Call Me Killer (13 page)

“Let him in,” Rory said. “I wanna meet this guy.”

I opened the door. If the two hacksters wanted to geek out together, have at it, dudes.

Finlay was a big guy. A bit taller than me. Probably more lean body tissue, given that I'd been slacking off hitting the gym. He had that narrow-eyed toughness that I've always associated with SEALS, Rangers or maybe hardcore intel types.

I wasn't sure which branch he had been, but Sean had hinted Finlay had been some kind of black ops guy. Women found him attractive, especially if they were into danger man.

Rory stood staring at him with her arms folded across her skinny chest. Didn't look as if she found him attractive.

“Where is he?” Finlay had that type of arrogant, commanding voice I'd heard from former military types. Sean could be that kind of asshole when he tried, but Sean had usually been too nice to pull that shit.

Rory stepped forward. Finlay looked right past her, staring at the closed door to my bedroom as if his X-ray vision could melt it. Rory glanced from him to the door and back. Then, grinning, she walked over and threw the door open, revealing the empty room with our rumpled bed.

“I'm not a 'him.' Newsflash: chicks can hack, too.”

He turned his cold stare on her. She didn't look like much, I admit. But she'd grown on me. I noticed for the first time that she was wearing clothes I hadn't seen before. Maybe she'd even combed her hair. How much stuff did she have in that backpack of hers? A week's worth? It's not like there was a mall within walking distance.

“Ah. Cherchez la femme.” Finlay said. He wasn't as surprised to find out the hacker was a girl as she’d expected him to be. “What’s your name?”

“I don't have to answer your questions.”

“You admitting you broke in?” he countered.

“Hell no.”

“I've got you cold.”

“No way. The only machine in the place is whistle-clean.” She gestured to the table where my computer stood. “Check for yourself.”

He laughed. It was not a nice laugh. “I'm not here to threaten you with 20 years in federal prison, little girl. I need you to replicate how you did it. I keep stuff safe for my clients. Nothing's ever impregnable, but I was confident we were close.”

Her turn to laugh. She batted her eyelashes at him and did a dead-on Scarlett O'Hara accent: “Ah'm sure Ah've no idea what you're going on about.”

Finlay moved fast to plant himself right in her face. I moved almost as fast to get between them, but there was no room for that. We shouldered up against each other with Rory, half a head shorter than us both, jammed against the wall.

She snorted. “Hey guys, one at a time. I don't do threesomes.”

Finlay backed off about an inch, saying to me, “Please don't tell me you're fucking this schoolgirl.”

“I'm in college,” said Rory.

Finlay filled his fist with her hair and dragged her over to the nearest wooden chair where he slammed her down.

“Hey!” we both said together. I was about to attack him, surprised by my own rush of protectiveness. Jeez, it was a weakness of mine. Why did I always get so protective of the women in my life?

Well, damn. When had Rory sneaked in as one of the women in my life? Come to think of it, besides my mom, Rory was now the only woman in my life.

“Don't, Griff,” she warned, reading my body language. “Let's see what Tough Guy here has to say.”

“If you're really the hacker, you’re good.” He waited a moment before adding, “But not good enough.”

She bristled, but she didn't argue. “Obviously. You're here, aren't you?”

From one hacker to another, I guess that counted as respect.

“Who are you working for?” he asked her.

“No one.”

Finlay swooped over her like a velociraptor about to take a bite. “I want an answer, bitch.”

Jeez. There were rumors that Finlay had been some sort of terrorist interrogator during his military days. I had no idea if they were true—there were always a lot of silly rumors going around—but he looked and sounded threatening enough.

I wanted to kill him.

Rory didn't seem impressed, though. She stared up at him with guileless eyes and said nothing.

Finlay gave her head a sharp twist, using the grip he still had on her hair. “Let's not force Griff here to bury yet another body in his woods, okay? Talk.”

“That's enough!” I could feel my blood roaring in my ears. I was barely restraining myself from leaping on the guy. “Let her go or the next body in my woods’ll be yours.”

He released her hair and slanted me a look. “I figured as much. You are fucking her.”

