He Will Be My Ruin

by K. A. Tucker

  “Did you find anything good on Grady?” I was in a cab and on my way to Zac’s within two minutes of getting a call from Doug.

  “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.”

  “So he’s a hacker.”

  Zac chuckles. “A hacker? No. I’m a hacker. James Hartford is a fucking god. He goes by the name GenerationInvasion online. I’ve heard him speak at Def Con—that’s a hacker convention. He’s broken some of the biggest—”

  “Yes. He’s a hacker.” Doug glares at Zac. “He enjoys breaching company networks and charging them big money to redesign and fortify their systems. He runs a business under his online name.”

  Another monitor changes to a simple—and unimaginative—website. “Kind of basic, isn’t it?” Villages United’s website has more personality than this. I’d expect someone with his technical prowess to do better.

  “It’s a me-myself-and-I operation. Some people have accused him of attacking systems anonymously and then strolling in to save the day, setting it up so companies feel it necessary to hire him. Either way, he’s made himself quite a name for solving security issues. A name he doesn’t seem to go by in everyday life for whatever reason, seeing as he’s adopted the name ‘James Grady’ and even has a credit card registered in that name.”

  “That’s why I didn’t make the connection between his screen name and who he is right away,” Zac adds.

  Thank God I’m sitting, because my knees are shaking. “So, he would probably know how to hack into Celine’s camera.”

  Zac snorts. “In his sleep. Her camera, her computer. Everything.”

  “You said she wasn’t very tech-saavy. She c
ould have asked him to help set the camera up in the first place. Makes it even easier for him to get into the system,” Doug says.

  Zac’s heavy almost-unibrow arches. “He could have been watching her for months, for all we know.”

  Which means Grady could have been the one watching the night Jace came over, somehow figured out who he was, and seen an opportunity for blackmail.

  My stomach sinks. “But why be a building super when he has this company? And why would he watch her like that? Who does these things?”

  “Someone who had serious affection for the pretty tenant downstairs?” Doug must see the distress in my face—he’s figured out what kind of relationship I had going with Grady—because his harsh tone softens just slightly. “But we’re just spitballing here. We need to play out all the possible scenarios. Zac can’t get into his system remotely.”

  “Fort Knox,” Zac confirms. “Ain’t happening from the outside.”

  “But it got me thinking about Grady and Celine and the connection to Vanderpoel, from her diary. Zac started doing his thing.”

  “I thought to myself, if I were stalking a chick . . .”

  I cringe at Zac’s verb choice. Though, if Grady was monitoring Celine through her camera, then there isn’t a better word for it than that.

  “. . . I’d be looking to run into her every chance I could, and make her think all these coincidences must add up to the universe’s grand scheme for me and her. I’ve already got the perfect connection at home—she’s only a floor below me, I can watch her in her apartment, I have keys to get into her apartment if I need to—but I need more. So I find a reason to be in her building. A legit reason, because I want her to know that I’m there. And what am I good at? Breaking into company systems.” Zac blows up the testimonial page of Grady’s website.

  My heart sinks.

  There’s the missing connection.

  There’s the reason Celine wrote about running into Grady in her office building the same day she ended up sleeping with him for the first time.

  CHAPTER 38

  Celine

  July 16, 2015

  I smile at the middle-aged lady and take my place on the other side of the elevator, hiding my disappointment that it’s not Jace riding with me. I’ve gone months at a time without seeing him around the building. Of course I’m not going to share an elevator with him a mere hour after running into him at Hollingsworth.

  We travel up in silence, stopping several times to let people off on their floors. I keep my eyes ahead, feeling the glances from men as they get on. Although it’s something I’ve become used to, I’m still not comfortable being stared at like that.

  The doors open on my floor and I step out.

  And I stop short, in surprise.

  It takes me a moment of gawking at him—his typical jeans and T-shirt replaced by a suit, his scruff trimmed and his hair gelled back in a dark, loose wave—to accept that I’m not mistaken and this is in fact Grady, the same guy who I run into in the hallways of my apartment building on a semi-regular basis. We seem to have the same mail pickup and laundry schedule, and he’s always fixing something for Ruby. “Hey. What are you doing here?” At my place of work.

  His hazel eyes crinkle with his smile. “Fixing your computer system. You guys were hacked a couple weeks ago.”

  I frown. “Really? You know how to do that?”

  Grady chuckles. “Yeah. It’s kind of a side business for me.”

  “Wow, that’s . . .” My eyes trail over his appearance again.

  He looks really different in a suit. Really attractive. It feels like I’m actually seeing him for the first time.

  And if a company like Vanderpoel has hired him to fix their system, he must be really good at it. “That’s impressive. Do you do this for a lot of companies?”

  “Just a few, here and there . . .” He sighs. “I’m not really into the corporate world.”

  “But you could do really well. You wouldn’t have to—” I cut myself off before I say, fix toilets and trap mice.

  He knows what I was getting at. “I like doing the building management stuff. It’s easy, low-stress, lets me work with my hands. That’s what I like. This is just easy money for me.”

  My disappointment swells. Not very motivated is more like it.

