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She heaved a sigh and rested her cheek on Harrison’s chest.
Eventually, Taylor drifted to sleep, and I went downstairs to get the cookies when they arrived. Taylor was still passed out, even when I popped in to tell her about the cookies. Harrison stayed with her, but I was still too worked up to sleep.
I went to my laptop to check my email and eat a few chocolate chip cookies. I scanned through a few of them until I found an email that woke me up. It was from someone else who worked for our security firm, someone who was able to dig up the information I couldn’t get.
I opened it and found the details on Taylor’s father’s autopsy report. All of the information had been broken down into plain language.
I swept cookie crumbs off my hands and dug into the information, hoping my gut feeling that something off had happened to her father wasn’t right.
CHAPTER23
Harrison
Cody returned a few days later, the energy around us awkward and tense. We tried not to let it affect Taylor, but she probably felt it, too. Then again, she and Cody had their own conflict. The longing way that Cody looked at her made me both furious at him and sad for them both.
It was almost like we were back to the very first days we were together, where all of us were suppressing our attraction to her. I didn’t want to flaunt our relationship while he was just getting used to being her bodyguard again.
The first few days were just pure awkward, but by the third, Cody’s attitude shifted. He wasn’t upbeat or anything—not that he ever was—but he had a fire in his eyes that had gone out when he’d left Taylor.
“What’s going on?” I asked him after we took Taylor up to a meeting. We waited for her in the lobby.
“It’s about her stalker,” Cody said, unlocking his phone. “You know how we finally got that lead on him from all of those cameras? I dug into him.”
“Dug into him?” Ethan raised an eyebrow.
“Yes.” Cody shot him a look before going back to his phone. “I had some assistance looking into him more closely than I could have done on my own.”
In other words, he’d probably asked someone to hack the guy. We’d gotten his name—William Moore—and his last known location and age. He lived in Brooklyn and was twenty-eight. But besides that, we didn’t have much. He had a minimal internet presence, at least under his own name, and no criminal record. That was more than enough for a very motivated hacker, though.
“He’s not a stalker. Or at least, he doesn’t fit the profile of one,” Cody said. “He’s too well adjusted.”
“The man who tried to drag Taylor into a car in the middle of the fucking day is ‘too well adjusted’?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Besides that? Yes.” He handed me his phone. “He’s got a girlfriend, or at least a woman he’s talking to. I thought about reaching out to her to ask where he was, but I didn’t. He also has had the same job for the past four or five years and isn’t the kind of guy to jump from job to job because of his lack of social skills. He’s only active on Facebook and isn’t saying anything off the wall there.”
I looked at the email that he’d pulled up and read it. Cody was right. On paper, William was pretty normal. We didn’t have any new photos of him, but the most recent ones we had of the months preceding this showed him with the car he’d escaped from, hanging out with the same woman. They were clearly dating.
And they hadn’t found any evidence of him actually stalking her because they didn’t connect him to any particular social media platforms besides a boring Facebook profile. That didn’t mean that he was actually offline.
But the fact that he had obviously been dating someone didn’t line up with what we normally saw when it came to a stranger stalking someone. Usually, there was a single-minded obsession with that person, and they didn’t go through all the effort to hide that.
I frowned, handing him the phone back.
“That’s weird,” I said. “Do you think he’s just different?”
“What would the odds of that be?” Ethan asked. “We should look into him further. The attack happened out of nowhere, so maybe there’s a reason why.”
“Yeah, let’s look into it,” I said. “Ask your contact to get us more if they can.”
“Will do.” Cody tapped away on his phone.
His hunches usually had merit, so I hoped this one was similar. I wanted to find out more about the guy who’d tried to take Taylor, just so she felt safe again. When she felt safe, she was happy. And her being happy was the most important thing to me.
We had to get to the bottom of this now that we had a lead.
CHAPTER24
Taylor
