Hidden - Laura Griffin Page 0,94

back to let him close the door. “I just wanted you to think it through before you got involved with a reporter. Now you’re involved, so . . .” She shrugged. “You should try to make it work.”

Jacob shook his head.

“Call me if you get any updates from Mullins,” Kendra said.

“I won’t.”

She closed the door, and he watched her walk back to the station, probably to spend another late night catching up on paperwork. Kendra was a good detective. She was sharp and experienced and hardworking as hell. But he couldn’t take her relationship advice.

Jacob checked his phone one more time before pulling into traffic. He wended his way through downtown, thinking about the case and the autopsy report and everything he’d learned about David Langham.

A tight wire.

That was how one of Langham’s buddies described him. He and Langham had been through training together and done two consecutive tours in Afghanistan. They’d had a falling-out after that, but the man wouldn’t say why. He hadn’t seemed surprised to get a call from a homicide cop, though. In fact, not a single person Jacob had talked to was surprised to learn Langham was wanted by the FBI. That told Jacob a lot.

He crossed the bridge and caught a glimpse of the Austin Herald building. Would Bailey be there now? He figured she would. She was probably pounding away on her story, a story that was sure to be explosive. Which meant it would likely be picked up by news outlets across the country. Bailey was about to expose some powerful people, but in doing so, she was exposing herself, too.

I know you care about her. Jacob’s gut clenched. The thing of it was, Kendra was right. He could admit it to himself, but he was too pissed off to figure out what to do about it.

His phone buzzed in the cup holder, and he checked the number before answering. US GOV. Given the last few days he’d had, it could be anybody from the Marshals Office to the New Orleans FBI. He braced himself for bad news.

“Merritt,” he said.

“Hey, it’s Morgan.”

“What’s up?”

“Did you hear about Langham?” she asked.

Something in her voice made Jacob’s shoulders tense. “What about him?”

“He hijacked a car in Beaumont this evening. We think he’s in Texas.”

* * *

* * *

I DON’T KNOW HOW you work in a pub.”

Bailey glanced up with a start. “God, you scared me,” she told Nico.

He smiled. “I scared you?”

“I didn’t hear you walk up.” She’d been nervous all day, glancing over her shoulder and jumping at shadows, but she didn’t want to tell Nico that.

She moved her computer over, and he set his bag on the table. “Thanks for meeting me,” she said. “How’d it go with your source?”

“Awesome,” he said, sliding into the booth across from her.

“Who was this again?”

“A former Granite Tech employee who used to be on their red team. Now he works for a software start-up.”

Bailey took a sip of her wine. “And a red team—they do what, exactly?”

“It’s a group of white-hat hackers. As opposed to black. They run penetration tests.” Nico leaned his elbows on the table. “Basically, they get assigned to try to hack into systems and find holes in security. Companies hire them to sniff out vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Anyway, this guy worked for Granite Tech, and he told me how about two years ago he was given a special assignment by none other than Lucinda Oberhoff. She asked him to hack into three state DMV databases and collect records, supposedly to demonstrate flaws in their security systems.”

“Whoa.”

Nico smiled. “It gets better. He said he always thought the project was suspicious because he never dealt with anyone on the client side. Just Lucinda. Everything went straight to her.”

“That’s especially interesting because Lucinda told me that Granite Tech doesn’t have any government clients,” Bailey said.

He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a notepad. He flipped through the pages. “Get this. My guy said, quote, ‘I don’t know where all those records ended up. But it was frighteningly easy getting them.’”

“He said that?”

“Yep.”

“On the record?”

“Yep.”

“We need that in the story.”

Bailey clicked open the article on her computer. She and Nico were collaborating on a three-part series that would run on A-1, above the fold, for three consecutive days. Max and the business editor and even the publisher were involved.

“What are you working on?” Nico asked.

“The story for day three.”

“Mind if I look?”

“Go ahead.”

Nico scooted around to Bailey’s side of the booth and