Nash Brothers Box Set - Carrie Aarons Page 0,161

Small incremental robberies that no one noticed until recently, and they seemed to have come from breaches in a system.”

I nod, logging all of this information in my memory. Notepads weren’t necessary, I didn’t have to log things on my phone. I’m not sure when I noticed I had a photographic memory, or that I could retain a lot of information much longer than my brothers could. We’d go out to eat and Keaton, Bowen, and Fletcher could barely remember what they wanted to order when the waiter came, while I could recite the entire menu as my mom was tucking me into bed.

Genius, they called me. I wasn’t going to argue with what was probably true, not that I was ever diligent enough to get tested.

“And where was it, what systems?”

Captain Kline rubs his hands over his face, clearly distressed at this part. “All of them. I received the first report, from the athletics director at the high school in Fawn Hill. He noticed that, slowly but surely, small disbursements of the athletics budget had been siphoned in the past year. Dollars some weeks, more in others, but the theft totals up to about five thousand dollars. And it’s not just the school. Nollers Stamping Plant made a call to Mack to report seven thousand five hundred dollars had gone missing in minute amounts in the last year, as well as two more county businesses who have come to me.”

“Let me guess, they’re all on the same network or run the same security programs on their computers.”

It’s no coincidence that four businesses, or public places that have budgets and financials, were digitally burglarized in the last year and no one caught the small amounts siphoned out until now. They all had to be running the same kind of program on a system somewhere … that’s how the hacker was getting in.

Kline nods. “Clearly I don’t speak your language, but it has to be something like that. And these are only the ones who have noticed. All in all, the suspect has made out with about thirty grand in other people’s money, which in these parts is a good sum. Who knows how many other places are being unknowingly skimmed from? That’s what I need you to figure out. Pinpoint the program he’s sneaking in through, identify if any of the thousands of businesses in the county use it as well, and trace this guy. We have to stop him … I have a feeling this asshole is making off with a lot of hard-working people’s money.”

If I knew anything about the half-cocked digital business practices of the professionals operating in this county, I’d say more than two dozen of them could be getting stolen from and never realize it.

The checklist in my head starts to form, and the adrenaline rush of having a new cyber puzzle to solve gets my veins firing. “All right, well, let me go on a deep dive when I get home. I’ll need access to all of their—”

I was about to say organizations, but we both knew that I didn’t need permission to hack into something I wanted to see. Kline cut me off before I could say it anyway.

“No, I’d start at the scene of the first crime. Fawn Hill High School.”

2

Penelope

“Matthew Liam, if you’re not down here in point three seconds, you lose your Xbox for a month!”

I scream up the stairs, my voice taking on a terrifying bellow. School mornings are usually chaos, as is expected with three boys under the age of ten, but this is just one of those days where everything is falling apart.

My four-year-old, Ames, peed on his sheets last night and I’d had to do a quick job of stripping his bed, pep talking him through a shower and then aiding him in his get-ready progress as he was still my baby. Travis Jr, my oldest at the teetering on puberty age of nine, refused to wake up for an alarm, much less a bulldozer. And Matthew, the seven-year-old and quintessential middle child, has been sitting on his bed in his underwear playing baseball cards for the last half hour.

I feel murderous, and I haven’t even gotten to swipe on mascara yet. Not that today is different from any other moment of my life; when you’re a widow by the age of twenty-eight and left to raise three strong-willed males, there isn’t much hope for order. As much as I try to remain the drill sergeant,