Joey clicked into the email, eagerly taking in every word. The woman’s jovial tone coupled with obvious offers of a quid pro quo made her clench her jaw.
Senator Morris was offering to throw her weight around at the FDA for Cole. She didn’t mention what she wanted in return, but the insinuation was there. Cole was trading favors with the devil.
And that was enough to wipe away all the warm feelings Joey was harboring about her current employer. Someone was targeting Zia Pharmaceuticals and his Alzheimer’s therapy project. But getting into bed with Katrina Morris? Hard to feel very sympathetic.
