“Okay,” she said. “I think that’s done.”
“Good work,” Connor said.
“Do you want to look at anything else on here? Now that it’s open?” Cami was feeling curious about what Kate Warner did, and why she’d taken the trouble to record every episode of the game.
“Yes. What can you find?”
“I’ll have a look.”
Cami left the gaming setup and navigated into the other files and folders. It felt weird doing this. Hacking was one thing, motivated by a cause. But this felt in a way like looking into someone’s private life. Cami felt a flash of sympathy. Never, twelve hours ago, would this woman have imagined that she would have been killed, and the FBI would be going through her online transactions.
Cami could see several work-related sites here, multiple social media accounts, a couple of storage sites, email, and even a picture folder.
“She’s a journalist,” Cami said. “That’s her job. She works as a senior investigative journalist for a national publication and does freelance work also, from the look of this.” Searching through the documents, Cami frowned. “You know, I don’t understand why she would have been doing online gaming. Because to me, it looks as if a lot of the articles I’m seeing here are negative toward the whole online world.”
“Such as?”
“‘Online Poison: The Psychological Dangers of Gaming,’ ‘Virtual Insanity: the Money behind the Madness,’ ‘Webcam Worries: The Predators that Lurk.’ To mention just a few.”
“It doesn’t make sense she was playing, then, if she was so anti-gaming. Unless it could be to get background on a story,” Connor suggested.
“Yes. That would make sense. If she’d logged in so recently, perhaps she was investigating Bordercross specifically,” Cami wondered. That might take them further. Perhaps this game, or its makers, had a dark underbelly, and there was information waiting to be exposed. Journalists didn’t go digging for no reason. Maybe Kate Warner had received a tipoff or a lead that something was wrong.
“Can you find any notes? Any current research? What new files are there?” Connor now asked, his voice urgent.
“Let me see.”
Cami searched through the documents, looking at the most recent documents and emails.
She felt her excitement rise as she looked at what Kate Warner had been working on.
“Connor, this is weird.”
“What is?”
“What I’ve just found.” Joining the dots, she couldn’t actually believe what she was seeing. “This might be important. It looks like she was actually doing an expose of Virtual Ventures. That’s the gaming company that developed Bordercross.” Leaning forward, now riveted by what she was discovering, Cami accessed the working documents and notes. “That might be why she logged into the game and recorded it. To get live background and perspective. But the expose article isn’t about the game itself, it’s about one of the company directors in particular.”
“Which one?” Connor asked, his voice sharp.
“A man called Rowan Andrews. From these notes, it looks like she suspects that Rowan Andrews was stealing the private information of online players and selling it.”
There was a shocked silence as Connor took in this information.
“She’s gotten quite a lot of proof so far,” Cami added, reading further. “It definitely looks like there was something irregular going on.”
“Rowan Andrews. Bordercross.” Connor repeated. “I’m going to pull up an address for him now. Forward all the information you can get off that machine. All the research. From the timing, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence. A journalist investigating the game turns up dead. It could be a targeted murder or even a hit. The other kills could be camouflage, or else the guy had more reason than one for killing.”
Cami felt sick. “Do you think Kate was targeted because she tried to expose them?”
“We don’t know. But there’s a strong link. If Kate Warner was killed because of her interest in this, then Rowan Andrews is a prime suspect, and there’s no time to waste in questioning him.”