“There? What do you mean?”
“Inside with me.”
“You mean like a web designer or administrator making edits to the site?”
“No. It was like someone was following me around.” He looked off behind her as if even he—knower of all things cyber—was having difficulty explaining what he’d experienced. “Every time I went to a specific email, a reply box opened within it and a string of random letters and numbers was typed in.” He shook his head. “It was weird.”
“I call unexplained computer stuff a glitch, but if it seemed off to you, it probably was. Could it have been another hacker in there trying to communicate with you?”
“I thought about that. But how did they know I’d be there? There are very few safety barriers. Someone would have to be monitoringthat space continuously and for what reason? And if they wanted to communicate with me, why type gibberish?”
She had no answers. But she did have a possibly connected question. “If whoever sent that video of Cyrus in the room isn’t connected to the people who arranged his kidnapping, that unknown person would have had to hack into the monitoring camera, right? To be able to post it on the dark web for me to see?”
He nodded. “The police said the monitoring device was in the main room of the cabin, most likely used to watch Cyrus without constantly entering the room.”
“Yes. But could the feed of Cyrus have also streamed to someone else? Say the people that man who brought Cyrus food kept referring to who were on their way? Or even a bigger boss of a kidnapping ring of some sort?”
“Sure. Any of that is possible. You can monitor footage from anywhere remotely if you’re granted log-in access.” He inclined his head backward. “Like the one at your door.”
“So the woman who called and gave me access to the live stream is either a hacker, or someone related to the crime. Someone who maybe went rogue or whose conscience got the better of her.” She thought for a few seconds. “Or someone who wanted to torture me,” she murmured. But something about that didn’t feel quite right, and she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. Maybe it was that the voice on the phone had been eerie, yes, but now that she thought about it, almost ... helpful.
“The other question is,” Rex said, “even if any of those guesses are accurate, how did that person know you’re Cyrus’s mother?”
“That I have no idea, unless Cyrus’s full history was known to the people who took him. If Hollis was involved, that might be the case, right?”
He was silent for a moment as he picked absently on the bottle label. “Either way, I don’t believe it was a random kidnapping.”
“No,” she agreed. “It couldn’t be.”
They each focused on their food for a moment, questions bouncing through Cami’s mind, loose strings flying in every direction, which she was trying so hard to weave into a coherent picture. But they were just missing too much right now.
“By the way,” Rex said, “what are the boxes?”
“My dad’s cases, going back five years from the murders. I have no access to the digital files, so that’s what I’ve got.” The thought of leafing through dusty papers looking for who knew what was already giving her a headache.
“You said the police looked into his recent cases,” Rex said. “They looked there first for a connection to the crime, right?”
“They did, and they hunted for any online threats and things like that. They found a few general ones and followed those, but nothing came of that line of research.”
Most of Rex’s bottle label was peeled off now. “What about ... not the cases themselves, but what happened in the aftermath?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your dad didn’t just sentence people, he let them off, too, right? Sometimes he dismissed their case entirely and set them free.”
“Of course.”
He tore the remainder of the label off and began folding it, over once and then again. “So what if someone he set free victimized others in a similar way?”
She thought about that, those loose strings still taunting her. But it felt like, because of him, she’d just grasped one. “Okay. Yes. So, he let someone off, and that person victimized a family in the same way we were.” She blinked and shook her head. “And then what? That family, or someone within it, blamed my dad and hired two low-life criminals to come exact vengeance?”
“Blame and hatred make people do really dark things.”
She tapped her chopstick on her plate for a minute. The police had looked for a person or someone related to that person who had felt wronged because of a sentence her father had imposed. Which madesense. He’d taken freedom away from many—years, whole lives. It was a strong motive for revenge. But ... Rex could be right. This could very well have to do, not with the taking of someone’s freedom, but with the granting of it. Opportunity that was then used to harm others.
“Maybe they didn’t hire those men to kill us,” she murmured. The recollection of their words chilled her, even now.It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I admit things got out of hand, and we made some stupid moves.“Maybe they were just meant to scare us. But it went too far.” Her eyes widened. This felt right. “That would account for the comments about my father seeing his family tormented being the whole point. And the other comments, at the end, about how it wasn’t supposed to go that way. Those two men, Trig and AJ, they went off script, maybe because of the drugs, maybe because they were simply evil and couldn’t control themselves once they got some power over three helpless women.”
He thinned his lips, and she knew he’d tightened his muscles, too, by his sudden stillness. She was beginning to know him so well, not just his mind, but the signals of his body. It scared her. And it thrilled her, too, in ways she was both tempted to lean into and run from.
