Loverboy (The Company #2) - Sarina Bowen Page 0,89

cold sodas, and proof that we can tie every one of The Plumber’s pie shop posts with video evidence of Teagan on the premises, she caves in faster than a sandcastle at high tide.

“Everything I posted, I did for my boyfriend. He’s just a bookkeeper who found himself working for the wrong guys,” she says, eyes downcast. “I mean—this one in particular is super scary.”

“Super scary how?” Max asks, leaning back in his chair and appearing far more relaxed than I know he really is.

“My boyfriend always found him creepy, and he has a short temper. But his office seemed pretty normal at first.”

“What kind of office is it?” I ask.

“It’s upstairs at a nightclub. He goes in two times a week to do the club’s books. The ledgers are mostly ordinary—alcohol and a big payroll. But they also pass him receipts with dodgy information on them. My boyfriend is supposed to put them down for ‘miscellaneous expenses.’”

“Huh,” Max says noncommittally. “Nightclubs are often fronts for a whole lot of things. Drugs. Money laundering.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Teagan insists. “Anyway, there are also a bunch of computers up there—more than a nightclub would need. My boyfriend is a bookkeeper by trade, but hacking is his hobby. So he notices powerful computers, you know? And the machine they put him on has a lot of horsepower.”

“Interesting,” Max says, leaning forward. “What kind of hacking does he do?”

“Breaking into first person shooter games.” She shrugs. “He sells cheat codes to sweaty gamers in South Korea.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” I ask.

“A little bit,” Teagan admits. “The game manufacturers are always trying to close the loopholes. But my boyfriend likes the thrill of the chase. It’s a cat and mouse game between him and the game manufacturers.”

“Okay,” Max says. ”So how did your hacker boyfriend get you posting murder details on the dark web? Connect the dots for me.”

“Well, these guys in the nightclub office are a weird bunch. They won’t let him do the books remotely. They won’t let him use his own computer, and he has to put his phone in a bowl while he’s working there. It’s a little paranoid, but not that off base, right? Some people just don’t trust the cloud. So he’s on one of their rigs, and he starts poking around this PC one day just for fun. Kind of like driving someone else’s Ferrari. And someone had left a private message channel open …” She sighs.

“So he read it,” Max guesses.

“Yeah.” She heaves a sigh. “He shouldn’t have read it. There was some scary shit on there. And he didn’t want to be caught reading it. But it worried him. He needed to know if he should even be working for these people. So he …” She hesitates.

“Mirrored it to another channel?” Max guesses. “To read later?”

“Yep.” She swallows hard. “The thread he saw was about some kind of super creepy poison,” she says, shivering. “When he read it that night at home, he got kind of freaked out.”

“Oh man,” Scout says, taking another corn chip from the bag. She’s here to play the good cop, I think. In case Teagan needs convincing.

“Yeah, my boyfriend wanted to drop him as a client. When the creepy boss asked to increase his hours, he made an excuse, like he was too busy with his long-time guys. But the scary dude offered to triple his pay and give him even more hours, so he stayed.” She hangs her head.

“And that was a mistake?” I offer gently. “Did he hear more things that he shouldn’t?”

“Well, it’s funny that you put it like that. My boyfriend has almost no hearing.“ Her eyes tear up again. “He’s almost completely deaf. But he’s really good at lipreading. And—this happens all the time to people who have a disability—they treat him like he’s blind and stupid, too. The younger guys that guard this office, they will say anything in front of him. They talk about who they’re going to shake down next. And my boyfriend pretends like he can’t understand anything they’re saying.”

“So he hears a lot,” Max says.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. And then …” she takes a big breath. “The first hacker murder hit the newspaper, and they couldn’t shut up about it. My boyfriend noticed that they knew more about it than was in the papers. So that freaked him out.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. “So …” Max’s eyes are as bright as I’ve ever seen them. “You think these guys are killing