by Jodie Bailey
Look innocent. Was that what Macey was doing? Was she devious enough to set up a scenario in which she looked like the victim? Or was she truly a bystander?
It hurt his head—and his heart—just thinking about it. No matter what the evidence said, he was certain he knew Macey well. Even the rest of his team believed she was likely innocent. It was still a tough line for investigators like them to walk.
He tossed her keys on the dining room table, retrieved the laptop and settled it on the bar that separated the living area from the kitchen. He plugged in the machine, then dropped an external hard drive and his cell phone on the counter beside it.
This was his job. Macey had given him permission to be in her house and on this computer, so why did he feel like the lowest form of pond scum?
Trey inserted his earpiece, then dialed Dana Santiago’s number. As soon as Dana arrived later this evening, he’d pass the cloned drive to her so she could dig for anything that might finally prove Macey innocent.
Or guilty.
That right there was the thing that gave him pause and made his conscience threaten to run for cover. Everything in him was convinced she was innocent. And not being fully truthful with her at the hospital had left him feeling like he’d just completed the Darby Queen obstacle course at army ranger school. In the mud. Twice. He really ought to—
“This is Dana. You ready to get to this, Trey?” Dana’s voice lit up in his ear. A former US marshal with WitSec, Dana Santiago was a tech rock star and a welcome recent addition to Eagle Overwatch’s team as a civilian contractor.
Trey needed to be as all business as she was. “I figure I’ve got about half an hour. As I was pulling into the driveway, Macey called and said they’d finally released her. It’ll take them a little bit to do that and then about half an hour to get here from the hospital, but I’m not willing to take any chances.” Because if she caught him, that could be the end of everything.
“Then let’s get moving. Rich and I are on the road to you. Should be there in a couple of hours and we can amp this thing up.”
“Good.” As much as he’d chafed at backup at first, today had convinced him he needed it. “What do I need to do?”
“The software to clone the laptop’s hard drive is on the external drive you have. Plug it in, crank up the utility, and it’s self-explanatory from there. I’m here if you hit any bumps in the road. Should be simple unless someone hid some partitions in the drive. You’re trained enough to sniff those out.”
Trey keyed in the password and followed Dana’s directions, but one thing still nagged at him. “While this is loading, let me run something by you.”
“Fire away.”
“Say you’re you, all tech geeky and stuff, but you’re also incredibly paranoid. So paranoid that your alarm system and the laptop that runs it have zero connectivity to the outside world.”
“I’d say I’m hiding something major, but go on.”
“But your user password contains no special characters, no capital letters, no nothing.” It had bugged him since the amusement at the unusual password had died. It didn’t seem like Olivia’s standard operating procedure to create a password so easily crackable.
Dana sighed. “Who made the password?”
“Olivia.”
“Hmm.” The sound of silence hung over the line. There was a muffled conversation, probably with Rich, before she spoke again. “I’d say that’s pretty suspicious. Almost like she wanted it to be crackable. From what I’ve heard of her and seen in your reports, she was best described as—”
“Paranoid.”
“Well, yes. She had all of the markers of someone trying to hide something.”
She did. And, oddly enough, Macey had none of those characteristics. Once again, nothing made sense.
Trey glanced at the clock on the screen and at the progress of the software. He was running out of time quickly. “I’m going to clone the entire hard drive. Macey has the only user data on the system, but I’m going to guess there’s more I can’t tap into. This is too simple.” The more he saw, the more he became convinced that Olivia was the guilty party and, somehow, Macey had been dragged into this maze. Unless Macey thought he was too stupid to figure out her laptop was one of the keys to proving guilt or innocence, she had no idea what she’d handed him.
But she could still be lying. After all, he’d missed it with Gia. Everything had seemed fine in his marriage until it wasn’t. And he’d been stunned to learn it hadn’t been fine for a very long time.
He dug into the system as far as he could go with Macey’s credentials. “Okay, there has to be an admin account somewhere on this machine. Macey only has user credentials. Something tells me Olivia buried an account on here. There are some large files deep in the hard drive, but I can’t see what type they are. They date from a couple of years ago to as late as yesterday. Random days and times. You can crack into this, I’m sure.”
“If Olivia hid something, I can find it. Never underestimate me.”
“Never said I did.”
From the direction of the kitchen, the hum of the garage door rising froze Trey’s fingers on the keyboard. “Macey’s home.” The status bar still indicated he needed a few more minutes. “I’m going to disconnect our call. When this is done, I’ll run back to the house and lock the external drive in the safe in my closet for you to access when you arrive if I’m not there.”
“Be safe, Trey.” The screen on his phone went blank as Dana killed the call.
Be safe. Why did that still feel like an indictment instead of a sentiment born out of concern? If nothing else, it was a reminder to keep Macey at arm’s length, because even though they all suspected she was innocent, she still might not be what she seemed.
The laptop pinged its completion and Trey ejected the hard drive and shoved it into his back pocket as the kitchen door rattled.
