Cara softened slightly and looked Hutch’s way. “He’s not a criminal. He was a kid who broke the law to try to do the right thing. A girl at his high school…she went to a college party and got drunk and some football players took advantage.”
“The word you’re looking for is rape.” He wouldn’t sugarcoat it, and he’d been fucking happy to set his ass in jail. “They taped the whole thing, and then their parents worked with the DA to cover it up. I was in a smaller town then, and no one wanted to lose the conference championship. So I hacked the system and I sent that tape to a couple of reporters.”
“Hutch did more time than the football players,” Ian explained.
“Yeah, but they didn’t play again, and their names are still out there.” He would circulate the story every few years. Every time one of those fuckers thought it was gone. “I was sixteen and I barely knew that girl. What do you think I’ll do for a woman I care about?”
“Your prior arrest doesn’t concern me or my bosses. But I do have something that does concern me.” Cara’s spine straightened and she leaned toward Ian. “Do you know that your…what do you call them…your operative is sleeping with the client?”
Ian chuckled. “Yeah, if I fired them all for that I wouldn’t have any employees. It’s kind of a perk of hiring my firm. McKay-Taggart. Serving your security needs and getting you off. It’s our new slogan.”
Hutch couldn’t help himself. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was hypocrisy. “Does your boss know you’re sleeping with the locals? Or was that scene in the lobby for show?”
Ian was the one sitting up straighter now. The boss loved some gossip. “The detective’s doing the fed?”
“Oh, yeah,” Hutch said under his breath. “Blew their cover wide open last night.”
Cara looked like she was ready to breathe fire.
Chris put a hand on her arm. “Don’t. You know he’s right and that’s why you’re angry.” He looked Hutch’s way. “Special Agent Thompson and I used to be engaged. We broke it off two years ago when she joined the FBI. Working on this assignment together brought back certain feelings, and we allowed them to cloud our judgement last night. If we’d had our heads in the game, this wouldn’t have happened. We would have known to keep you in the lobby until that light went off. It takes about a half an hour to cycle on that system, right? The light was still on when you got up to the apartment. That’s why you packed her up and left.”
“Yes. I assume you’re the ones who turned it on, and you did last night because you knew we would be late.” He remembered Cara specifically asking about that night. “She thinks you’re her friend, you know.”
Cara seemed to soften slightly. “I am. At least I hope I am. She’s involved in something criminal, and she doesn’t know it. Or I could be wrong and she’s a big part of it. It’s precisely why I can’t tell her I’m with the FBI. We’re at a delicate time, and I’ve got to figure out how to handle this.”
“What exactly are you investigating? The death of Madison Wallace?” He wanted to know what concerned the feds most.
“I was investigating Layne and her company before Madison Wallace was killed,” Cara explained. “She’s not the first mysterious death around Jessica Layne.”
“You’re talking about her business partner?” Ian asked.
Cara nodded. “And last year a business rival of hers died in a mysterious car accident. They were fighting over rights to patent a process concerning a new leap forward in eye tracking tech. Genedyne’s case was considered the weaker of the two. There have been rumors for years that what Layne really does is bet on tech. She decides something is going to be big, and by either corporate espionage or clever trickery, she forces a legal fight for the patent. In this case, she was going up against a much smaller firm, and when the lead developer died, the firm’s investment cash dried up.”
“Hence, they were unable to fight the legal battle,” Chris continued, “and Genedyne won the patent. The investors quickly found their way to Jessica Layne. There’s a pattern of what I would consider fraudulent use of the legal system to better her company.”
“I haven’t heard anything about new eye tracking tech.” Hutch kept up with everything that was new in the industry. He oftentimes collaborated with Adam Miles on how to perfect facial recognition methods. Eye tracking was in its infancy, and like many new high-tech things, had its start in video games. But the uses were wide and varying.
“That’s because she hasn’t used the patent yet,” Cara explained. “She’s sitting on it, using it to gain capital, but we’ve seen no attempts to actually bring it to market. It’s one of the reasons I need to look at her financials. There are other reasons. I believe she might be working with some other tech firms to steal ideas, patents, even actual money from smaller firms. If I can prove that they’re working together, I can charge them with a number of crimes. I can also force a wider investigation into what I think is collusion amongst a group of tech firms.”