“What the holy fuck?” Natalie asked from behind him. “I didn’t put those there. I didn’t. I—”
“I know, Natalie.”
“But… Where did they come from?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
“But they’re right there on the screen now. Where did you find them? How did you even know where to look?”
“They teach you in spy school.”
She stared at him with daggers in her eyes, eyebrows pulled low. And such a glare.
“Tough crowd.” More daggers came his way so he pointed at the screen to get her laser beams focused on something else. “When you delete something, or a lot of somethings, they go to your recycle bin.”
“I know that but I always delete the crap in my recycle bin.”
“But if you didn’t know they were there you wouldn’t know to delete them. Most people don’t even know that much. But then you also have hidden files.”
“Hidden as in how hidden?”
“Say you put a thousand pics of Debbie does the donkey on your hard drive here.”
“Ugh, don’t use the name Debbie, I’m already traumatized enough.” She wiped a hand down her face and left her cheek propped on her palm with her other arm across her abdomen.
“Sorry. Bad call on my part. How about Samantha does…” he glanced again, “the football team.”
“Point made. Continue.”
“Okay, so you can put hundreds and thousands of the most horrible pictures ever onto your system. Put them in a folder and then hide the entire folder. You won’t see them until you get in the properties of the system and tell it to show all hidden files. It can be useful.” He gestured toward the screen. “Or not.”
A knock on the door drew both of their attentions.
Jay stood in the doorway with a backpack on. “Hey. Sorry to interrupt. We’re all done for the day. You want me to lock up?”
“No, don’t worry about it,” Campbell answered, and he could feel Natalie glaring at him. “A few NYC detectives are going to be showing up in a little while.”
“Oh, that sounds less than awesome.”
“Tell me about it,” Natalie added.
“You guys need me to stick around for anything?”
“No,” Natalie answered.
“Yes,” Campbell said at the same time.
“I’m not exactly sure which of those I need to listen to.”
“Just a couple questions on PC safety around here.” Campbell didn’t wait for him to say anything or Natalie to cut him off. He just kept on talking. “Do you guys keep the PC passwords written down anywhere here?”
“No,” Natalie answered.
“Yes,” Jay countered.
“Huh?” Natalie asked.
“You remember after the fire when the investigators were trying to get into one of the files because they suspected that ex-employee of being involved?”
“They needed to get into his computer and we didn’t have the passwords to any of the laptops because why would we.”
“Exactly. So we have the password envelope in the safe.”
“Is it still there?” Campbell wanted to know.
Jay shrugged. “That I know of. We haven’t needed it so it should still be sealed in there. Really wish I would have remembered it the other day when Greta had trouble getting into her system last week. I had to run through the names of each of her six hundred cats to get into the system when she couldn’t remember the password after her vacation. Remembered the list right after I got in. Lot of good it did me.”
“Natalie, why don’t you go with Jay and see what you can find while I call Wyatt and get him and one of his geek squad people down here. Bring the password list in here if it’s opened or not. Don’t touch it though.” He pulled out his wallet, extracting a pair of tweezers from it. “Use these, and grab a baggie from the break room and put it in there.”
“You have tweezers. In your wallet.” Natalie took them from him and eyed him sideways.
“Doesn’t everybody? And Natalie?” He stopped her halfway to her door. “You’re going to need a new password.”
“Why? Why all the talk about passwords? I know what my password is.”
“As does someone else, I’d say.” Campbell said so she could bounce it around in her brain. “One of the things I just checked was the log of attempted and successful logins. The only ones here for the last two weeks have been yours.”
“Couldn’t they have planted the pictures earlier than that?”
“Sure,” he conceded. “Except all of the dates on the shit-ton of pictures are from twelve days ago.”
“Ugh.”
“What pictures?” Jay asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Hey, Jay? Since you did it recently, where do I go to change her password?”
He closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the ceiling. “Control panel, user accounts, and then change password.”
Campbell got right to the spot and left it open. “It’ll be ready for you when you get back in here with your new password,” he called to Natalie as they moved down the hall.
The volume of her answers grew quieter the farther away they walked. “Fine. And don’t think I don’t notice how you’re just doing stuff and we’re not discussing it.”
“That’s true but you know I’m right so you can’t exactly argue.”
“I’m a girl. Sure I can. Logic normally doesn’t make a big difference in that argument.”
“Isn’t that the truth. Chicks can argue about anything.”
“You’re totally wrong.”
Campbell paused. “Are you just being argumentative now to be funny?”
“No comment.”
He smiled and picked up his cell to call Wyatt.
* * * * *
Hours later, Wyatt and one of his IT people named Eric were still hard at it, trying to find anything definitive about the pictures and who could have put them on there. Natalie had crashed on one of the couches in the next office, her adrenaline finally dropping out, leaving her exhausted. He probably had a bit to do with her state as well since he hadn’t let her sleep much the night before.
