Page 41 of Six
Nora and Cyn nodded. “We’ll finish with the financials and if anything comes up, we’re a phone call away,” Cyn said.
“What about Abyasa, Candra, and Shinta?” Six asked.
Cyn waved her off. “They’ll be fine. Michaela was teaching them self-defense when I left, and Dan was going to have them show him how to cook some of their favorite meals.”
Michaela was Cyn’s groundskeeper and personal trainer, and Dan was her house manager and chef. Six, Devil, and Nora all had people that came in to cook and clean, but Cyn, with her ginormous house, was the only one withstaff.
Six cast her friends one more questioning look. Had the tables been turned, as they had been in January when Cyn was in the thick of stopping a terrorist attack, Six wouldn’t give a second thought to helping. In fact, there’d be nothing else she’d want to do other than to help her friends—it’s what they’d been doing for one another since the day they’d met. But this somehow felt different, and she didn’t like leaving them with all sorts of unanswered questions while she and Gavin went off on a road trip. No matter how important that road trip might turn out to be.
“Go,” Nora said. Her voice was gentle, but there was no mistaking the steel in it. Cyn and Devil nodded their agreement.
Her gaze lingered on her friends, then shifted to Gavin. “I guess we’re going on a road trip. My car or yours?”
Chapter Eighteen
“They must knowthat Jeremy’s records didn’t die with him,” Gavin said as they wound through the hills toward Keene, New Hampshire. Both he and Violetta had been quiet for the past thirty minutes, but it was a comfortable silence.
“I agree,” she said after a beat. She was driving, and he was enjoying the luxury of watching her. And the countryside. He hadn’t gotten out and around New England much since he’d moved. The variety of greens reminded him of England, but everything was just a little wilder in America. And he kind of liked it.
“They are a modern company with the sophisticated technology needed to protect their product. They’d know that the odds of Jeremy having backups and a storage service and similar technology are high,” she continued. “Do you think Julia is doing a runner by going to Paris?”
He didn’t, and he didn’t think Violetta did either if the tone of her voice was any indication. “There was no unusual activity in her accounts—at least not the ones I looked at. I think she’s hiding out while DePalma cleans up the mess. It gives her some distance from whatever he’s doing if she’s out of the country.”
“But he can’t possibly clean everything up,” she reiterated. “He might be able to find someone to hack into Jeremy’s accounts, and if he could do that, he could wipe them. In fact, he probably did and hacking in is probably how they found out about the women. But even if they wiped the data after I accessed it, backups of backups exist and can almost always be reconstructed.”
They crested a small hill, and a lush valley spread out below them. “It’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Assuming Julian told DePalma he wasn’t going to pay and why, DePalma has to be feeling like an animal backed into a corner, and that’s never a good thing.”
Gavin agreed. DePalma was a first-class douche of a human, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d know that everything was about to come crashing down around him. And a person who has nothing to lose could be, well, unpredictable.
Which made him worry about Violetta. Not that he hadn’t been worried about her before, especially when she’d guided the women through the woods on her own with no backup. But that had been a low-grade kind of worry since the situation was well in hand, and he’d had his eyes on the two killers the entire time. This was different.
Assuming DePalma was behind Jeremy’s murder, the attempt to run Violetta off the road, and the two hitmen sent for the women, Gavin had a hard time believing the manwouldn’tcome after Violetta again. Because if DePalma had even a modicum of intelligence, he’d be able to figure out that she was behind the escape of Abyasa, Candra, and Shinta. And if she knew about them, then he’d be crazy not to think she knew about everything else.
“I think we need to get Heather to file the suit soon,” Gavin said. The best way to protect Violetta was to get the complaint into the system and out to the public.
Oblivious to the specific direction of his thoughts, Violetta nodded. “Do we know where DePalma is right now? He’s the loose cannon.”
“I suspect your friends are already tracking his movements, as well as the Fogartys, but I’ll text Cyn and see if they can get a bead on DePalma.”
He sent the text, and they fell back into silence waiting for Cyn’s reply. According to the map on Violetta’s dashboard screen, they were an hour out from the coordinates Nora had given them for the Newcrosses’ Keene home. As the minutes ticked by, Gavin replayed in his mind everything that had happened in a few short days.
He’d hated keeping his role in her life from her, and when he’d first been given the assignment, he’d argued that she should be told. Franklin was equally adamant that the information be kept from her. In retrospect, having his assignment come to light in the way it had—in a moment when his assistance could be appreciated—was far better. She still hadn’t welcomed him with open arms, but at least he’d been able to demonstrate that he was worthy of her respect.
And he had it. He knew he did. He could see it in her eyes and in the easy way she was now working with him. She’d had his from the first time he’d read her file. But again, that had been part of the problem. He’d known so much about her before he’d even arrived, while she’d been kept in the dark about him for months.
“What are you thinking?” Violetta asked, breaking into the silence.
He had no desire for Violetta to know how often he thought of her and so a lie—or at least a fudge of the truth—fell easily from his lips. “I was thinking that this investigation reminds me a little bit of hunting a terrorist.”
She glanced over and arched a brow at him, making him smile.
“It’s not a classic whodunit investigation like on all those American crime shows. We know who the perpetrators of the crimes are. And we have a pretty good idea of the breadth of those crimes thanks to the interviews with Abyasa, Candra, and Shinta. Like hunting a terrorist, we know who they are, and we know what they’ve done, and our job is to bring them to ground. When I was in the field, usually that meant capture or kill. But here, it means bringing them to justice. I kind of feel like we stepped into the second half of an episode ofLaw & Order.”
Violetta snorted. “You know how bad that show is, right? I mean it’s great, I love it, who doesn’t? But it’s terrible in how it portrays investigations and trials.”
He made a face at her. “Spoilsport.”
