Page 40 of Maneater (The Mavens #1)
TWENTY-SEVEN
JOSIE
“What’s going on?” I ask as I enter the room, noting my partner is already there on her computer.
I spent a minute alone in the quiet office fixing my clothes and, admittedly, looking around for anything of use, but it seemed like an unused office that held nothing.
Once I confirmed that, I walked out of the room and headed right back to our suite.
“A lot,” Rory says with a smile. “There was a break-in in one of the rooms.”
My eyes widen as I take in her words. “What? A break-in ?”
“Not long after you disappeared, I did, too. I placed a bug in the staff room next to where the party was, since I figured I could pretend I was drunk and lost if someone caught me in there. Thank God for that, because some alert must have gone out, and the party broke up. Several employees went to the room to gossip. From what I can tell, it was a high-roller repeat client whose room was broken into.” She pauses like whatever she’s going to say next is important, and I brace.
“And the cameras went out for five minutes.”
“Like the fire,” I whisper, sitting on the arm of the couch beside Rory, whatever buzz of the night had been washing away. “So it was planned?”
She shakes her head. “The cameras being down wasn’t scheduled this time.”
My eyes widen once more. “So someone did it intentionally?”
She shrugs. “I’m just going by what I’ve heard in the break room and in the pool house. They say the feed looped previous footage for five minutes during the break-in, so the security didn’t realize.”
“The employees are talking about it in the pool house?”
“Yeah, the maintenance crew was doing their night tasks and gossiping.”
Not for the first time, I’m grateful for Rory’s decision to put a bug in there.
“We need to put more in the break rooms,” I mumble, contemplatively.
Rory nods, though we both know if it were that easy, we would just do it.
When she broke into the security control room, we almost blew our cover by Rowan showing up.
I was able to distract him, but it’s clear he knows something is going on, but hasn’t figured it out yet. For now, I’d like to keep it that way.
“The police scanners say nothing was taken from the room, but I can’t confirm or deny that.”
‘Nothing taken?” I ask, confused. “You said it was a high-roller client?”
“Yeah. Some tech bro with a lot of zeros behind his net worth.”
“There had to be at least something in there worth money. Why not take anything?”
She shrugs. “My guess is it’s just sabotage. Not them trying to do anything more than, in the grand scheme of things, hurt the reputation, the safety, and the trust in the organization.”
I nod because that makes sense, even if a part of me knows we’re missing something important. I just can’t see it yet.
“The cameras went out, and this time it wasn’t scheduled. It’s safe to assume, I would think, that it has to be someone in the security office who has something to do with this?”
“I’d say either someone in security is our guy, or he has an accomplice. Why else would that be happening? Someone with skills and experience is the only one who could feasibly short the cameras like that. I’m not sure I could do it just yet. It took me a full week to get into those feeds.”
“I want to get to know them a bit, and anyone who has access to that. Can we see it, and who went into that room in the past, say, forty-eight hours?”
“You mean besides me?” Rory asks with a laugh, and I return it, but still she nods. “Yes, I’m already running a search for it, as well as any coding I might be able to find that would lead to how it was shut off and then turned back on. I’m not sure if it was real-time or a scheduled loop.”
I nod.
“Now, while I’m doing this, tell me what happened,” she instructs. “After Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome dragged you off.”
I feel my cheeks flame. I suddenly feel shy, which is so wildly out of character for me. I tell myself it’s because I’ve never done this before, gotten involved while on the job, but deep down, I know it’s because it involves Rowan .
“What do you mean?”
Rory gives me a head-to-toe look before smiling wide and shaking her head, her fingers still moving on her keyboard like some kind of robot.
“Did you get laid?”
“No,” I say, my fingers moving to my necklace and playing with it, trying to distract myself.
She finally stops typing and continues to look me over, assessing like a mother trying to test her daughter for lies.
“Yeah, you don’t have the I finally got dick look about you.