Campbell hung up his cell after being on a call with Clay to fill him in on what had been going on. He didn’t really have much to share, which was pissing him the fuck off.
“Clay’s up to speed.”
“Which isn’t saying much,” Wyatt added as he watched over Eric’s shoulder. “We’re probably going to have to take the laptop. We’re not finding anything much that could help us.”
Campbell wiped a hand down his face, exhaustion settling into his bones. “That’s gonna go over well with Natalie.”
“I know.”
“Have you found anything that could help? Anything at all?”
“Nothing much. Several layers deep we found one name attached to the properties of one of the pictures, but it means nothing to me. We’ll run forensics on all of the images and see what else we can come up with.”
“And what about the name?”
“We’ll put it through all seventeen of our identification databases and see if we get a match anywhere. It’s a long shot but it’s all we have to go on right now, which is more than we had this morning.”
“What’s the name so I can run it through my avenues, too?”
“Braden Currings.”
A gasp from the doorway filled Campbell’s stomach with acid. Natalie stood there, frozen with a hand over her mouth. Pale.
“Who is that, Natalie?”
She swallowed several times, and Campbell wondered if she were trying not to puke. “The father of my baby.”
“What baby?” Campbell asked her, but she didn’t answer. She looked lost somewhere in the past where he couldn’
t reach her. Moving off the chair he sat in, he approached her and cupped her cheek, bringing her face around to look at him. “What baby?” He knew there was a whole hell of a lot more to her story than the simple pared-down version he’d gotten earlier.
“The one they forced me to give up for adoption.”
“Who’s they?”
“My parents.”
Chapter Thirteen
Natalie
It felt like the walls were closing in on her.
But Campbell kept them away. He kept her grounded, safe, while she tried to process through the shock.
“What happened with Braden, Natalie?”
The shame she felt nearly consumed her. “I was so naïve. I fell in love or so I thought. He was older by almost a decade. An associate of my father’s.” She shook her head at the mistakes she’d made when she was so young and stupid. Having to relive it in front of Campbell was bad enough, but Wyatt and Eric wrecked her. “He seduced me, I think, but I’d had a crush on him for what seemed like forever. He was older, sophisticated, knew what he was doing.” Or so she thought.
She wandered away from Campbell, needing some distance to continue. “He got me pregnant accidentally during our brief six-month affair.”
“How old were you?” Campbell asked. His hands were in tight fists, and she almost didn’t want to answer. He’d find out anyway, and she decided telling him was better than the alternative.
“Seventeen.”
“That’s statutory rape. Why didn’t your parents press charges?”
“The scandal. Are you kidding me? I got pregnant out of wedlock and by a guy who worked for my father’s company. They wanted it to go away, not bring full media attention to it.”
With his fists clenched tight, he asked, “What happened after you got pregnant?”
“It was like you see in bad movies. I was whisked away to California and a private birthing facility. They shipped me off until I had the baby. And got rid of it.” Wrapping her arms around herself, she remembered how alone she’d felt. How isolated. Sad. Desperate to get away from everything. Everyone.
Wyatt spoke up for the first time. “If you got pregnant at seventeen, you were probably eighteen when you had the baby. Legally an adult. Why did you give it up for adoption? Doesn’t sound like you wanted to.”
“You don’t go against my family. I had no money of my own until I turned twenty-one and they wouldn’t let me work while I was in school, so I had literally no means to support myself or a child.”
“Did you tell your parents you wanted to keep the child?”
“It was a little boy. He was perfect.” She wiped tears from her cheeks with no recollection of crying and walked out of her office to stare at a picture hung in the hallway. But all she saw was her reflection in the glass. “Yes I told them.” A humorless laugh filled the hallway. “I was told not to come home until I’d gotten rid of the problem. He was their grandchild and they saw it as nothing but a problem.” Shaking her head, she spoke over her shoulder. “So I had the baby and gave him up for adoption. Not because it was what I wanted to do but because he needed a better life than what I could provide for him. Two parents. A dog.” Shrugging, she tried to find something else to say but that was it. She was a coward and made decisions that not only affected the rest of her life but the rest of her son’s life as well.
Because she couldn’t find the balls to stand up to her family
She stiffened when Campbell approached her from behind. His reflection bored into her as he came up to her. Ready for his judgment, she turned and lowered her arms. Whatever he had to say she deserved. Whatever he was going to tell her she’d already told herself hundreds of time.
He tipped her chin up to face him and kissed her.
Kissing her again, he then pulled her into his arms and held her.
Bursting into tears was a real possibility that she was in no mood to share with the world so she took a deep breath and backed up.
Not having a clue what to do with his affection, she moved around him and back into her office.
Wyatt had that detective look on his face. “What part did Braden play in the adoption or custody of your son?”
“None at all. He’d already signed over the rights to have anything to do with our son before he was even born.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.” It was Eric who spoke. “There are rules in place making sure all parents can’t sign their rights away until after a child is born.”
