Page 22 of Just Now

“I guess I can do that. I had a big project that I was working on all night. For a client in Korea. We were communicating the whole night, testing it out. I’ve got the message thread, and I’ve got all the tests we did.” He stared at Cami. “If you know IT, you’ll be able to follow the track.”

“Show me,” she said.

“Here. Take a look.”

He got up and strode over to the state-of-the-art laptop on the dining room table.

“Wait a minute.” Connor held up his hand. “Cami, you look at that record. Mr. Brandon, we’re going for a walk.”

“Where?” Apprehension was now visible in Gavin’s eyes.

“You’re going to show me around your house,” Connor said. “Come with me. I want to see what’s in here, what you’ve got in your rooms.”

In this neighborhood, with its hodgepodge of apartment buildings, warehouses, and dilapidated homes, it might be easy to keep someone imprisoned if you had a soundproof room. This didn’t seem like the kind of area where people would hear, or would ask questions if they did. So she guessed Connor was going to check for any hiding places, and in the meantime, she needed to confirm that Gavin really had been programming all night.

She hadn’t known what to expect, but as she sat down at the laptop and started going through the message thread, she saw that he wasn’t lying. The messages went back and forth for hours, with Gavin sending code and the client responding with feedback. They had run a few tests and fixed a few bugs. It was clear from the thread that Gavin had been working hard on the project from about five p.m. until about two a.m. There hadn’t been a window of time where he could have gone out and dumped a body. Not with what she was seeing here. There hadn’t been twenty minutes to spare. And she double-checked the IP address that the messages had been sent from.

It was this one. He hadn’t gone elsewhere with his laptop, but had in fact been working here.

Footsteps sounded behind her. Connor was returning, with Gavin walking behind him. Connor’s face was inscrutable but he gave Cami a quick nod that told her the house was cleared, and he’d found no soundproofed rooms or subterranean hiding places.

“I’m happy with what I see here,” Cami said.

“You’d better not have messed up my coding,” Gavin said, the threatening note now simmering in his voice again as his confidence returned.

“I didn’t touch your coding,” Cami retorted. “Why would I do that?”

“We’ll leave now,” Connor said loudly, seeing that tensions were still running high and a tech-related argument was about to break out. “But I must warn you, Mr. Brandon, you’re treading a fine line here. You could have gotten into big trouble from sending those emails. Cross that line again, and things could go badly for you.”

Gavin stared at him, clearly not appreciating the advice.

“You’ve cleared me. I’ll live my own life, thank you,” he said defiantly, and Connor shrugged.

“Your choice,” he said.

As they left, Cami decided that this visit had not been totally fruitless. They might have cleared Gavin, but she thought that he’d given them a window into the killer’s thinking. The way Gavin obsessively emailed the women, forcing them to be subjected to his dark, twisted fantasies, yet perceived himself as the innocent party, was a mindset that must be shared by the man they were hunting.

But the hunt was futile so far, and this lead had fizzled out. And worse was to come.

As they left Gavin’s house and approached the car, Connor’s phone rang.

He picked up, his voice sharp.

“Yes?” he said. “Yes, go on, put me through.” He paused, and then he gripped the phone tighter as he spoke the words Cami dreaded.

“Another body? Where?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You were a challenge! What a challenge you were!”

Breathing hard, the killer forced the woman’s limp arm into the shirt sleeve.

“You will wear this, even if I have to make you!”

This last victim, the one he’d taken last night, had surprised him. He’d thought her spirit was broken. She’d been in tears, compliant, submitting to his will. But when he came back to taunt her one last time about the outfit she was wearing, before he came in and killed her, he realized that she’d gotten a whole lot more fighting spirit. In fact, she’d proved to be a wildcat.

She’d stripped off the men’s clothing and replaced it with her own, and then she’d refused to put the men’s clothing back on. He needed her to! He had to kill the old him, the person he’d used to be.

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