But you do have…a look.” I continue to stare, knowing that avoiding her eyes will just make her more suspicious, and then, finally, she smiles.
“He made you come? Ate you out?” A blush burns on my cheeks.
“God, I’m good at this.” She laughs before looking back at her computer screen. “Still nothing for him?”
I roll my eyes. “No, he also got the SOS call and had to leave before I could return the favor.”
“Was it good?”
I nod. “ So good, Rory. Like shouldn’t be legal, good.”
She smiles then, and my mind wanders over the last few hours and how it felt like Rowan and I had actually made…progress. He clearly still is suspicious of me, but I think he’s moving past it. But it puts me in such a strange spot, making my stomach tie in knots.
Rory continues to look at me, reading my face before her brows furrow. “What’s wrong? I thought it was good?”
“I like him,” I whisper, almost ashamed to say it.
“Glad you can finally admit it,” Rory says with a laugh.
I look at her, shocked, and she rolls her eyes.
“Oh, come on . I’m not stupid. You’ve been in denial from the jump.
The day you started complaining about some hot, rich guy who crashed your dates, I knew there was something.
The universe clearly got tired of you two taking your sweet time, throwing you two together on the same island. ”
It’s strange to hear my very logical best friend discuss topics like the universe and fate.
“I just…I want to make things clean. Everything is very muddled right now, with work and him and…I don’t know.
Lying to him is really eating at me, but I’m not comfortable sharing who we are or why we’re here with him, not yet, at least. Plus, Annette didn’t tell him for a reason, and we have to respect that.
But I can see…something with him, and I don’t like starting it this way. ”
But I also know it’s what has to be done, and honestly, if I want anything beyond the next week or so with Rowan, there will always be parts of my life that won’t be accessible to him.
I have to be okay with that. It’s why I’ve stayed single for so long: men are not okay with this line of work, especially when it includes flirting with men and having to keep secrets.
Early in my Mavens career, I tried to have a few boyfriends, but it always ended in heartbreak and disaster.
Since then, I’ve kept things easy: engaging the occasional fuck buddy to scratch the itch but keeping them at arm’s length. It’s worked great, but suddenly, the idea of it makes a distinct loneliness that I’ve even hidden from my subconscious impossible to ignore.
I want a person , and I’m starting to understand I want that with Rowan.
“If he’s the right one, he’ll be fine with it,” Rory says softly, and I nod, knowing she’s right. I won’t give up this career I love so much for a man . Another beat passes before she speaks again. “You know you have to tell Gabriel, right?”
I sigh and nod. “Yeah.” I look out the window at the blue waters crashing on the shore, and for not the first time, I wish I were on a real vacation.
God, after this assignment, maybe that’s what I’ll do.
“That can be a tomorrow task, you know? For tonight, can we just…change the subject? Talk about the case instead of my imploding love life, if you can even call it that? Actually,” I say, remembering what I snagged.
“I got you a gift,” I say with a small smile, waving the keycard in the air, trying to ignore the niggling of guilt that runs through me once more at the idea of stealing from Rowan.
“No way,” Rory says with a wide smile, reaching out for it. I shrug. “Where did you get that?”
I grimace at the reminder before answering.
“I stole it from Rowan. It fell out of his pocket during the…well, you know, and I slid it under my things, then into my pocket without him noticing.”
She stares at me, awestruck, before looking over the card. “Is it universal? Is it coded to him? Can you get into any room with this?”
I shrug. “Not sure. I couldn’t ask specifics without seeming weird.”
“It’s fine, I can use this to find out.” She digs through her luggage, which is filled with equipment, and finds what looks like a credit card swiper.
She plugs it into her computer and grabs the keycard, then opens a new screen and starts typing before scanning the card in the device.
I sit patiently as she works her magic, and a few minutes later, she squints at the screen and smiles wide.
“Josie, I don’t think you realize how much you just gave us. This will let me hack into the entire system.”