“Rules have no place with my parents. Not unless they want them to. They have enough money that anyone can be bought. No law is above them. If they want something to happen, they make it happen. And money talks no matter which state your minor daughter is sent to, to have a secret baby.”
“That’s not right.” Eric shook his head.
“Welcome to my world.”
“So you had your son. You gave him up for adoption and then what? You came home?” Wyatt’s tone was gentle. Inquisitive but not judging. It still made her sweat and want to hide.
“I came back here. To NYC. Recuperated. Finished my high school diploma with private tutors because all of my friends were told I’d gotten a scholarship to study abroad.”
Wyatt shook his head and so did Campbell as he spoke. “Your parents are a piece of work.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Who else knows about him?” Wyatt enquired.
“My parents are all I know of.”
“You never told anyone else? Ever?” Again Wyatt didn’t sound accusatory, merely shocked, which she completely understood.
“No one. I’m sure it’s in my medical records or something in Cali at the clinic I used there, but that’s all I know of.”
Wyatt cocked his head to the side. “You said something earlier about coming here to the clinic. How is that when you were shipped to California to have the baby?”
“This is the clinic I came to to have the pregnancy test run before I told anyone. Then I was flown across the country. When I came back to the city I came here. Don’t know why.” She shrugged. “Guess I felt safe here. Like they understood what I was going through.”
“But you weren’t a patient?”
“Nope. Volunteer when I came back. I used my parents’ money to go to college. I majored in business and sociology. I knew what I wanted to do after only working here for a few weeks. I wanted to own a place like this. Make a difference. Give girls options I didn’t have. Facilitate more than just their physical care if they would let me. This is also the clinic where I met Angela. We’ve been kindred sisters of sorts ever since. Amazing what friendships can be forged under harrowing circumstances.” She glanced at Campbell and then down at her feet. “So when I graduated with my master’s degree I started working here full-time. Not long after, the then-owners decided to retire and I offered to buy the clinic. Had to take a hell of a loan to do it but I’ve made it a success, even with the fire. Thank goodness for insurance.”
“Wait,” Campbell stopped. “Why didn’t you just buy it? You were over twenty-one at that point and should have inherited quite a bit, I would assume.”
“Oh yeah. That. I left out the part where my parents effectively disinherited me when I told them what I wanted to do. That I wanted this to be my life’s mission.”
“Fuck. They really are assholes. Remind me to punch your father in the face if I’m ever unlucky enough to meet him.”
Natalie smiled at Wyatt’s imagery. “I’m gonna hold you to that.” She shook her head. “What pissed me off the most when all of that went down is a big part of my inheritance wasn’t under their control. Never was. Well, it shouldn’t have been. It was supposed to be straight from my grandmother. My mother’s mother. We were so close. She was the only one who came to visit with me in California. She was with me when I had my son. I’ll never forget her.”
<
br /> “She died?” Wyatt asked.
Nodding still made her heart squeeze tight. “While I was in college. Massive stroke. I was devastated.” Still am, she wanted to say but she kept that to herself.
Wyatt’s eyebrows drew down into a look of complete confusion. “So why didn’t that money come to you? I can only imagine what you could do with this place and how many more like it you could build with that kind of funds beneath you.”
“Remember that earlier statement about the regular rules not applying to my family?”
“You’re shitting me?”
“No, Campbell, but I wish I were.”
“Have you fought them for it?”
“Me and what army would go against the Grants in a legal battle?”
“You are a Grant,” Campbell growled.
“True.” She nodded and rubbed her eyes. “But not the right kind of Grant.”
Campbell made some kind of noise that was a cross between a curse and a harrumph. He stared at the laptop for a few seconds. “Who else had access to your office in the last few weeks?”
“Everyone. Yes I know that’s not the answer you were hoping for, but it’s the truthful answer nonetheless. We don’t keep buttloads of cash so I’m not worried about stealing. We guard the medicine cabinet but we’ve never been broken into. We have an alarm for the main door and the back door. That’s it.”
“Cameras?” Wyatt asked, as he looked up at the ceiling in her office.
“Nope.”
“That’s gonna change,” Campbell added. “And quickly.” He stared her down as if he were waiting for her to argue but she honestly thought cameras were a good idea.
“Well. We’re as far with this tonight as we’re going to get, and we need to take your computer.”
“Sheesh, Wyatt. Talk about the carrot and the stick there. I finally get to go home but you’re taking my work PC with you?”
“I know it sucks, and you know I’d do it any other way if I could. But this is going to take some time.”
“We could clone it, boss.” Eric turned to Wyatt. “I’ve got a ghost drive here. It’ll take me no more than fifteen minutes to copy the entire system over and I can clone it into another laptop at the shop tomorrow.”
Ultimate Surrender: The Surrender Series, Book 2 Page 16
