Page 59 of Deadly Sacrifice

Katie opened up a tracker program and, her fingers flying on the keys, quickly pulled together a paragraph or two of code. She set up a digital version of a noose and left it dangling over a frequently trafficked trail through the world of the game.

The next time Dark Wizard logged on and entered her particular level, he'd be tempted to click on a carelessly discarded jewel . . . and once he did, the snare would tighten around his avatar and give her a trace directly to his IP address—and his physical location in real time.

All she had to do to catch him now was wait. "Unfortunately, I've never been good at that," Katie muttered. “At least I'll get the douchebag next time he visits the game.”

She logged out and began a new file, pulling together the dossier Lei had requested on Roger Nettle.

Katie dove into the first layer of her search, combing through public records. Roger Nettle’s information was sparse. Almost too sparse. No family, no known address before a few years ago, no school records she could find. The guy was practically a ghost before arriving on the island. Her fingers flew as she set up a deeper web search, scouring for any sign of him under aliases, business records, social media.

She hit something. A small, barely noticeable discrepancy in a public registry from New York City: a business license for a limousine service, registered under the name “Roger Nettle,” but the social security number attached to it had been used in a completely different context—a legal case involving a man named Ronald Mank.

Katie’s pulse quickened. “Gotcha, scumbag.”She opened a new window and began cross-referencing.

Ronald Mank had quite a history. He was wanted in three states—California, Nevada, and New York—for fraud, blackmail, and check kiting. He’d been charged multiple times but always managed to slip away, leaving a trail of fleeced victims in his wake.

Apparently, he’d reinvented himself as Roger Nettle in Hawaii, ingratiating himself with Kuleana as the “cultural expert” known as “Kahuna.”

Katie rolled her eyes. “Cultural expert, my butt.” If Mank was running scams here, there had to be a reason he’d latched onto a group like Kuleana. They were well-funded and privately powerful. What was his angle? What could he possibly gain from pretending to be an environmental consultant?

Katie pulled up the Kuleana team’s public profiles, focusing on the key players. She zeroed in on the three victims again, but her gut told her Roger wasn’t after them specifically. She started looking at the rest of Kuleana’s extended team leadership.

But she paused as she thought of Helen Steinbrenner. She recalled the picture of Bill Wilkinson’s hand on Helen’s behind. There was something off there. Maybe Wilkinson was just a creep, but if Helen had something going with him, it made her vulnerable. And if she was vulnerable, she could be blackmailed.

Katie ran a quick search on Helen. The widow had a significant amount of personal wealth. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine someone like Ronald Mank targeting her, especially if she had secrets—or an affair—that she wanted to keep hidden.

Katie’s eyes narrowed. Could this guy have been blackmailing Helen Steinbrenner? It made sense. He could have found out about an affair with Bill Wilkinson, snapped a few compromising pictures, and leveraged them to extort money from her. Or worse—maybe he’d been blackmailingbothof them.

“But what does Mank have to do with the murders?” Katie sat back and scrubbed her hands over her face, trying to piece it together.

Maybe that’s why the killings happened—to cover up Mank’s blackmail of the core team members.

Katie cracked her knuckles and leaned forward. She was going to need a lot more before bringing this to Lei.

She started again, this time digging into any possible criminal activity Roger—no,Ronald—could have been involved in during his time on the island. If he was blackmailing, as his pattern had been before, there had to be a trail. Money transfers, offshore accounts, something. Even as she worked, a quiet voice in the back of her mind nagged at her.

What if she wasn’t the only one digging tonight?

If Mank knew she was onto him, he might go after her, too. Katie glanced at the small window on her screen, showing her tracker program for the online game. The Dark Wizard still hadn’t logged in.

But if Ronald was as tech-savvy as she suspected, he wouldn’t be sloppy enough to log into an exposed game server when he was under pressure. He’d be covering his tracks.

“Come on, Ronald,” she whispered. “Come out and play. Let’s see how good you are.”

There was still something she hadn’t figured out yet—who was Ronald Mank blackmailing? Was it possibly Helen and Wilkinson? Or were there others?

Beck Noble, project manager.Currently in police custody “for his own protection,” Noble had been the one to request a “cultural expert” be hired for the Kuleana project, and Lei wanted to rule him out as a suspect since he was the last remaining core member of Kuleana who hadn’t been killed.

Katie pulled up Noble’s file again, her eyes scanning quickly over the details. Beck Noble was boots on the ground, overseeing Kuleana’s development projects, and her instincts screamed that he was hiding something. Katie dived back into the financials she’d hacked into earlier.

Kuleana’s builds were supposed to be state-of-the-art, environmentally conscious developments. But as she dug deeper, she found discrepancies. Overbilling. Invoices for materials that were never delivered. Kickbacks to companies that didn’t exist.

Katie’s pulse quickened.Beck Noble was embezzling.

He’d started off subtle at first, with small amounts here and there, easily written off as standard project overages. Over time, the amounts grew larger.

Beck had been siphoning money from Kuleana, padding his pockets by using substandard materials and cutting corners. The contractors he liaised with had to be in on it since they were the ones building with the materials. Noble had been doing this for months, maybe years, without anyone catching on.

And then they took on the controversial Iao Valley build, and David Steinbrenner brought Ronald Mank/Roger Nettle into the picture.

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