“So, wait, clear this up for me, okay?” Rory said, looking curiously between us. “I don't get tortured if he's fucking me? Is that some kind of macho male code?”

If it was a macho male code to ignore her and stare aggressively at each other, we did it. “She's a friend,” I said after several seconds had gone by. “She's trying to prove I didn't kill Hadley. She's not working for anyone.”

“Sounds like she's working for you.” He managed to make this sound nasty.

“Not for pay,” I snapped. “She's a college kid on spring break.”

Finlay gave a short laugh when he heard that. “You have got to be kidding me. She looks like jail bait.”

“I'm almost twenty-one,” she sniffed. “I'm a senior. I don't work for anybody. Why? You offering me a job?”

“I repeat: what's your name, little girl?”

She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. In silence.

He pulled out a cell phone and snapped her picture. She threw her palm up in front of her face. “Not quick enough,” he gloated.

Rory looked upset, surprisingly so. Horrified, even. She snatched at his phone, but he held it over his head.

“Fuck you! Delete that right now.”

Instead, he thumbed some keys. “Sorry, but it's on the server now, babe. You're being checked out even as we speak.”

She was clearly not at all pleased about this. But she quickly adopted a “who the fuck cares” pose. “You'd better have great facial recog software because I don't leave my picture scattered around on the web.”

“I specialize in facial recognition software.”

“Yeah? Then why don't you use it to find Hadley?”

“Hadley's dead.”

“Maybe so. Or maybe she's still alive.” The stare she was giving him was almost as hard as the one he was giving her. “If your resources are as good as you say they are, and if you have the right contacts, you should be able to tap into the NSA's mountain of stolen information and find out if there are any surveillance photos of Hadley anywhere in the world over the past twelve months. Airports, train stations, major cargo shipping ports. That's something I can't do. But I'll bet you can.”

“The girl's nuts,” Connor Finlay said to me.

“Wouldn't the feds have already tried that?” I asked.

“It would be resource-heavy,” he answered, and Rory nodded in agreement.

There was a short silence while we all considered this. Then Rory gave Finlay one of her dazzling smiles and said, “So who do
you
work for? These clients of yours? Are any of them part of the Reef Hill group?”

Moving quickly, Finlay put his fingers around her throat and squeezed. She went pale and I could see panic in her eyes.

I saw red and lost it. I jumped him from behind. Next thing I knew we were both rolling on the floor. Every fucking thing my brother ever taught me roared in me, and the fight was pretty even until Former CIA or whatever dude managed some sort of twist-slam that put me under him with one arm so fucking numb I couldn't move it. Then Rory jumped on us.

“Stop it! Are you both insane? Stop it right now!”

To my surprise, Finlay let me up. He was rubbing his shoulder where I'd initially rammed him. Rory was rubbing her neck and I was trying to get my right arm to work again. The numbness was slowly replaced by tingling.

Finlay bounced to his feet like a dancer. Fuck him, he was in better shape than me. I needed to get back into the gym. Rory was stroking my face, which apparently got smashed, although I didn't even feel it. “Are you okay? Don't you know he grabbed me just to see what you'd do?”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Who or what the fuck was Reef Hill?

Finlay took her hand and pulled her to her feet. He handed her a water bottle that had been sitting on the coffee table, twisting off the cap as he did so. She eyed him warily, but took a swallow, then handed the bottle to me. I pushed it away.

“That's not the only reason,” he said. “How long were you in my databases? How do I know you’re really looking for a woman who’s been dead for a year? There could be all sorts of other reasons for your intrusion. Why the fuck are you researching my clients?”

“I don’t even know who your clients are,” said Rory. She paused. “But I can guess.”

So could I. I’d heard that Finlay was doing well with his computer security business, and I’d also heard that he hung out with Silas Marks and Alec Cranmore. Marks had probably sicced him on us after last night’s altercation in the restaurant. There were wheels within wheels turning here.

I was trying to convince my wired body that there was some reason not to throw this guy out of my house. “If any of your clients have something to do with Hadley, then yeah, we’re researching them,” I said.

“They don’t. Do you seriously imagine the cops haven't been all over that shit?”

I half expected Rory to mention that there were no interviews with Finlay’s billionaires in the police files, but she kept that tidbit to herself.

