Page 7 of Wicked Love
Logan flexed his hands. “My turn to do the breaking and entering.”
He stepped ahead of Slade into the small office room and dropped into the chair at the metal desk. As his fingers whipped across the keyboard, sending the monitor flickering to life, the rest of us gathered behind him.
I couldn’t tell what he was doing exactly, but after a couple of minutes of clicking and tapping, the password request window vanished, and the regular desktop full of icons appeared before us. Logan grinned tightly and sent the cursor veering across the screen. “Ah ha. Looks like the footage is stored here. Usually these kind of systems are set up to delete after no less than twenty-four hours, so this morning’s footage should definitely still be there.”
He opened up the folder and skimmed through the file names, which seemed to be labeled by the day and hour. Then he clicked one open. It showed a view of the sidewalk outside the shop—and the road and the trucking company building on the other side just ahead, as Dexter had predicted.
Slade let out an approving whistle and gave his friend a thumbs up. “Now we’re talking.”
Logan played the footage at three times the normal speed, racing through various people coming and going from the trucking company door and its bay off to the side. I guessed none of the guys spotted the man who’d approached them, because none of them said a word. Then Logan clicked the mouse to bring the video feed back to regular playback, just as I saw the three guys currently around me walking up to the building.
They stepped in through the front door, and Slade let out an urgent sound next to me. He pointed at the screen.
The second after the Vigil guys had entered the building, a gangly man with slicked-back hair had strode into view from the same direction they’d arrived from. He walked briskly but confidently toward the trucking company.
Dexter knit his brow. “That’s him, but he doesn’t look nervous at all. The opposite, really. He seemed so anxious when he approached us.”
Slade frowned. “Where’s he going now?”
The man had veered down the alley next to the trucking company instead of continuing on to the door. He stopped there, standing where he was only just visible in the shadows near the mouth of the alley, braced as if waiting for something.
“It looks like he followed you there and then hung out until you left,” I said. “I thought you said it seemed like he only noticed you after you showed up?”
“Maybe he’d spotted us somewhere we were investigating earlier and…” Logan paused, clearly not sure how to explain how the man would have tracked him down again. “Or he could have just seen us from farther down the street when we pulled up.”
I guessed that was possible.
The man stayed in place until the Vigil guys emerged several minutes later. They continued down the street, clustered close together in conversation. As they passed out of view of the camera, the man in the alley edged closer, clearly having noticed their presence. He waited for several beats and then slipped out onto the sidewalk.
As he headed after the guys, his posture slumped, his head ducking and his shoulders hunching. His head jerked with nervous twitches as he scanned the street. Then he vanished from the frame too.
Logan stopped the playback, staring grimly at the screen. I knew he had to have noticed how strange this was too.
“It’s like he planned out how he’d talk to you,” I said. “He only acted nervous when he knew you were about to see him. Itwasan act.”
“Or maybe he started out confident and then got freaked out as the possible consequences of blabbing on his boss sank in?” Slade said, but he couldn’t put a lot of conviction into the suggestion.
I hugged myself. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t like it at all. Too much doesn’t add up.”
“It doesn’t add up because we don’t have all the pieces yet,” Logan said stubbornly, but he was obviously just as uncertain as the rest of us.
I didn’t know if he was letting himself think this far yet, but I couldn’t help it. What if Beckett’s confusion had been completely real? What if he really had been set up?
What if we were focusing all this energy on blaming him when the real villain was still lurking behind the scenes, ready to strike again?
CHAPTERFOUR
Slade
Igroaned as I came into consciousness, stretching my legs out to relieve the stiffness in my back. The couch was comfortable to lounge on while watching TV, but not the greatest for a full night’s sleep. My joints cracked as I sat upright with a brief yawn. The scent of last night’s Chinese food still hung in the air, provoking a gurgle in my stomach.
Logan was just stuffing a couple of textbooks into his bag near the front door. He glanced over at me when I moved and offered an apologetic grimace, keeping his voice low. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
I shook my head. “Happened all on its own.”
He slung his backpack over his shoulder with a huff of frustration. “Have to get to class. It seems stupid evenhavingclasses while all this shit is going down.”
“At least they’re teaching you skills that’ll make you an even better hacker,” I said with a half-hearted grin. “Whether they meant to do that or not.”
