Secure Location - By Beverly Long Page 0,48
on each other. Her family had been quiet and emotionless, even in the wake of Missy’s death. They didn’t talk about what happened. The one time she had been brave enough to broach the subject, her father had told her that she should have been more careful and her mother had said that it was best to try to forget it.
She stopped trying to talk about it and stopped hoping to count on anyone else. She sure as heck didn’t want anyone counting on her.
She kept a safe zone around her and the only one that had ever breached it was Cruz. In his bold, in-your-face way, he’d managed to get past all the imaginary alligators and scale the palace walls.
They’d been a team. A cohesive unit.
They’d loved and laughed and in the quiet nights when she awoke and she could hear Cruz breathing next to her, she’d been overwhelmed at the love she felt for him.
Yet she’d continued to keep her secret.
Maybe because she really liked the pedestal. Maybe because she was afraid of disappointing him. Maybe because she’d gotten used to never talking about it and now it just seemed too damn late.
She heard two sharp raps on the door. “Meg, it’s Cruz.”
Greta opened the door. He came in with Detective Myers on his heels. They didn’t have her laptop.
“Well?” she asked, impatient to have the details.
Cruz gave her a tired smile. “There was a program on your laptop. Basically, it was recording and transmitting every keystroke, every website you went to, all the activity.”
She felt nauseous and terribly violated. “Transmitting it where?”
“We’re working on that,” Myers said. “Every computer has an address, sort of like a house number. But whoever installed this was smart. When our technical guys try to trace the address, it’s bouncing them all over the place. Russia. China. India. The guy was good at covering his tracks. Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’re not going to have much success.”
“Why?” she demanded. This was getting old. She wanted answers.
“Two things. First of all, the malware was pretty sophisticated. The technical guys knew what they were looking for and they had trouble finding it on the machine. Two, he has to assume that once he sent the pictures, we’d eventually find our way to your laptop. By now, he’s probably covering his cyber-tracks. Your information is probably being routed through some old lady’s desktop in Indonesia and she’s as innocent of the crime as you are.”
Meg shook her head. “I hate computers.”
Cruz nodded. “Me, too.”
She mostly used her laptop for personal reasons. Online shopping, reading the Wall Street Journal, perusing new recipes. What had someone hoped to gain by tracking that kind of activity? “How did this program get on my computer?”
Cruz ran a hand through his long hair. His face was very serious. “That much we know. You didn’t open some random email and install this. Somebody who had access to your laptop downloaded the software.”
She didn’t know if that was supposed to make her feel better or worse that she hadn’t been fooled by some slick cyber-creep. “How long?” she asked. “How long has this been going on?”
“For almost six months,” Myers said.
She mentally reviewed the termination dates of Hawkins, Looney and Blakely. Six months ago they’d all still been working at the hotel. Oscar Warren had also been there. She looked at Cruz’s face and knew that he’d already gone through the same exercise.
“Where do you normally keep your laptop?” Detective Myers asked.
She shrugged. “At home, usually. I bring it to work occasionally.”
“When it’s at work, do you have it with you? Do you take it to meetings?”
“No. I leave it in my office. I’ll use it during my lunch hour. Sometimes I’ll stop at a coffee shop on my way home and jump on the public Wi-Fi. I don’t see how this could have happened, I have a password on it.”
“There are programs that can break a password in seconds. Child’s play for somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
“Charlotte would have had access,” Cruz said. “Because of his relationship with her, Hawkins probably did, too. You said that you’d come back to the office and he’d be hanging around.”
She nodded.
“And Looney was in Maintenance and Blakely in Security. Both with access to a master key that could have been used to unlock the office when both you and Charlotte were away.”
Her head was spinning. “Yes.”
“Oscar Warren?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We didn’t give keys to any of the people from A