Page 2 of Crossing Paths
After dinner, with her belly full and her brain already occupied with Devon Leifsen’s file, Norah settled back on her bed with her laptop warming her thighs. Probably hoping for leftovers, their dog, Warrant, had chosen to stay downstairs with Cara as she did meal cleanup. Although Norah appreciated having the space to stretch out her legs, she missed the furry beast’s warmth.
She read through the bare bones of Leifsen’s entire file,letting the information settle into her brain. He had a few possible connections in Langston, although his home base and main associates were in the Denver area. He was young—only twenty-three—but he’d managed to rack up a solid list of suspected offenses in the five years since he’d been a legal adult. Norah was pretty sure his sealed juvie file would be interesting reading as well.
Like Barney had said, he’d been arrested most recently for his part in three Denver burglaries. One of his accomplices had given him up as part of a plea deal. Before that, he’d been accused of numerous crimes, from bank fraud to planting cameras in the dressing area of a local beauty pageant. Norah’s nose wrinkled at that last one.
Not only is he a thief, he’s a sexual predator too. Gross.
Most of the charges against him had been dropped immediately, and he hadn’t been convicted of anything. He’d never been married, and there were no known girlfriends or boyfriends—past or present—listed. His mailing address matched his parents’ house in Golden, and they’d been the ones to bond him out before he skipped bail.
After scanning through the last page of his file, she started searching online for information, starting with his parents, Karen and Bryon Leifsen. They owned several auto body shops along the Front Range, and the couple’s names popped up quite a bit in the Denver social scene. Karen had a few speeding tickets, but otherwise the pair seemed to be generally law-abiding—or at least were good at not getting caught.
A light knock on her bedroom door made Norah jump, herlaptop bouncing with the sudden movement. “Come in,” she called, and Cara stuck her head in.
“I’m heading to bed,” Cara said. “Find anything?”
“Not really.” Norah had taken in a lot of information, but she wasn’t ready to start processing it yet, so there were just a bunch of facts about Devon Leifsen floating around her brain.
“Don’t stay up too late.” Cara always told her this, even though she knew Norah almost never took the advice.
“I won’t,” she responded as usual, although she’d probably still be digging deeper into the rabbit hole far into the wee hours. Once she found a trail, it was almost impossible for her to stop chasing it, even for critical needs like eating and sleeping. She worried that if she took a break, she’d never be able to pick up where she’d left off, and that lead would be gone forever.
Once Cara withdrew and softly closed her bedroom door, Norah moved on to searching for information on Leifsen’s few friends mentioned in the file. One of them, a Chloe Ballister, was in a modern rock band that played at a bar in Langston on a semiregular basis.
“Of course it’s Dutch’s,” Norah muttered as she made a note of it. The local bar had been a hot spot for trouble over the past few years. “Everything shady seems to come back to that place.”
Chloe was also a regular at open-mic nights at Chico’s Coffee, one of Norah’s favorite places. She wondered if she’d ever been at the coffee shop at the same time as Chloe—or even Leifsen—without knowing it. The thought gave her a shiver. Norah was happy to track skips remotely—she was really goodat it, in fact—but the idea of confronting them in person like her sisters did made her want to go hide in a closet.
A faint beep drew her eyes back to her laptop. A black text box with a flashing cursor opened in the corner of the screen, and she blinked at it as confusion slowly morphed into understanding. As letters appeared on the screen—letters that were not typed by her hand—she could only stare in horror.
Hi Norah!
Someone had gained access to her computer.
Her brain couldn’t wrap around this fact. Despite layers and layers of top-notch security, someone had managed to hack into her heavily protected system. Her hand hovered over the touch pad, unsure if she should engage or do her best to kick out the interloper. They didn’t seem to be attempting to access her data, however, and the cheery greeting—including an exclamation mark—threw her off guard.
Who is this?she typed, even as certainty settled inside her. It had to be Devon Leifsen, the hacker she was researching at this exact moment. Anyone else would be too much of a coincidence.
Devon. Nice to meet you.
Her heart was thundering now. She balled her hands into fists, taking reassurance in the bite of her short nails into her palms. Despite the confirmation, doubt took hold. Could it bea prank? Someone pretending to be Leifsen? The only people who knew she was investigating him were Molly and Cara, and neither of them would do something so cruel and pointless. Barney knew, but Norah was willing to bet her left kidney that he didn’t have the know-how to hack her computer. In fact, she was reasonably sure he had to have help sending an email.
What are you doing?Her shaking fingers made it hard to type accurately.
Chatting with you!??She’d never seen such a sinister smiley face.
Why did you hack my laptop?The voice in her head was now screaming at her to shut him down, but she had to know.
Because I wanted to introduce myself to the beautiful woman who’s investigating me now. *waves* Hi pretty bounty hunter!
Norah’s gaze flew to the dark window for a terrified second before she looked back at the small, circular lens at the top of her laptop screen.He’s not watching you, her brain tried to reassure her.He’s just trying to scare you.
It was working. She was full-on terrified. Her safe world, hidden behind her laptop screen and passwords and firewalls, had been broken into, and she’d never felt more vulnerable and exposed. With just a few lines of text, Leifsen had destroyed the anonymous security that’d allowed her to help her sisters. How could she do her research work now that the very skip she was looking into had virtually walked into her bedroom to confront her?
With trembling fingers, she closed the text box and then shut down her laptop. As soon as the screen went black, she closed the computer and kept her hands pressed against the top as if to keep Leifsen from remotely opening it, as impossible as that would be. She mentally vowed to cover the laptop camera before booting it up next time. Her gaze darted around her shadowed room, dark without the light from her laptop screen, and landed on the black window again.
Forcing herself to put the computer aside and slide off the bed, she moved to the window, her heart hitting her ribs so hard it felt as if it was going to break out of her chest. The darkness of the room spooked her, but she couldn’t turn on a light, not if he was watching her.
He’s not out there, she tried to convince herself as she drew closer to the glass pane.He’s holed up somewhere miles away, messing with your head from the safety of a friend’s couch.