“So what’s this Reef Hill thing?” she asked.

He looked at me instead of her. “Something that proves your girlfriend here has been sticking her digital fingers into private data. But it’s not relevant. It’s not even important. As far as I know, it’s got nothing to do with Hadley, but it fucking pisses me off when people’s personal files are violated by irresponsible hackers who don’t know what the fuck they’re dealing with.”

“It's a stupid name,” said Rory. “I mean, come on. Who calls themselves Reef Hill? It’s so fucking
obvious
.”

It wasn’t obvious to me. I thought about it, trying to figure out what was so obvious or why Rory had picked up on the name in the first place. She'd mentioned that she was good at pattern recognition, so I tried to picture a pattern.

Once I looked at it that way, it didn’t take me long: “Fuck. Are you kidding me? Hellfire? Is that what you’re talking about?”

Connor gave me a cold stare.

“Reef Hill is an anagram for hellfire.”

Rory beamed at me as if I had just solved an advanced math problem. “Yup, it sure is. Couldn't they come up with something more original?”

When Finlay's blue eyes went even colder, I figured we were right on target.

Rory glanced at me. “Do you know what the Hellfire Club was?”

“I know there’s used to be a kink club in New York City with that name.”

“The original Hellfire Club was an Eighteenth century England rich guys' Black Mass and sex club. It's been inspiring the whips-and-chains crowd for centuries.”

“Fais ce que tu voudras,”
Finlay said. “Do what thou wilt.”

I gave him a look. “French, Finlay? You shittin' me, dude?”

“So is it a private club or what?” Rory asked, ignoring the testosterone raging around her. “I don’t believe it’s irresponsible for me to check it out, considering that Hadley was into some risky erotic practices.” She winked at me, and for a moment I forgot about everything else in my delight at how freaking cute she was when she winked. “Looks like the billionaires are into BDSM.”

“You two are in deep
merde
,” Finlay drawled.

Rory

“I need to talk to you alone,” Finlay said to Griff.

Uh oh. This is the first I heard of Connor Finlay, but he was clearly on top of things. I wonder how much, if anything, he knew about me. “Griff doesn't have any secrets from me.”

But they exchanged one of those “this is man to man, dude” looks so I knew I was about to get kicked out.

“Rory, go outside and investigate his car or something.”

Connor Finlay actually looked alarmed for a moment there. I rolled my eyes and didn’t budge. The only time I obeyed Griff’s orders was when we were both naked.

“Connor knew my brother.”

More male code. Griff had never even mentioned his dead brother to me, but I knew what had happened to him. I found that out on my first day here. In fact, it was probably one of the reasons why I’d initially decided to stick around. I thought it sucked that somebody whose brother had given his life for his country was treated so shabbily by the local cops.

I got it. He’d invoked his dead brother. That meant I had to back off and let the guys do their thing. I hoped they wouldn’t kill each other.

“Fine. I need a shower anyway.” I grabbed my backpack and slammed into the bathroom so they could talk alone.

I took the quickest shower in the history of modern plumbing. I got my hair wet but didn’t wash it. It wasn't dirty anyhow.

Then I left the shower running and ducked thru into Griff’s bedroom, where I pressed my ear to the closed door of the living room.

I suspected I hadn't missed more than a couple of minutes of male posturing.

“—the fuck do you even know anything about this?” Griff was asking Connor.

I was pretty sure I already knew the answer to that. I wasn't surprised when Finlay replied, “Let’s just say I got involved when you two badgered my client over his dinner. Sam—that’s Silas—didn't know who the hell the girl was, but your face has been in the local papers often enough for him to recognize you.”

“So Marks sent you sniffing after us.”

“Actually, I have my own interest in the case.”

“Why? What's it got to do with you?” There was a small silence before he added, “Was Hadley seeing you?”

I didn’t like the sound of Griff’s voice when he asked that. He sounded as if he still cared.

Well, of course he still cared, I reminded myself. Hadley had disappeared and he’d never had any closure. That’s why I was investigating, right? To get him out from under that cloud. To correct an injustice. So he’d be able to put the whole thing behind him and forget her.