Page 10 of Drunk In Love
When his gaze meets mine, he quickly averts his eyes and moves toward a desk adjacent to the conference room.
“Will do,” Katie says, taking the cards and sliding them into her pocket.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” Max says and the three of us exit the conference room, with Katie moving in the opposite direction. Max and I begin our walk back to the reception area when the man I saw a few moments ago speaks up.
“Are you two here about the security leak?”
Maxwell positions himself between the guy and me.
“Who’s asking?” Maxwell questions.
“Jacob Reyes,” the young man answers in a low voice, glancing around the open office. Everyone seems preoccupied with what they are doing. There are enough people conversing that our conversation seemingly goes largely unnoticed in the back corner of the office.
“I’m the new head of IT. I was the one who notified them about what was going on.”
I step past Maxwell just short of Jacob. “What caught your attention?”
“There’s millions of individual subscribers, so it’s hard to keep track of what each person is doing. Almost everyone shares passwords. What caught my attention is the fact that every week we have group subscription log ins from exactly fifteen hundred accounts, and that week an extra kept popping up and couldn’t be traced to an account on record. I let my former boss know.”
Max glances at me before continuing. “Who is your former boss?”
Jacob lowers his voice. “Franco DiLaurentis. He was fired. Once he started talking about what was going on, a few days passed, and next thing I know, I’m getting promoted.”
Zach and Cecily never mentioned Franco by name in the preliminary meeting. They’d only advised that it had been an employee who alerted them.
“Could you tell us—” Before I could finish my thought, Jacob shook his head.
“I don’t want to get too involved in any of this. I figured no one had mentioned Franco, and I see I was right.”
Before Max and I could respond, a voice piped up from a few rows away. “Hey, Jacob, can you please help with the laptop adapter? I’m trying to connect my laptop to my monitor.”
“Be right over, Rachel,” he calls over to the woman. Turning back to us, he stands up. “I’ve got to go.”
“If you can think of anything else, let us know,” Maxwell says, extending his hand to pass his card to Jacob.
Jacob steps back out of reach and waves the business card away. “Like I said, I don’t want to be involved. I got a good gig here. Just look into Franco DiLaurentis.”
With that, he was gone. Our biggest breakthrough so far was refusing to talk any further.
“Let’s get out of here,” Maxwell says, putting his hand at the small of my back and ushering us though the exit.
Alone at the elevator bank, Maxwell turns to me. “What did you think of the journal employees?”
I tuck a lock of hair behind my ear before answering. “I think that office has a lot of secrets—more than Cecily and Zach can probably imagine.”
Maxwell nods. “With the exception of our workplace, I know most have secrets. Employees covering up bad behavior of their own or bad behavior of their coworkers.”
“Exactly,” I answer, passing him to step into the elevator first. Maxwell falls into step behind me. “What we have to figure out now is what is being covered up and by who.”
“I think it may start with this Franco.”
CHAPTER 4
Maxwell
The trip downstairs to the Financial Journal turned out to be more fruitful than anticipated. Though Jacob was not as forthcoming as he could have been, he did plant a seed. Who was this employee no one wanted to mention who just so happened to have disappeared after the leak was exposed?
This assignment was shaping up to be much more challenging than anticipated. Working with Kamaya was no hardship, but being around her more and more after that post-wedding morning was extremely awkward. I was certain that I was the only one affected by the shift between us. Kamaya behaved like her normal self, but I was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate.