Page 33 of Wanted
“Could he have gotten into your account? I’ve seen the security system, but he’s the one who showed it to me.”
She shook her head quickly. “Absolutely not. He’d have to have my…password.”
Reno leaned forward. “What?”
She pushed her hair back. “He got locked out of his account one day. The system administrators weren’t responding fast enough, and he had a deadline to meet. I let him use mine.”
“Your password?”
“He used my account once, several months before you and George showed up at our door. I changed my password as soon as I got back into the system.” Her words slowed. “I knew better than that. I didn’t like doing it even at the time, but he was in a bind, and I wanted to be nice.”
Reno shook his head. So many problems rose from that culture norm. Being nice and not listening to your gut got people into so many bad situations. Especially women.
He could practically see the gears turning in her head. “Dani?”
Her face was solemn when she finally looked at him. “That might have been enough. He could have done it. There wouldn’t be any logs showing him taking action, because he was logged in under my name.”
Reno stood and held out his hand to help her out of the booth. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
CHAPTER SIX
Reno pulled his phone out as soon as he’d paid the bill. He had an idea, but he needed help. He called George’s number as they walked down the street and waited impatiently for him to answer. “George? It’s Reno.”
“Hey, it’s about time you called. What happened? Did she get away again?”
Reno scowled. Was his reputation getting that bad? “No, she turned herself in.”
There was the sound of a chair squeaking. “You’re kidding me.”
Reno glanced at Dani. She was tense as a high wire under a trapeze artist.
“No, she’s been answering questions, and I may have a new lead. Listen, I need you to do something.”
“What? How can I help?”
“You know that hacker that you picked up on this case?”
That was where the crime had first come to light. Instead of being transmitted online, the code had been copied onto a flash drive. It had ended up in the hands of a college dropout that George had brought in on a separate hacking offense. While decidedly insecure, the low-tech handoff had made the culprit harder to trace.
“Yeah, what about him?”
“I need you to ask him a few more questions.”
George gave an uncharacteristic grumble. “Like what? He’s already been found guilty. He doesn’t know anything that he hasn’t already told us.”
“We might not have been asking the right questions. I want to know more about the voice at the other end of that phone call.”
The seller and the dropout had met in a chatroom and then taken the transaction offline. They’d spoken on the phone to negotiate terms. Thinking back, that should have been a big red flag to Reno. It had always seemed out of place and amateurish. Danielle had always come off smarter than that, but he hadn’t wanted to go soft on her when her name had been all over the comments in the code.
George’s grumble got a little louder. “He said the person used one of those voice modulators. Remember?”
“I remember,” Reno said. The dropout had spilled his guts, the glory of being a big-time hacker falling apart when he’d been pulled into an interrogation room. Once George had used his disapproving dad technique on him, all the kid’s secrets had come out. “I just need to know if the seller had allergies.”
“Excuse me?”
“In their conversations, was there ever a sneeze? I don’t know if a voice modulator would translate it, but did the seller sound congested? Or did he have to stop to blow his nose?”
“I’m not following you.”
