shook his head, removing the rest of the tack. Ace should be resting. “I’ve got it. Where’s Marie?”
“Out front with another cup of coffee, I think.”
“You think?”
Ace hooked his thumbs in his belt, rocked back on his heels. “I thought you had her babysitting me, not the other way around.”
“Either way, you should both be here,” he pointed out, inexplicably annoyed. “Scrabble, find Marie.”
Ace snorted and reached for the saddle as the dog raced off.
“Ace,” Emiliano warned.
“I’ve had as much rest as I can stand.” He yanked the saddle off the rail and stalked off toward the tack room.
It wasn’t until he was well away from the house that Emiliano had realized his mistake in leaving her with Ace, who, despite the declarations to the contrary, wasn’t at the top of his game today. She might have done anything while he was gone, tampered with his computer, contacted the Cohort, tried to walk into town. Or found a ride back to Dallas.
And as she followed Scrabble to join him at the corral, a cup of coffee in hand, winter sunlight on her hair and that wide smile flanked by dimples, he knew all those possibilities were baseless. Mentally, he removed her name from the list of possible Cohort accomplices.
He’d done more background research last night after Marie had gone to bed and Ace had fallen asleep. He supposed being a foster kid explained her lack of ties to anything other than Colton, Incorporated, but it still bothered him. Who lived that way, without support or backup? No pets, as she’d said, a minimal social life and completely career-oriented.
When Scrabble sat, gazing up at him expectantly, he praised her and bent to give her a good ear massage. It gave him a moment to pull himself together. “How was your morning?”
“Great. Ace gave me the full tour. He showed me how to give the horses out front some treats.”
“Good.” Emiliano shuffled his feet and stared out over the acreage. She was almost too fresh and pretty to look at with her hair pulled up into a ponytail, her snug jeans too dark to have seen much use, and the half-zip sweatshirt with the faded football team logo over a long-sleeved shirt. She was in tennis shoes instead of high heels, so he had a better sense of how petite she really was, with those feminine curves balanced perfectly on her small frame.
At one time, she might have been exactly his type of woman. Thank goodness his work kept him traveling from one cyberattack to the next, effectively killing his chances to repeat the relationship mistakes of his past.
“I’m headed inside for the conference call,” he said.
“Could I please join you?”
No. “Sure.”
In the study that overlooked his mother’s vegetable garden, he pulled another chair around to the working side of the desk so they could be seen on the call together. It wasn’t exactly protocol, but it wasn’t a breach, either. Scrabble stretched out on her belly between the chairs, her feet sprawled out like a furry compass star.
When Dashwood, Townsend and Staller were all online with Emiliano and Marie, Dashwood gave the preliminary general update that they didn’t have a definite lead yet. Staller filled in the blanks on the malware that kept the firewalls vulnerable, adding his expectation of fixing the issue by the end of the day.
Beside him, Marie nodded thoughtfully. The others couldn’t see the way her hands relaxed at the news that Colton, Incorporated, would soon be secure again.
Finn Townsend appeared as frustrated today as he had when Emiliano had left Dallas. “This code is definitely Cohort. I’ve found the standard references to their so-called leader, Sulla. Nothing so far that points us to a local Princeps.”
One more deviation from standard Cohort behavior. The workhorses of the Cohort, the Principes often clustered near a cyberattack site to launch red herrings and other distracting challenges at investigators.
“There are typical tools and procedures within the signature, but the technique isn’t on par,” Finn added.
“Meaning what?” Emiliano wanted to hear something more substantial, something that would give them a hard target.
“Someone new.” Finn scowled at his notes. “I’ll keep digging.”
“And you?” Dashwood asked Emiliano.
He reported about the attack on Ace and the xylazine theft. “Whoever it was killed the camera on approach, so no identifications. I’m still working out how they managed that. It’s probably a local crime of opportunity,” he finished. Pulling the bagged syringe from the desk drawer, he held it up for his team to see. “The sheriff will send this to the lab in Austin. Hopefully we’ll get prints and a lead.”
“Keep us in the loop on that. The timing doesn’t feel like coincidence,” Dashwood said, astute as ever. “In the meantime, be vigilant and let’s all keep playing to our strengths.”
Emiliano’s strengths ran to computer forensics and research, and it seemed he would be spending the rest of the day on both.
“One more thing.” Finn’s gaze was brittle as he looked straight into the camera. “Going through the wreckage, I found trashed emails that someone at the company has been in recent contact with Hugh Barrington.”
Emiliano didn’t recognize the name, but it was clear from the horrified expression on Marie’s face that she did.
“That’s impossible.” She turned to him. “He was a lawyer for the Colton family. When his rampant corruption was exposed, the company cut all ties with him.”
“I’m looking at evidence to the contrary,” Finn said with a shrug. “It’ll be in the cloud for everyone to evaluate.”
Dashwood wrapped up the meeting, leaving Emiliano wishing for the first time ever that he was in Dallas rather than on his ranch. Although he wanted to see Finn’s new evidence firsthand, it was too risky. He couldn’t take Marie back where the Cohort was hunting for her and he couldn’t be that far away in case they managed to track her to Shadow Creek.
He’d barely ushered Marie out of the office when his phone hummed with an incoming text message. His boss was particularly irritated he’d allowed Marie to be on the call, and when Emiliano saw the accompanying screenshot, he understood why.
The emails Finn had found were between Marie and Barrington. The content summary revealed a clandestine privacy breach the opponents of data mining were always warning against. His team considered her a suspect.
On a soft curse, he looked down at his dog. He just couldn’t make himself believe the electronic evidence over his dog’s judgment. Digital files could be fabricated while Scrabble didn’t get distracted so easily.
No way would his team accept a canine opinion as fact, though.
“Something’s off and we need to find out what it is,” he said to the dog. After the break-in at the vet’s office, he wasn’t sure they had much time.
Scrabble
