Cody Walker's Woman

Cody shook his head. “We already told you. Everything happened exactly as Keira and I described.”

“What did you leave out?”

Cody turned and headed toward the back of the truck. “Nothing,” he said over his shoulder. “Except Danvers’s gun is a .357, it looks like there are bloodstains on the money in his wallet, and, oh, yeah, we found Tressler’s computer at Betsy Duggan’s house.”

“I’ll be damned.” Callahan followed him.

Cody hefted the computer monitor in his arms. “Want to grab those evidence bags and close that for me?” he asked Callahan, and waited until he did so.

A short distance away Keira stood in earnest conversation with McKinnon, probably telling her partner the same things he was telling Callahan, and at first sight of them, Cody stiffened. It wasn’t an embrace, but the other man’s arm was around Keira’s shoulders, and Cody struggled with the fierce possessiveness he couldn’t prevent. He didn’t want McKinnon...he didn’t want any man touching Keira.

Then he remembered, and the possessiveness fell away, replaced by a secret exultation that raced through his blood. Keira trusted him the way he’d yearned just that morning for her to trust him—with every fiber of her being.

He didn’t need to feel threatened by her relationships with other men. Not anymore. She belonged to him in a way she would never belong to another man, and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with coercion on his part. It didn’t have a damn thing to do with making her his. She belonged to him in the only way that truly meant anything—she’d given herself to him, freely, honestly. Heart, mind, body and soul, she was his—and he would cherish the gift as well as the giver for the rest of his life.

His eyes met Callahan’s knowing ones, and he wondered just how much of his thoughts he’d revealed in the past few seconds. “Might as well tell the whole thing once,” he told Callahan lightly before calling Keira and McKinnon over.

* * *

They set up Tressler’s computer and hooked up the internet connection as Cody and Keira together told the story of what they’d discovered at Betsy Duggan’s house. When the computer was turned on and ready to go, Cody pressed Keira into the chair. “You drive.”

“I’ve got a theory,” she said as her fingers typed in the password, and they waited for the desktop to come up. “But...”

“Let’s hear it.”

She glanced up at him. “I could be wrong.”

“So?”

The respect in his eyes warmed her, and she smiled at him. Cody was right this morning, she acknowledged. They were a team, just as she and Trace were a team. As a team they were stronger than either one alone, and there was truth in the old adage that two heads were better than one.

She double-clicked on the Veni, Vidi, Vici icon on the desktop, and the game opened. It defaulted to a username account, STRESSLER. “If he was smart, he’d have different passwords,” she said. “But most people aren’t that smart. They have one password they use for just about everything because it’s easy to remember.” Holding her breath, she again typed the password C-e-n-t-u-r-i-o-n.

Just that easily they had accessed Tressler’s persona in the video game.

“This might take some time,” she explained. “If this were a real video game, I might have to access level by level, but I don’t think... There!” she said suddenly. She clicked on a series of shortcuts that looked incomprehensible to the men standing behind her until she reached a flashing bar that said “Password Protected Area!”

She turned toward Callahan. “Didn’t you say Tressler accidentally came across that elimination list?”

“Yeah. But he wouldn’t tell me anything about how he found it or who had it.”

“I don’t think it was a person. I think this is it. Tressler was probably like a lot of guys who’re hooked on these online games—like a lot of hackers, too—he couldn’t stand not being able to get into a password-protected area. So when he came across it, he tried to guess the password. And once he did...”

She turned to look at Cody standing on her other side. “I think Tressler just happened to have the same password for his personal use that was set up to unlock this area of Veni, Vidi, Vici.”