Deadly Pursuit - Chapter 5
Serena moved to the table and sat. “It looks good.”
“It’s amazing. My favorite Chinese food restaurant by far.”
They ate for several minutes in a comfortable silence. Serena in his space felt natural. He could imagine sitting across the table from her night after night.
But she didn’t need him lusting after her right now. She needed him focused on finding whoever had attempted to kidnap her.
“Before we turn in for the night, I was hoping to get a look at your laptop, if you don’t mind.”
“Why?” Serena asked, forking another mouthful of food into her mouth.
“I keep thinking about what the little guy who attacked you said about the file. That’s the key to this whole thing. I suspect if we find that file, we’ll find whoever is behind the attacks on you. Maybe you have the file and you don’t know it,” Tyre pressed. “I’ve heard of hidden viruses and attachments and whatnot. Maybe the file is hidden on your computer.”
Serena’s brow arched up. “I don’t open unfamiliar files and my antivirus protection is the same one we use at West, but I have no problem with you searching my computer. I think it’s a good idea, actually. I should have thought of it.”
“You’ve had a night.”
She left the table, heading back into the guest room. A moment later, she returned with her laptop in tow.
He cleared the dishes from the table while she logged on.
“I keep most of my files backed up to secure cloud storage, so there’s not actually much on my hard drive.” She called up the drive. “What is here is all personal stuff. Of course, anything West related stays on my work computer, which I can access remotely if I need to.”
He stood over her shoulder as she scrolled through the files on the computer.
A chime sounded.
“Incoming email,” Serena explained. She double-clicked the envelope icon at the bottom of the screen.
The newest email had come in from a local grocery store and the subject line announced the week’s deals.
“Huh, that’s weird.” Serena pointed to the third email from the top of the list.
“What’s weird?” he asked.
“It’s from a friend of mine, Charley Bright, but I haven’t corresponded with him in a couple of years. Not since grad school.”
The body of the email was empty, but there was an attachment. A photograph of Serena and a young white man with curly brown hair appeared on screen in graduation robes.
“I don’t know why he’d send this to me. We graduated years ago.”
“When was the last time you talked to Charley?”
“If you mean actually talked and not just a quick quip on social media, about a year ago. I saw him at a friend’s party and he’d just accepted a job with one of our old professors.”
“So he’s an academic?”
She shook her head. “No. One of our professors, Professor Garland, left academia a while ago for the private sector. He’s head of security at GoldCorp, a regional private bank. He hired Charley into the bank’s cyber security department a couple of years back.”
Tyre’s brow furrowed in thought. “I think our first stop tomorrow should be a visit to your friend Charley. But right now, I think we should both get some rest.”