DONOVAN (Gray Wolf Security, #1)(163)

“Or change it.”

As Ruben said that, he gestured at the computer screen. At 12:07 am last night—while Adrienne and I were driving to San Antonio—someone let themselves into my office and crossed to the computer. The glow of the computer screen as it was woken revealed who the user was. My heart stopped in my chest. Of all the people I had expected to see standing there, this face was the never even on the list.

“Oh, hell,” I muttered, stepping back until my back hit the windows.

“You know who that is?” Ruben asked.

I nodded. “Adrienne saw this?”

“She saved it at two o’clock this afternoon,” Robert helpfully reported.

I nodded slowly, my head spinning.

“Who is it?” Ruben demanded.

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell him the truth. But I couldn’t lie, either. What if she had Adrienne? What if she was the one behind all this? What if—

“Is there more on there?”

“Yeah,” Robert said, pushing a button that made the footage move forward again. The camera turned off when it didn’t detect movement in the room, so the next bit of footage didn’t show up until nearly dawn. A little before 6:30 in the morning.

“Too early for work,” I said softly as Jaime’s face appeared on the computer screen.

She picked something up from on top of the computer keyboard and placed it in the center of the blotter. Then she began typing on the keyboard, her fingers moving almost as quickly as Robert’s had. And then she looked up and spoke.

“Who’s she talking to?”

Robert shook his head. “Can’t tell from this angle.”

Jaime turned back to the computer, typed a moment longer, then grabbed whatever had been sitting on the blotter and took it with her when she left. The rest of the footage was just normal daily activity in the office.

“When Adrienne saved this footage,” Ruben asked slowly, “was she saving something specific or just this particular twelve-hour stretch of time?”

“There’s no way to save just one bit of footage on these cameras. It has to be downloaded onto a computer and edited that way.”

“Then we can’t know which person she reacted to when she saved the footage.”

I glanced at Ruben. For once he wasn’t staring at me. He was staring at the footage as it continued to play out.

“No, not really,” Robert said. “All we can know is that she saw this and she felt it was important enough to the case to save it.”

“Can you identify who’s on the tape?” Ruben asked me.

“The woman there,” I said, gesturing as Robert continued to let the footage play and Jaime again came into the office, “is my personal assistant.”

“Is she supposed to be in here, messing with your stuff?”

“She is.”

“What about the other woman?” Robert asked, reversing the footage until the first bit played again. “Do you know who that is?”

I had to be careful. I couldn’t just tell them. She couldn’t be behind all this, could she? What advantage would she get from all this?

Jacob, with is wonderful timing, suddenly burst into the room.

“There’s been another message.”





Chapter 30


Adrienne

“What will he say when he realizes it’s you?”

She didn’t answer me, but she paused in her movements. It was just a slight hesitation, a movement that wasn’t quite completed. But then she shoved the spoon toward my mouth again.

“Eat.”

“Not hungry.”

“Don’t care. Wouldn’t do if you’re not alive when he asks for proof that you are.”

“You must know how he feels about me. What do you think he’ll do when he realizes you’re the one who took me? Do you think he’ll forgive and forget just like that?”

She stood up and dropped the bowl on one of the shelves, splattering the bland oatmeal she’d been feeding me all over cans of tomato paste.

“You weren’t supposed to figure it out. We didn’t know about the camera in his office.”

“No one knew. I slipped it in there without telling anyone.”

“Yeah, well, that was your mistake. We were going to let you go. We were going to get what we wanted and just let you go. But you had to get nosy.”

“Nosy?”

She glanced at me. “If you hadn’t put that camera there…” She sighed. “We worked so hard to convince your father that Lucien was doing this to himself. You should have been gone. The case was over.”

“But I was still investigating.”

“You didn’t go away. He brought you to dinner after your father told you Lucien was the one who sent the emails. That’s when we realized he really liked you. And he would respond to you going missing.”

“You keep saying ‘we’. Who else is involved in this?”

She shook her head. “It’s none of your business.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

She spun around a second, staring at me like she thought she hadn’t heard me clearly. If I’d been able to see her face, I’m sure it would have been pale. But I couldn’t. She continued to insist on wearing that thin ski mask even though she knew I knew who she was.