  The elevator doors open again and Vanderpoel employees filter out, forcing me to step closer to Grady. He doesn’t back up. “So, how long will you be here?”

  “Just the afternoon. But do me a favor and don’t mention it to Ruby, or anyone else in our building. The owner’s weird about me working another job. I kind of promised him that I wouldn’t.”

  I wink. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Maggie

  December 15, 2015

  “I think it’s safe to say we have enough proof that Grady was paying Celine for sex,” I mutter. And she enjoyed it, based on her diary, so it makes sense that she’d agree to it on a regular basis. Hell, I was doing it on a regular basis—for free—because I enjoyed it with him. Now the very idea makes me want to vomit. “But do we think he took the vase, too?” Where does that play into this? It has to play in, somewhere.

  “Well, I did find this.” Zac scrolls through the company info page. “See this engineering company here? It’s based in Beijing and owned by Jin Chou, one of the richest men in China. Grady did some contract work for Chou’s company back in 2011, and then again in 2013, only that was for Chou’s private home. The guy obviously trusts him.”

  “So the guy is Chinese. Not exactly a smoking gun for art theft,” I say.

  Zac waves a dismissive hand. “What’s interesting about Chou is that it’s rumored he’s involved in black market trade. Mainly iPhone rip-offs that are sold to India and Thailand. If I were a guy like Grady, who got his hands on a major Chinese art find like this and was afraid to sell it out in the open in case someone started asking questions, the first thing I’d do is call up my rich Chinese buddy who likes to make money and probably doesn’t care about going through regular channels to do it, and say, ‘Hey Jin Chou, how should I sell this thing? I’ll split the money with you.’ ”

  I open my mouth, but he cuts me off. “And Jin Chou would say, ‘Holy shit, sell it to me because then I can turn around and taunt Li Jie with it.’ ” Zac hits a few keys and a face shows up on another monitor, of an unsmiling Asian man in a charcoal-gray suit. “This is the guy who bought the twin vase with the phoenix on it, back in ninety-six. Another obscenely rich Chinese guy, who owns a communications company. And both Chou and Jie are members of the same private member’s club in Beijing.”

  “Huh.” Maybe it’s just me wanting it to be true, but that definitely is a connection. I look to Doug for his opinion and find him giving me that knowing nod. “Two degrees of separation between Grady and the man who, arguably, would want that vase the most. Of anyone in the world. That’s something.”

  Jesus. What if Celine did tell Grady about the vase—about how valuable it could be—and he decided to get rid of her so he could take it? Or maybe she didn’t need to tell him. He probably was monitoring her computer—like everything else to do with her—and read her blog post.

  While I ponder this, Doug drags a whiteboard easel over and turns it around to unveil a mess of scribbled handwriting in orange and blue markers. A vertical line splits the board into two, the larger half marked “Prime Suspect” across the top, the narrow half labeled “Other Suspects” with names, possible motives, and question marks in boxes. They’re there because a good investigator doesn’t entirely dismiss them until he knows he can.

  But if we’re being honest, this board is all about Grady.

  “So here’s the best possible scenario, based on what the diary and Jace told us, and what we think we know about Grady. Plus a little bit of conjecture.” He starts at the top, where it says “July.” “Jace and Celine meet at Hollingsworth, by chance. Celine also meets James Grady in the Langham, for paid sex. We
are going to assume, based on Grady’s technical abilities, and the fact that he was very likely invading Celine’s personal life on multiple levels, that this meeting wasn’t a coincidence. If the eighty-one-year-old neighbor pegged her moonlighting career, you can bet he did, too. He’s likely been watching her for months, monitoring her phone backup and her computer, spying on her through that lobby camera. Maybe he knew about her mother’s health situation, and how desperate Celine was getting for money. He figured out who Larissa Savoy was and called her, asking for a pretty Hispanic woman. Maybe he even hacked into Larissa’s life, just enough to have a client referral name to throw out.”

  “He’s that good,” Zac confirms, his face showing his awe.

  “Based on Celine’s written records, escorting was a part-time thing, only once or twice a week, mainly on weekends. She had a bad experience near the end of July and quit working for Larissa entirely. Maybe she wrote about it in the diary that’s missing. Maybe Grady read it while she was out. He doesn’t want to share her anyway, so he offers her a chance to still make money while feeling safe, and of course she takes it, because she’s a young, beautiful woman and he’s a young, attractive man and she’d rather be sucking his dick than that of some sweaty sixty-year-old stranger. Okay, fine, that was a bit harsh—” Doug holds a hand up to silence me before I chastise him.

  “But why would he want to pay for it? He’s attractive. He’d have no issues finding someone else.” I know that for a fact.

  Doug’s eyebrows spike and he says nothing, as if waiting for my wits to start working.

  “Because he doesn’t want anyone else. And because he couldn’t catch her interest otherwise. He probably already tried.” Jace’s guess isn’t so crazy after all.

  “Bingo. She doesn’t want the blue-collar apartment super.”

  “He also isn’t blond,” I mumble to myself, though I’m guessing it had nothing to do with that and everything to do with his perceived earning potential and future ambitions. Celine dreamed of a life of financial comfort, and she admired men with drive and goals.