A key in the lock and a twist of the knob, and then Macey’s mother stepped inside. She glanced at Trey. “Oh good. You’re here.” She dropped the keys by the stove. “I can head on out, then. She’ll be safe with you.”
“Where’s Macey?”
“She went around to the side of the house to open the gate and let Kito in.” With a wave, Tiffany Price walked out, leaving the door to the garage open.
Trey’s stomach clinched. After the events of the past couple of days, the idea of Macey out of his sight, even in her own yard, set his senses on high alert. It shouldn’t be that way. It should never be that way. Not for him and not for her, either.
He was half a second from bolting into the yard to make sure she was safe when Kito pounded up the garage steps and skidded on the kitchen tile, headed straight for his water bowl. He lapped with a ferocity that would normally make Trey laugh.
But where was Macey?
Trey took two steps toward the door just as Macey appeared, pale and tired, but upright and safe.
He thought his knees were going to give out and drop him to the floor. Oh man, he was definitely in trouble.
She shut the garage door and leaned back against it. “I saw Mom leave.”
Wincing, Trey forced himself not to go to her and hug the look of dejection away. He failed to understand a mother who had no maternal instincts. His own had prayed him through the roughest times of his life, even when he hadn’t wanted her to. “She said she’d check on you later.”
“You and I both know she didn’t say that.” Macey tipped her head toward the laptop. “Did you figure it out? Did I completely wreck the system?” She leaned heavily on the counter, appearing tired but none the worse for wear, although she favored her left side a little.
Trey couldn’t look at her. While he wasn’t about to lie, he certainly wasn’t about to tell her everything he’d been doing in her house while she was absent. He turned his focus to the laptop and clicked on what must be the program that
ran the alarm system. “Just now cranking up the alarm software. Would you happen to know if Olivia had a separate account and password?”
“No.” Macey walked over to stand beside him, heightening the sense of guilt in Trey’s gut. “I guess because I’m computer illiterate, she thought it was funny to make the account in my name. We never used that computer unless it was to control the alarm. After she died, I hid it away so nobody else could get to the alarm system. I guess her paranoia rubbed off on me.”
“She had another laptop, then?”
“She had her main laptop with her overseas, and I assume it went to her aunt with the rest of the things she had with her at the time.”
Trey shifted to one side so that Macey’s arm wouldn’t brush his as she looked over his shoulder. The longer this op went on, the more uncomfortable he grew with seeking Macey’s guilt. But as the commander had reminded him, he was also searching for her innocence. He simply couldn’t let his mind make a decision. He had to stay balanced. So why did he keep swaying toward her?
He steeled himself against her presence and clicked through the alarm system. It was a basic interface with toggle switches for each segment of the alarm. Just as Macey had said, the alarms for the doors and windows were on, while the floor pads and motion sensors were off. It was odd that Olivia had designed something so simple, although she could have simply created a basic user interface for Macey’s sake.
Or...
“You said this laptop has no connectivity?”
“None. When I changed the settings, I had to wire it into the main router in the office.”
Trey nodded once, then scrolled to the system settings on the machine. He hesitated with the mouse over the program he wanted. It wouldn’t be a good thing if she caught sight of the screen and asked exactly what he was doing. “How about you climb into the recliner and get some rest? I’ll be done here in a minute and be out of your way until the door is delivered.”
“The recliner.” Her voice held no small amount of longing. “That sounds amazing.”
Trey moved to the small dining room table and sat with his back to the wall, facing the den, where Macey reclined. He clicked into the settings and headed for the network, scrolling through several screens until he confirmed his suspicions. He needed Dana Santiago more than ever, because Olivia had laid out the drive in a way that wouldn’t allow it to be fully cloned. And it certainly wouldn’t allow Dana to see all that he was seeing. Something that curled his stomach over on itself.
A hidden network interface card was installed on the laptop, one Macey would never have thought to look for. Despite what she believed, the laptop was wirelessly connected to their network.
And someone else was in control of the alarm.
* * *
Macey lay on the recliner, half listening to an old sitcom on TV and half watching Trey fiddle with the laptop. He was intent on what he was doing, but he was still there with her. Unlike her mother. No drama, no mama.
Macey sighed. It had always been that way. And it was the exact reason she had to shut down this little crush on Trey. If her own mother couldn’t be there for her, why would anyone else? As much as it pained her, even Trey couldn’t be fully trusted to be there for her in the end, to truly care when she needed it. One day, even he would vanish.
While Trey was trying to look like he wasn’t doing much more than messing with the operating program for the alarm, she’d known him long enough to recognize the furrow in his brow. Something else was going on here. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The break-in yesterday and the man at the store today were beginning to tangle together in her emotions and her memories.
Medication had dulled the pain in her side to a consistent, annoying throb. The cut hadn’t been deep enough to keep her from working the next day, but it was enough to curb some of her activities for a little while, at least preventing her from doing anything that would pull at her stitches. The doctor had said it was a good thing the man had chosen a box cutter and not something bigger. Probably, in the morning, it wouldn’t feel like a good thing.
