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“Your phone was definitely tampered with,” Ava started. “Cloned and hacked as Sabina suspected. All those appointments you thought you missed or thought you had but didn’t?” Ellie nodded. “You didn’t miss them or make them up. There’s digital evidence that about seventy percent of the entries on your calendar were tampered with in some way.”
“So when I’d look at a meeting and see it set, for example, at three o’clock on Wednesday, then get an alarm for a two o’clock start time, I wasn’t wrong to be confused?” she asked.
Ava nodded. “We found several examples of appointments being entered into your calendar, presumably by you or Harry, then changed remotely. Then oftentimes changed back to the original. Again remotely.”
“Someone was very intentionally fucking with you,” JJ said.
“And that’s not all,” Sabina jumped in. “We found similar evidence of your notes and texts being tampered with. Those text conversations you didn’t remember having? Well, you didn’t remember them for a reason. You never had them. Whoever had control of your phone did.”
Ellie, who’d been perched on the edge of her seat, stilled, then slumped back, looking both defeated and relieved. Asher reached over and took her hand. She twined her fingers with his and held on tight.
“Okay, so that’s good news for my mental health. But bad news in that it confirms that someone is, as Dr. Garcia said, intentionally trying to fuck with me. What about the music, though? I assume they messed with that, too?”
Sabina nodded. “Not all your playlists were tampered with. But four of the ones you appear to play the most were replaced with identical lists with infrasound layered into them.”
“So not every playlist would affect me. Just some,” Ellie said, her tone thoughtful. “It’s almost ingenious what they’ve done,” she continued. “They left enough of my stuff alone that I had glimpses of…for lack of a better word, sanity. Times when my mind was clear enough to recognize howoffeverything was the other times. Almost like they were mimicking a descent into dementia. Or insanity.”
Ava’s lips thinned. “That’s exactly what they were doing. When the intrusions first started nearly six months ago, they only tampered with a few things. Over time, they increased the frequency and scope to what we see today.”
Ellie looked to JJ. “Is it just me, Dr. Garcia, or is the psychology of this really fucked up?”
“Call me JJ, please. I think we can all agree that you no longer need my services. Well, not for the original reasons you came to see me. The kind of trauma you might experience in being targeted like this is something we can discuss later, if you like. As to your question, yes. This kind of psychological warfare is particularly insidious. Not only does the perpetrator have hard technical skills, but they are also extraordinarily detailed and organized. And may even have some training in the mental health field.”
“That rules Harry and Ricardo out, doesn’t it?” Ellie said. “Ricardo is a Luddite. And while Harry is a wiz with social media, he can’t even program a queue of music on Spotify.”
She addressed the question to Sabina, but Chad answered. “We’re leaning toward agreeing with you. But the two of them just booked a trip to the Maldives. A country with no extradition to the US.”
“I told them to take the time off,” she said. “There’s a return ticket, isn’t there? For before the Oscars?”
Chad flipped through a file in front of him on the table, then nodded.
Ellie exhaled. “I told them both I’d be up here for most of the spring. I need to be in LA for the night of the Oscars and in Savannah in the middle of April. But I plan to stay here until then. They don’t get a lot of time off. I told them to take it.”
“And did you know they planned to go to the Maldives?” Ethan asked.
Ellie shook her head. “But it’s been on their bucket list. That I do know. Both the Maldives and Mauritius.”
“Ellie told me last night—”
“After you bunked out of the family gathering for a cozy night at home,” Chad muttered, making Ethan snort.
Asher shot his cousin a death glare and continued. “Ellie told me last night that you all believe the objective of this is her destruction. Has that changed with the additional information?”
JJ shook her head. “No, it hasn’t changed. It’s reinforced my initial assessment. Whoever is behind this is driven by a profound hatred. Likely fueled by jealousy. But not the run-of-the-mill professional jealousy. This is deeply personal. This is specifically about you, Ellie. Not just your accomplishments, but the fact that they areyouraccomplishments.”
Asher squeezed Ellie’s hand. Hearing JJ lay it all out made it real just how dark and twisted the situation was.
After a beat, Ellie shook her head. “I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna, but I don’t know anyone who hates me that much. There are actors who I’ve beaten out for roles. And awards I’ve won that others haven’t. That sort of thing. But the opposite is true as well. There are plenty of roles I’ve lost to others and awards I haven’t won.”
“Whatever the drive is, it’s been festering for a long time,” JJ continued. “The manifestation of it started close to six months ago. But I can assure you, our perpetrator has been harboring these thoughts, this hatred, for a lot longer.”
“Then we need to understand what changed six months ago,” Asher said.
Ethan nodded. “We looked into your schedule, Ellie. And while you were working on a film around that time, your life didn’t change that much. The day-to-day did, of course. But the process of filming, and your movements both before and after the shoot, don’t suggest that somethingyoudid was the triggering event.”
“Essentially,” JJ said, “we found no dramatic change inyourlife that would trigger the perpetrator to act. Which means there was likely a change in theperpetrator’slife. It could have been more than one thing. But a key factor, for our purposes, is that whatever changed intheirlife brought them into your orbit and gave them proximity to both your home and your device.”
Ellie mulled this over then looked to Chad. “Two things come to mind right now. First, again, your analysis rules out Harry and Ricardo, who have access to me all the time. Second,” she said, switching her attention to the group in general, “if someone I didn’t know wasthatclose to me, wouldn’t I have known?” Ellie asked.
