He dwarfed Evie, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Authority, excellent.” Evie beamed at the lout and shook off Jax’s warning grasp on her elbow. “Marlene says she sent files to her old office, to a woman she refers to as the Stuffed Shirt With Tortoise-shell Glasses. If you’re satisfied now that your mother was murdered for what she knew, perhaps you would be so good as to look up those files. Her computers were stolen before we could acquire all the relevant information.”
The professor looked over Evie’s head to Jax. “You’re the lawyer? Then you know accessing federal files is against the law.”
Jax put his hands in his back pockets, rolled back on his heels, and offered his best slick Savannah good-ol’ boy attitude. “I also know that Marlene Gump was no longer employed by the feds, that she left her files to her granddaughter, who allowed us access to them. If you want to go after criminals, find the ones who stole those computers. If you actually want to work this case, then we have added considerably more information to those files that you might wish to see.”
Professor Gump frowned. Before he could speak, Evie tilted her head back and beamed at the ceiling. “Hey, Granny, happy now?”
A wind swept through the hall, slamming open the apartment door. Shoving past the professor, Evie walked in as if invited, chatting with an invisible entity. “Yeah, his aura is uptight, but it’s protective. You shouldn’t call him a chip off old Gibraltar. Is that his father?”
Professor Gump rubbed his wrinkled brow and stepped aside.
Evie often had that effect on people.
Twenty-one
He’dshot her with her own water gun.
Instead of going back to work, Ariel had had to curl up under her desk and rock until her jumping nerves settled. If she scared him, good. Served him right. He’d scared her.
But after Roark limped into town to do whatever he had to do, she’d practiced breathing and calmed down a little. She knew—rationally—that he’d only escalated what she had started by flinging food at him. What on earth had got into her?
She wished she had some way of locking the pocket door between the kitchen and her front office. She was furious enough to shove a desk in front of the opening and bolt the front door while he was in town, but she’d promised him a place to stay. Besides, he knew her security codes. The man was impossible.
She needed him out of the house. She simply could not deal with a huge presence sucking up her air and vibrating her home’s bones.
And then he rode back on a ridiculously beautiful girl’s bicycle, looking so pleased with himself that she wanted to... and no way could she, which made her furious all over again. Just the thought of coming close enough... Caused raging hormones and made her want to hide in the closet.
The bike sat there on the front porch, right next to Mitch Turtle’s house, calling to her. She could unbolt the front door and test the bicycle for herself, but Roark was still out there, tapping away on his laptop. The blasted man had parked temptation on her doorstep and waited for her to fall for it.
When she finally returned to her desk chair and opened her work, he sent an email. She paid no attention. Instead, she sought to burrow herself into the fraudulent bitcoin account in search of the owner.
Her phone binged with a text. She tried to ignore it, but it ate at her. What if it was Jax?
Frustrated at not being able to hack through the account’s security, she finally poked her phone.
video linkwas all the text said, from Roark, of course. Now she itched to open the email to see what in heck he meant.
How did he do this to her?Her concentration was phenomenal. It was how she’d accomplished everything she had so far. Sensory deprivation had its advantages.
Roark needed turmoil to thrive.
Which, of course, sent her down the rabbit hole of doubt. Stupid therapists. Was she thriving?
Until Roark had come along, she had thought so. She was living on her own, paying her own way, and had even learned to deal with deliveries and telephones. If she could learn to ride a bike, she might even some day visit Iddy at the pet store. Eventually, she might... Well, meeting anyone for coffee or tea was probably out of the question. Noisy, busy cafés were excruciating.
So, she didn’t need the stupid bike anyway.
To prove he didn’t bother her, much, she opened the email. It simply included a link. She could handle that. She clicked, and a video from a bad camera angle appeared on her screen. It appeared to be a drugstore with narrow aisles and crowded shelves, but she supposed that could be the angle of the lens. It focused on a counter with a clerk wearing a shabby white coat. The clerk came and went as Ariel watched.
It took a minute before she realized this wasn’t a clip but a hack into an actual, functional camera.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been inside any sort of store. Watching from a distance like this was—not frightening. She always kept the sound off on her computer. She tested to see if the camera picked up sound but it apparently didn’t. That was fine. She didn’t mind just watching.
Of course, the game grew old, as most games did. For a while, the variety of characters stopping to buy everything from beer to hair dye was amusing. The store obviously didn’t attract a high class of clientele. Shorts and T-shirts were about as dressy as they got. A few of the men didn’t go that far. Some of the kids were barefoot. The “no shoes, no shirt, no service” warning didn’t apply here.
She left the video running in a corner of her screen and returned to her work. Could she create her own scam letter and entice the bitcoin account holder to reveal his password? But if he used a random password generator, as she suspected, that wouldn’t work.
Deep in thought sometime later, she jerked out of her focus at the beep of her phone. Annoyed that anyone disturbed her at this hour of the night, she glared at the text.watch now.