Page 64 of Maneater (The Mavens #1)

FORTY-THREE

JOSIE

“Welcome back, lovebirds,” Rory says when we walk in, and I smile at her, my body light with happiness. As much as I hate to admit it, she was right: I so very much needed an afternoon with no work, without having to dig into the minds of people. Now I’m refreshed and excited to close this case.

Finding a huge piece of evidence helped.

“How was your afternoon off?” she asks.

“Amazing, actually. We have a discovery,” I say, reaching into Rowan’s bag.

She looks at us, exasperated. “I don’t want to know about your sexcapades, Josie.”

Rowan chokes on his spit before coughing, but I ignore him.

“No sexcapades, you freak.” My fingers wrap around the equipment before I grip it and lift it out. “But how about a camera?”

“Is that…?” she whispers, eyes wide as she takes in the charred camera in my ha nds.

“The camera from the rental room? I hope so.”

“Oh my god,” she whispers, then reaches for it. “Where did you find it?”

I hand the wrapped camera to her. “Luck, really,” I admit.

“We went to some hidden beach, and when we walked back, it just happened to catch the sun. I went to look at it, and there it was. The hikes were cancelled after the booby traps, so I’m assuming our culprit hid it there, thinking no one would be out that way for a bit. ”

Rory moves across the room, heading to the table, lays out the towel, and then retrieves her small tool kit.

“I hate to do this, but I do have a call in”—Rowan looks at his watch—“forty-five minutes, and I need to look slightly less like a beach bum than I do right now.”

I smile wide before nodding. “Go, go. We’re going to be working on this,” I say, tipping my head toward Rory, knowing I’ll probably spend the time she’s working on it to go through more files.

“Keep me updated?” he asks.

“Of course. Let me know when you’re done.”

He grins. “I’ll bring dinner.”

“Good, we’re going to be here all night,” Rory says, unwrapping the camera and reaching for her toolkit. She looks like a kid on Christmas and doesn’t even bother to look up at Rowan. “Now go. Josie has files to look through as well, and you’re distracting her.”

“I do?” She looks up at the time with a glare.

“I segmented the files for us to go through while you were gone. I’m good, but I can’t comb through them all that quickly.”

I nod, slightly relieved she’s going to let me help instead of hunkering down with eight energy drinks and zero sleep, as I’ve seen her do before.

“Okay, well, I’ll let you ladies get to it,” Rowan says, then steps closer to press a kiss to my lips. “Let me know if you need anything.” And then he’s out the door.

We sit in near silence for long hours while Rory references manuals and videos to determine the best way to open the camera without damaging any evidence.

Unfortunately, with the fire, there were no prints as we had expected, and some of the actual camera casings were melted to the interior.

This means Rory has to get creative in opening it without damaging the internal mechanisms.

Meanwhile, I’ve been scanning carefully through the dates and times Rory took out of the system, trying to find something our suspect didn’t wipe, some kind of evidence they didn’t carefully cover up.

Finally, we catch a break in hour two, and I let out a soft, excited breath. Rory’s head snaps up to me, the microscope glasses she’s wearing making her look ridiculous and bug-eyed. She knows what that sound is, though. “What did you find?”

I shake my head, unsure. “I don’t…I don’t know,” I say, turning the computer toward her as she takes the glasses off before I hit play.

It’s a clip of an employee looking in a room while in a hallway, clearly panicking and then running in a different direction.

After a few more clicks, I show him running into one of the many hidden storage closets, though unfortunately, I don’t think it’s one we bugged, inevitably.

He walks out nearly ten minutes later, a bag slung over his shoulder and a phone to his ear.

“Who is that?” she asks, staring at the screen.

“I think it’s Carter,” I say, flipping through the photos we’ve taken of employees, then turning it toward her. ”He’s an assistant manager in landscaping.”

“He’s the one who said Tanya was ruining the job he got her by hooking up with Daniel, right?” I nod. “But why is he running away? Was he scared?” Rory asks. “When is this clip from?”

I turn to her fully and smile.

“I think he might be our security breach,” I say.

“What?” Rory asks, but she’s already shifting the camera to the side and grabbing her computer, and starting to type.

“About three minutes after this, someone hacked into the camera feeds to erase the previous footage and create an inconspicuous loop after the rat incident. This was from one of the side halls, one that wasn’t wiped.

