Page 50 of Just Hide

It took just five minutes for the police to finish their search and hand Cami the phone and the laptop bag. She took both eagerly. The wait had felt like an eternity and listening to the swish and rumble of rush hour traffic outside reminded her that the working day was coming to an end.

Questions were going to be asked as night fell. She had a vision in her mind of politicians gathering in boardrooms, making high-level phone calls, asking angrily why Agent Connor hadn't gotten any results yet.

She needed to take this case forward. She was the one with the IT knowledge; he was the one who was going to have to bear all the consequences of failure.

Nadia must have something on her phone, surely? Even if geolocation hadn't been enabled, there were other ways of tracking where she'd been. Or maybe she’d kept her phone out of the picture and done the research on her laptop? All she needed was enough to make Nadia talk and admit to what she'd done.

"Right, here you are. You can look at them in the evidence room," the officer said, indicating the door on the left. "There's plugs and chargers in there, but the devices must remain on the premises."

"Thanks. I'll make sure they don’t leave the room."

Cami took the phone and the bag, went inside the room, and turned everything on. She powered up the laptop and immediately linked it to her own machine, getting the software running to get through the login password.

Then, unlocking Nadia’s phone and powering up her own phone, she set the program to run that would crack the access code. That would hopefully take a few minutes.

While everything opened, Cami thought back over what it had taken to get here. What an afternoon it had been. It had felt as if the case was stalled for a while but then it had moved at lightning speed.

Those visuals of the women were still in her mind, together with their names. That was what had finally cracked the case, and she felt proud of herself for her logic.

Even though, there was still a strange missing piece, now that she thought about it.

There had been that one face that had disappeared. It had just ceased to exist last year as if it wasn't in circulation anymore. That had been strange. She wondered why and what had happened to cause that. In fact, Cami was now wondering if that face might have belonged to an earlier victim. Had this killer begun her spree sooner than anyone had thought?

What did a disappearing face mean? Had she gone overseas, or had she left the country? Or had she been killed? Why hadn’t that face linked up to anything current like all the others had?

The buzzing of her phone distracted her from her thoughts. She was into Nadia’s phone, and a moment later, she was in the laptop as well.

“Great,” Cami said to herself. “Now, let’s see what’s here.”

To save time, she synced the phone to the laptop, so that she could look through all the information in one place. And then, with that done, she started hunting.

She scrolled through the menu on Nadia's phone, looking at all the apps that she had on it. There were a few apps for messaging, and there were hundreds of contacts. She was on social media and had been active there. She’d had her email on her laptop, so Cami looked through that as well.

As she’d expected, everything was above board, and she couldn’t see anything incriminating at a glance. Of course, she wouldn’t. Everyone knew that incriminating evidence had to be hidden or erased, and she was sure that Nadia had done that. But she was also sure she hadn’t done it well enough.

Where were the secret folders, the hidden content, and the deleted messages?

Cami dug further, her fingers flying, looking for what wasn't there, looking for the places that information was stored when an unwary phone owner thought it had been successfully hidden or erased.

Here. This was it.Triumph surging, she found a folder of recently deleted messages and opened it, narrowing her eyes because there was a wealth of information here. She could see it immediately. Reams of texts between herself and her lover.

Scanning the texts, Cami saw that they'd met up often and had been getting together almost every afternoon.

And what was this?

She frowned, reading more carefully now. This didn't sound legitimate. This was seriously underhanded, for sure.

He’d written:"I'm going to wire $10,000 today and another $20,000 next week. Then, if she doesn't notice, I'll do the big one and get us a million out. I think I've got the passwords changed so she won't notice. Once we've done that, we'll be free and clear, but we'll have to move fast."

She’d written:“Great. I’m going to book flights as soon as you wire the first batch of money.”

Cami's eyes widened.

As she read on, reading between the lines as well as what was in the texts themselves, she realized that this cheating husband who'd confronted them at the door had been planning to transfer a lot of his wife's capital and savings into an offshore account.

He and Nadia were literally planning on doing a midnight flight. They were going to skip the country with the proceeds—those ill-gotten financial gains—and set themselves up somewhere else.

That was exactly what they were planning to do. And they'd been devoting a lot of time and energy to it.

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