“Oh . . . I’d say so. But let’s wait for Doug. He’ll be here in five. He likes to do the grand reveals.”
“Okay. Five minutes.” I hug my body tight and focus my energy on what Doug may have found, and not on the dust particles caught in the beam of daylight shining in through the tiny basement window. A window that I doubt I could fit through, should I ever need to escape.
I much prefer Zac’s dungeon in the dark of night, I decide, taking deep breaths to quell the rising panic. I haven’t had an attack since the day in that elevator with Jace. That day . . . I guess I have a few secrets to take to my grave, too. I can’t very well judge Celine for her decisions, especially when they were borne out of financial desperation, and the only excuse I have for what happened that day is insanity.
And what’s my excuse for carrying on as I did with Grady?
“You know, if you’re meeting clients here, you should probably hire a cleaning lady.”
Zac snorts. “No one comes in here except Doug.”
I frown. “I’m not Doug.”
“You’re right. You’re taller, and slightly less bossy.” He reaches into his bag of Cheetos—breakfast of champions—and grabs a handful. “I did some research on you.”
I glare at him, suddenly on high alert. “What kind of research?”
“The legal kind.” He grins. “I already did the other kind earlier, for Doug. You know, you could be using your money and power and beauty for evil.”
“Yeah. I guess?”
He licks the cheesy powder off his fingers. “It’s nice to see that you aren’t. It’s rare.”
I smile. This is Zac’s way of paying me a compliment. “Why do you do this, anyway? Sit in this dirty little tech cave all day as Doug’s monkey.”
Through a mouthful, he explains, “Because I’m good at it and he pays me well.”
I grab the nearby stool and take a seat. “You mean I pay you well.”
He merely smirks in response.
“I’m sure you could be doing this kind of stuff somewhere brighter? More social?”
“Yeah, well . . . My mom’s blind and getting up there in age. At least this way I’m around when she needs me.” He says it almost reluctantly, as if he doesn’t want to admit that he has a human side to him.
I study the wall of monitors in front of us. “It really is scary what you can do in this room of yours.”
His eyes watch a series of code churning on the far top screen. A jumble of letters and numbers and symbols that mean nothing to me but I’m sure do to him. “All I’m doing is finding the weakness. There’s always at least one. Humans, usually. Humans and their inherent stupidity, using passwords that a ten-year-old following a hacker’s script can guess, humans clicking on emails from people they don’t recognize, humans not doing their research and loading malware into their computer. Sure, it’s not all that. I spend hours, or days—or even weeks sometimes—writing code and breaking systems.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s fun. It’s a challenge.”
“But at least you do all that with good intentions, right? I’m sure you could be using that big brain for pure evil.”
“If it weren’t for Doug, I might be. He keeps me too busy to get into trouble.”
“Say his name and he shall appear,” I joke, spotting Doug’s bald head in the camera a second before the loud buzz of the doorbell.
Zac climbs out of his chair and jogs up the stairs to unlock the door, moving surprisingly fast for his size.
Two sets of feet stomp back down.
“You’re here. Good.” Doug—with heavy bags lining his eyes, as if he hasn’t slept all night—shoves a tall caramel latte into my hand. It’s the only beverage I buy at Starbucks.
I frown. “How did you know I like—”
“My connection at the precinct came back to me on the prints we pulled from that tin.”
My concern over the coffee is quickly forgotten. “So he has a criminal record?”
“No. The prints came back clean.”
My shoulders sag with relief, even as my disappointment swells. Finding a criminal record would have felt like a step closer to proving that Celine didn’t kill herself, but I’d prefer it be someone other than Grady who did it. “Then why are we here?”
“Because of sheep.” Doug kicks the stool I was just sitting on, and it rolls across the dingy gray concrete toward me. “Get comfortable. Zac?”
Zac wipes his hands on his pants—they’re streaked in orange by now—and then begins punching in keys. The monitors flip to new screens, one by one. The last one fills with a student ID card from MIT and a much younger picture of Grady—maybe in his early twenties.
“You found him.”
“James Grady Hartford Sr. runs Hartford Wool, a small but successful wool textiles business in Ipswich, England.”
“Sheep.” Now I understand. The name “Hartford” rings a bell. That wool blanket that Grady uses on the rooftop is one of his family’s products. He said his family was into sheep farming. They’re obviously into much more than that.
“He married an American by the name of Dorothy Haynes, and together they had two children. Their oldest, James Grady Hartford Junior, was born February 2nd, 1985 in New Jersey, where he lived with his mother for the first six months of his life, until they both moved back to Ipswich.”
So Grady’s last name isn’t even Grady. “What about the other child?”
“Another son, who died of a drug overdose in 2009.”
At least he wasn’t lying to me about that.
“James Grady Hartford Jr. spent his childhood in England and then, using his dual citizenship, moved to America. He attended MIT for two years before dropping out, and moving back to England.”
“MIT?” I frown. “That’s one of the top universities in the world.” How did Grady end up fixing toilets and replacing screws in Little Italy?
“Your super has a big brain,” Zac murmurs, waggling his eyebrows knowingly at me.
And another lightbulb goes off. “And he uses it for evil.”
“I called a connection in London and found out that James Grady Hartford Jr. was once under investigation for cybercrimes, back when he was just twenty,” Doug says. “They suspected him of building a back door into a government system and then exposing it to prove their vulnerability. They were never able to make it stick.”