“Is that…good?” I ask, half joking, because I never know with Rory.
She glares at me like I’m an idiot. “Yes, it’s good. It means we can see all card entrances and exits for all employee keycards, past and present. Some are assigned to people or account numbers, but it seems like universal cards like this are generic and not linked to anyone in particular.”
“Sounds a bit like a hole in their security,” I grumble, and she nods.
“Trust me, I already have a file created for Annette on all of their weaknesses and how to fix them.”
“Of course you do,” I say with a smile. “You’re nothing if not thorough.
” The heaviness from a few minutes starts to lift as I sit up straighter, grabbing a notebook and pen to start jotting things down.
“Okay, so this has been a productive night. We need to add security personnel to our main list officially. What else do we have?”
“I got a few things at the party,” Rory says. “One, Carter, the kid from landscaping, was absolutely plastered, and he had a lot to say to anyone who would listen.”
“Let me guess, you were all ears?”
She smiles proudly. “Well, of course. It seems he got Tanya her job, and he feels like she’s throwing everything away by hooking up with Daniel.”
“So, we’ve confirmed they have a thing?”
She nods, and my mind moves over the jealous redhead at the pool.
We need to fast-track figuring out who she was, especially if Daniel is hooking up with some other staff member at the resort as well.
“Why would he care about that? And why would that be her throwing her job away? I didn’t see anything in the employee handbook about hooking up with coworkers, though I suppose the GM hooking up with employees wouldn’t be great, but mostly for him, right? ”
“I don’t know. But he also told me that Daniel is the biggest player on the resort, always flirting and breaking hearts.”
I shrug. “I could have called that,” I say with a small laugh.
“Also, the reason the hostess was crying the other day is because she was dating the chef, and they broke things off. Unfortunately, Daniel wouldn’t move her to another restaurant, so she’s stuck working near him all day.”
“Oof, rough,” I grumble. “Though I don’t think that makes either of them a suspect, really. Unless she’s mad at Daniel and wants to make him look bad? But this seems like a lot of work to go through because you’re stuck working near your ex.”
“Agreed, but it’s good to have on hand.”
I nod again.
“Who wasn’t at the party?” I ask, flipping the notebook and jotting down all the people we saw. We met so many people there; it was the perfect place to get to know the staff. Though, even we couldn’t fully foresee another sabotage happening while we were there.
We each start rattling off names, and Rory begins to sort through the photos she took on her phone, pretending to take selfies with new friends, before cross-checking each person to see if we can find where they were before and after the party.
Then we pull out our list of all of the resort employees who were on the clock and use our newer access to the cameras to track them all.
There is a third list of employees who were neither working nor at the party, although none of them overlap with our primary suspect list. Still, we push them onto our secondary list just to keep track of them.
“I think we need to go to the spa,” I say.
“Ah, what a sacrifice this job is,” Rory says with a smile that I return.
“I want to see who we can talk to there. Maybe we can find something out about Tanya?”
She nods. “We should also try and find the break room there, see if we can bug it.” She starts clicking and clacking before she smiles. “Done. Two spa appointments at three tomorrow.”
“Perfect,” I say with a smile, looking through the other activities over her shoulder. “I’m going to hit up the Pilates class at noon.”
“Oh?”
“The guy I was dancing with runs it, and he was very chatty before I got dragged away.” We exchange a smile. “I’d like to get a handle on him, see what he might know, how he acts on the job.”
She nods. “Okay, perfect. I want to do a bit more digging on this,” Rory said, lifting the keycard, “tonight, but if you want to go to bed early, that’s totally fine with me.”
“No, no,” I say with a shake of my head, reaching for the file of papers and photos we’ve been accumulating. “I’m going to keep going through these, see if I can find anything.”
Like I could sleep right now with the adrenaline running through my system, both from my time with Rowan and the pro.
“We’re close,” Rory whispers.
I smile, knowing she’s right.