After much testing and consultation, the doctors had decided her fainting had been nothing more than emotional shock and that her neck and head were fine. But that didn’t make any of this feel real. The whole event made everything seem like it was happening to someone else, as though she’d somehow stepped into a movie role and no one had given her a script.
And then there was Trey. He’d always been one of those confident, take-charge kind of guys, almost to the point of being overbearing a few times. Olivia had called him on it more than once. While Macey had noticed it, she’d let the two of them with their competing controlling personalities tough it out with each other. It had been fun to watch them try to get the upper hand, whether in a pickup basketball game or in the decision of where to order pizza for dinner. Usually, if Macey waited long enough, the two of them wore themselves out baiting each other and she was able to step in and win without even trying.
But today, Trey was different. Hesitant at the hospital and uncharacteristically reserved now, he almost seemed like a stranger, a man pulling away from being her friend. Maybe he was about to back out on her, too, just like her mother.
She closed her eyes and winced. That would hurt more than she wanted to admit. This was foolishness. She was violating her own rules about romance and relationships. Trey was her friend and that was all she ever wanted him to be. Anything else was too risky.
“You okay?” Trey’s voice came in a soft whisper from the kitchen table.
Opening her eyes, Macey eased herself upright with a pain-driven wince and stood. She walked over and sat across from him. When she did, he pulled the laptop closer and angled the screen even more toward him.
“What are you doing over there? Streaming episodes of Gilmore Girls and you don’t want me to know you get all weepy about the goings-on in Stars Hollow?”
With a groan, Trey rolled his eyes. “You know I’m not.”
“Sure I do.” When they’d fallen into a show hole once on a rare North Carolina snow day, Olivia had won the remote war and had forced Trey to watch the series about a mother and daughter who’d formed a unique and loving friendship. His mutters and the way he’d frequently shoved his face into a pillow said it was too girlie for him, but Macey had caught him watching more than once, and he’d shushed her during a pivotal scene. “I’m guessing if I went over to your house and checked your watch history, you’d be up to season four? Because you know you didn’t stop when you left here that day. You were hooked.”
“Pleading the fifth.” With a last glance at the laptop screen, he moved to close it.
But Macey reached out and pivoted the machine toward her before he could. When Trey made a grab for it, she pulled it from the table into her lap, then made a face at him. “You really are streaming sappy TV shows over here, aren’t you?” The laughter died quickly when she caught a glimpse of the screen, though. Instead of the alarm program she’d expected to see, the screen was black and filled with white letters and numbers. “What is this? Why are you this deep into the system?”
When she glanced up at Trey, his face was an emotionless mask. In an instant, though, the passivity was gone, replaced with his normal teasing expression. “I thought you were a computer nobody. How do you know so much about them now?”
“I learned to code a little bit during a summer camp in middle school. This isn’t the alarm.”
“It sort of is.” With a heavy exhalation, he rounded the table and sat in the chair beside hers, gently removing the laptop from her lap to set it between them on the polished hardwood. He swiped the trackpad and, with a click, reopened the user interface for the alarm. He pointed at the screen. “You did everything right. Here, here and here.” His finger followed his words, indicating the switches she’d toggled off or on based on the features she’d wanted to keep active.
Macey said nothing. After the past couple of days, she didn’t know what to think about Trey’s attitude or his actions.
“The bottom line is, the alarm should be working. Based on what I see here, in Olivia’s program, there’s no reason the door intrusion or the window intrusion shouldn’t have set it off.”
“Okay. So why—” Macey’s head snapped up, pulling at her sore neck muscles. “Window intrusion?” Nobody had come through the window. “The back door was kicked in. Right? Did I miss something?”
Trey shot her a strange look. “A window intrusion. A theoretical window intrusion. If someone had opened a window while the alarm was set, it would have gone off based on what you’ve turned on here.” He cleared his throat. “The problem is that when the door was kicked in and when I opened it this morning, it didn’t sound. Are you sure Olivia didn’t have a separate account set up?”
“I—No.” The abrupt question spun her thoughts before she could ground them back into the conversation. “Is that what you were doing? Trying to hack the system?” Hack. After a robbery and a mugging, the word sounded evil and not like Trey at all. Was she growing suspicious of everyone, even the people she knew best?
“Actually, I was trying to look at the system to see if your alarm user interface was actually active. It’s possible Olivia made you a simplistic version, an easier one to use, and that she had a more technical system set up under another account. I was looking to see if there was a way to tell. If she did, there could be a glitch between your user interface and the secondary account.”
Macey nodded once. It made sense. Trey knew way more about computers than she ever would. While her friends had all been taking tech classes in college, she’d been deep in courses about human anatomy and physiology, the body as a machine more than man-made creations as machines. “It’s possible. She knew my tech savvy runs about as far as how to use my phone.”
He grinned his regular, comforting grin, and Macey’s heart seized. The skip of a beat nearly made her cough.