Before he could shoot off another text, or worse…hack the GPS in Shane’s phone and track his ass down, the outer door to the office opened. A few seconds later, he heard Shane’s voice as he greeted Ethan in the break room. Quinn put his phone down and pulled up the notes he’d made on the emails that he uncovered.
Shane walked through the door to his office, his eyes immediately going to Quinn who turned in his chair to face him. An eager grin spread across his lips that Quinn was sure he’d never get tired of seeing.
“Sorry it took me so long. Dad and I hadn’t met for lunch in a while. Just wanted to take the time to catch up a bit.”
Quinn nodded. He couldn’t begrudge Shane time with his dad, not after what he went through with his mom. Fuck, Quinn would give anything to have just one more day with his mom, the mom he grew up with, the mom before the accident. He loved her still, but the trauma she suffered, the pain she still suffered, killed him a little each time he saw her.
Walking around to his chair, Shane slid off his jacket and hung it on the back. The air had started out crisp that morning with frost already threatening to coat the grass and car windows. It was supposed to warm up as the day wore on, but Quinn hadn’t stepped away from his computer since he’d arrived.
“I got into the email account that Rose Lonneman gave us the other day.”
Shane shot him a grim look. “Hacked it, you mean?”
“What hacking? She used her kids’ names as her password. It took me two minutes. That’s not hacking. That’s called smart guessing.”
Shane rolled his eyes as he walked back around to the front of his desk. “Fine. What did you find?”
“Not much. A lot of the usual correspondence that you’d expect. Some generic family holiday planning emails with her mom and sister. A few emails with other friends like Rose. Lots of spam and coupons. Nothing really unusual.”
“Uh-huh.” Shane sat on the edge of his desk and wagged his fingers at Quinn. “Come on. Give me the rest. You wouldn’t have been texting me like a fiend if you just found coupons and notes from her mom. What do you have for me?”
Quinn lounged in his chair, trying so hard to look cool and collected, but he had a feeling that Shane wasn’t buying it for a second. “A secret email account.”
One eyebrow went up, but that was Shane’s only reaction. “Another email address? How did you find it?”
“She used the email address that Rose gave us as a backup account in case she got locked out of the secret account.”
“Did you get into it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“We got it,” Quinn said and then laughed. “This has to be what the hacker was looking for. There aren’t a lot of emails saved in the inbox, but there are years and years of emails in the sent folder. No one remembers to clean that shit out. But Brenda Spring was having an affair with another woman.”
“Oh.” Shane sat up a little straighter. “That would look bad for his reelection chances, I guess. There are enough people out there who wouldn’t look too positively on the fact that he was cuckolded…by a woman.” He paused and frowned before looking at Quinn. “But his wife died roughly a year ago. He still looks like the doting father and grieving husband. The hacker has got to know that he’d probably lose only a few points. He’s got a solid lead in the polls; has for the past few months.”
“Not after it’s revealed that he physically and verbally abused his wife for years,” Quinn added.
“What?” Shane jumped to his feet and walked straight to Quinn’s computer, staring at the emails as if they would suddenly confess all their details.
“I’m still reading through all the emails—and there are years of them—but I’ve run across several threads where she admits that they argued and he beat her. He broke her nose at least once and nearly strangled her another time. The woman she was in love with was furious and begged her to leave him, threatening even to tell the cops, but Brenda wouldn’t leave. The mayor threatened to tell the world that she was a sexual deviant and she’d never be able to see her kids. She was terrified of him—sure he was going to kill her someday, but she was more afraid of losing her kids so she stayed with this fucking bastard.”
“Can you be sure that Brenda Spring actually wrote these emails?”
“With about eighty-nine percent certainty right now.” Quinn turned back to his computer and started switching through several screens. “I pulled some of the emails she sent from her regular personal account, like those to her mother and other friends, and compiled them to study sentence structures and word selection. I’ve run them against a few of the more disturbing emails in the secret account. They are about an eighty-nine percent match, but I’m running more comparison to see if we can get a match in the nineties, but I say we can be pretty damn certain.”