Can you check where he was before and after every incident? ” I ask, my pulse pounding.

“On it,” Rory says, then starts typing, two screens running at the same time.

Over her shoulder, I see that she has set up a system to track the keycard usage before and after it is used.

Then, she inputs the times and areas into another screen, which should pull details from the cameras that Rowan gave us access to.

Then she moves to her other computer and opens up a tab to run a background check on him.

There, we find out he’s twenty-five, has an older brother, and has lived in Florida his whole life. He started at Daydream when it was opened, so his story of getting Tanya the job aligns with the timeline.

“He has a juvie record,” Rory mumbles to herself.

“He does?”

“It’s sealed, but let me…” She scares me with her talent, but somehow, she cracks into the system just moments before reading aloud.

“Oh fuck. When he was seventeen, he hacked into the school records to change his grade. He was caught, but the school didn’t press charges. Just made note of it, essentially.”

“So he has the skill and the ability,” I say, and she gives me a grim nod.

Her other computer dings, indicating it has finished its search, and she shifts her focus.

More typing and clicking occur before she sits back in her chair, crossing her arms on her chest. “I’d have to compare more closely, but from what it looks like to me, his breaks coincide with either right before or right after each sabotage was reported. ”

My pulse spikes, adrenaline races through my system, but I’m still able to think logically and tactically.

“He’s visible right as they occur, so he’s not the one actually doing the incidents?” Rory asks as she pulls my computer closer to her, speeds through the clip for the thousandth time, then pauses and zooms in on Carter’s face.

“No, I don’t think it’s him. See his face when he saw the mice? He looks absolutely petrified and panicked. He didn’t know that was happening.”

“But he’s definitely involved. Maybe he’s covering up for our true culprit?” I ask.

“Or he’s probably working with someone,” Rory says.

“Working with someone?”

“Either way, I think we’ve got our security leaks, it seems. An accomplice,” I whisper.

“But why? And for whom?” Rory asks aloud. Not knowing the answers to that is really starting to piss me off. “Fuck, I wish we could just grab him and put him into a room and question him.”

I shake my head, knowing that’s not the right tactic for a case like this one.

“No. Not yet. At best, he is the mastermind, with someone else completing the tasks for him and covering it up. At worst, he’s being used by someone, and if we go after him, we lose our real target.

We need to have all angles of this to nail it.

Right now, it’s far too circumstantial. Plus, he looked shocked when he saw the mice, so my gut says he’s trying to save someone.

A friend or a lover…” I sigh, knowing that while we’re getting closer, it’s not close enough.

“I’ll see what I can find while you work on that?” I ask, tipping my head toward the charred cameras she’s holding like a baby.

“Well, actually,” she says with a smile. “Right before you found this, I almost….” She moves back to the camera and fiddles for another moment before lifting something in the air with tweezers. It’s surprisingly clean and in one piece, and my excitement ratchets up.

This is my favorite part of the case. When it all starts to fall into place. When I can feel just how close we are to solving this case once and for all. My body feels electric, supercharged, and excited.

“Is that—” I start, but Rory cuts me off with a pride-filled smile.

“A microchip that hopefully holds the footage of the last moments of the rental building before it was torched? Yeah.”

“Oh my god,” I whisper excitedly. Rory smiles and pulls out a chip to slide the smaller one in before putting it into her computer. I hold my breath as we wait for the computer to process it, and then a screen appears with the files.

“There’s a recording of the last ten minutes before it was burned down,” she whispers, pointing to the last file on the screen.

It looks like they’re saved in thirty-minute increments, but this one was cut short.

She clicks it, and we watch. It’s dark, but night vision cameras help us see.

I smile when a turtle passes the screen, and Rory lets out a laugh, remembering how Rowan caught us the first time we went to check the place out.

And then we see it.

There’s no sound, unfortunately, but in the corner of the screen, a man in all black and a mask moves toward the shack, clearly on a mission.

Then he turns, throwing his hands into the air.

Our guy takes another step, and another face comes into view, this one not covered.

Clearly, they’re arguing. It’s a woman in a white tank top and black biker shorts, carrying a large, long-handled tote with a gym logo prominently displayed on the side.