Page 57 of Defending Love
Dani.
“Safe for now,” I replied. “Some things have me concerned. I also wanted to find out what you learned about the virus I found on her electronics.”
“Jackie just brought me that report. That’s why I was about to call.”
Jackie was Ben’s assistant.
“What did you find?”
“The virus is called GONO78, the same one Jack found on the Sinclairs’ computer and phones and was found on Damien and Ella Sinclair’s electronics. Are you familiar?”
“No.”
“In a nutshell, it continually searches for keywords. It’s hard to say if this virus was placed by someone looking for information about Sinclair’s business or personal. It’s not extremely high tech and can be sent easily through an email or text message.”
“Do you know how long it was there?”
“Not yet. We do know that it wasn’t there a year ago when you first worked the assignment.”
“Can you see the location of the receiver?”
“Not yet,” he replied. “We’re working on tearing through some firewalls. At this point, we know the virus was transmitting to the greater Indianapolis area.”
“Fuck,” I growled.
“What else is concerning you?” he asked.
I proceeded to tell him about the events of last night. “I can’t figure out two things. One, how did those guns-for-hire find us? The SUV was in the garage. I booked the villa under an LLC. Second, how did they know we’d gotten into Derek’s safe?”
“What’s your gut telling you?”
“Jack Webb said he spoke to Damien Sinclair yesterday. He mentioned something about Dani wanting to get inside the safe.” I inhaled. “What do we know about Damien Sinclair?”
“He’s the man who hired us.”
“And his father was killed under our watch.”
“I ran a conclusive background check on him before taking him on as a client last year.”
“Did you run his financials?”
“Of course.”
“Run them again,” I said.
“Eli, this is highly unusual.”
“Run both Damien’s and Darius’s. For the record, they’re both in the greater Indianapolis area. I want to know if either of them has a significant amount of outgoing funds in the past two months.”
“You think that Derek Sinclair’s killer was paid.”
“It’s what my gut is telling me, Ben. I sent a picture of the safe to the main office to ask about the number of digits the combination would require. I spoke to Jack. Dani spoke to her mom. Unless someone from Guardian is in on this, the only other people who knew we wanted in that safe were Marsha Sinclair and Damien Sinclair. I don’t believe Marsha would arrange to have herself shot.” Although stranger things have happened.
“I’ll run a report.”
“Ben, there’s a package coming to you today. I had it sent through a courier. I need the forensics on the letter ASAP.”
“You do know we have multiple assignments in progress.”
