He could still see all the flowers that had been at her funeral. Sarah had been particularly fond of roses. He’d put a dozen on her grave.
“Her whole family died,” he whispered. “A fire broke out in their house while they were asleep. Someone had disabled their smoke detector, then poured gasoline all over the first level of their home. The fire started and they...” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “The newspapers said that the family never had a chance. They didn’t wake up at all.”
“Did the police find the arsonist?”
He shook his head.
“And you think that relates to this case because...?”
Did he have to draw the guy a damn map? “Because Sarah was with Gunner, and she left him. He told me, he told me that he wasn’t going to let her go. She was his, and no one would ever take her from him.” His breath rasped out. “Now he thinks that Sydney is his...” He let the sentence trail away.
Silence. The kind that stretched too long; then, finally, Mercer said, “I thought you said you wanted to prove it’s not G
unner. Sounds to me like you’re making a case for the arsonist being him.”
“No, I—” He raked a hand over his face. “Maybe the drugs are still in my system. I’m being paranoid. I mean...the fires aren’t even the same M.O., right? I’m sure the fire at Sydney’s house wasn’t set by gasoline and the detectors weren’t disabled—”
“None of the alarms went off at Sydney’s house, and while the arson investigation is ongoing, preliminary indications are that gasoline was the accelerant used.”
He sagged in the chair. “But Gunner got her out? He was the hero last night, right? Not the bad guy. Not the arsonist.”
Mercer’s gaze gave nothing away.
“It can’t be him,” Slade whispered.
“If you’re so sure that it’s not him, then why are you in my office? Why did you tell Ms. Rogers that you had intel to give me?”
His hands dug deeper into the armrests. “Because...what if it is him? Our father...did Gunner tell you that he wound up in a mental ward? That’s where he died. He’d gone crazy, and attacked his latest girlfriend—tried to kill her.” His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. “We never saw him much growing up, but Gunner and I both always wondered...just how much like him were we?” He held Mercer’s gaze. “How much?”
Chapter Eight
Sydney stared at the computer screen before her, absolutely sure that there had to be some kind of mistake.
For six hours, she’d been working with the other techs. They’d gone back through the system, tracking their hacker. Gone through every system link they could find.
They’d narrowed down the security breach. It had happened three days ago, at 0300 hours. Long before anyone should have been in the office.
The Guerrero case file had been accessed, her personnel file had been accessed and Gunner’s file had been accessed. But according to the results she was seeing, their hacker had looked at Gunner’s file for only two seconds. That wasn’t long enough to learn any details. Just long enough to lead a cyber trail for them to follow. Long enough to show that someone had pulled the file.
Pulled it, but not scanned any information?
If their hacker wanted intel on Gunner, why not look longer? The hacker had been given access to her file for three minutes. He’d viewed all the Guerrero files for five minutes.
And it wasn’t that the hacker had been interrupted. According to the report she was generating, he’d viewed Gunner’s file first.
“Why?” Sydney whispered as she stared at the screen. He hadn’t gotten any data from Gunner’s file, so he’d gone there to what...lead a false trail? Gunner wasn’t the target, just her?
“Sydney, we found the pass code that was used to get into the system,” Hal West told her as he slid his chair toward hers. Hal was the lead systems administrator for the EOD.
She glanced up at him. A pass code would be needed to open the system, but their hacker had put a virus in place after he’d gotten access, and that pass code signature had been all but erased.
All but...
“It’s an old code, one that was initiated over two years ago.” Hal’s face looked strained. Considering that she knew the guy had been working the computers for most of the night—while she’d been escaping from the blaze—that strain was to be expected. “The agent we originally assigned the code to was given a new access number a year ago.” He shook his head. “Someone screwed up. When he got a new code, all privileges associated with the previous access should have been revoked. Someone didn’t terminate the code authorization and—”
“Hal!” she snapped out. “Which agent had that code?”
“Uh...right,” he said as his bleary blue gaze cut away from her and back to the nearby computer monitor. “Gunner Ortez.”