Fear No Evil by Allison Brennan Page B

stopped, froze.
    The countdown read 44:00:00.
    “Dammit, I paid, you bastard!” Kate spun around to another computer, frantically typed until she brought up Trask’s secure server and paid him again to watch the feed. It took her nearly ten minutes to get through. His server was getting a lot of traffic today, she thought bitterly.
    A message popped up on the screen.
     
Hello, Kate Donovan. Just wanted to make sure it was you, sweetheart. This one’s free. Enjoy.
     
    “What happened?” Dillon asked. “Why did it freeze?”
    Peterson sat at a vacant terminal and typed in a bunch of codes. “We have to pay to watch. I thought this was taken care of.”
    A message came up on the screen several minutes later.
     
Hello, FBI. I see you’ve gotten much better at hiding your identity, but you’re not as good as I am. I don’t think I want you watching this one. You might get the wrong idea. Remember, this is consensual fantasy role-playing, but I’d rather not have to explain it to a jury.
Too bad you don’t know where Kate is. I gave her the feed for free. It’s ironic. All these years she’s been trying to find me, getting close, very close, but all she did was lead me right to her door.
     
    “Shit! The bastard!” Quinn typed frantically, then the computer froze. Blue screen.
    Quinn spoke quietly yet frantically on the phone. Dillon read Quinn’s file as he paced, feeling more helpless than at any other time in his life.
    Thirty minutes later Patrick said quietly, “I have it.”
    “How’d you do that?” Quinn and Dillon stood over Patrick’s shoulder.
     
43:31:45.
     
    Again on screen, Lucy was restrained on the floor, tears running down her cheeks. She was looking straight up at the ceiling. Her breasts were bare, blood on her stomach, a bruise already forming on her cheek.
    Dillon didn’t know if he was more relieved he had missed witnessing his sister’s humiliation or furious that it had happened in the first place.
    “I hacked the feed, falsified the DNS so he doesn’t see it coming from a government server, and sent in Nick’s credit card information. I didn’t want him running names to numbers and seeing a ‘Kincaid’ on the list,” Patrick added.
    Peterson was trying to text message Kate to warn her. “Dammit! Kate shut down her system. She’s in danger.”
    “Lucy is in danger!” Connor exclaimed.
    “Kate will contact us,” Dillon said.
    “How can you be sure?” Connor threw his arms up in the air. “I can’t stand around and do nothing.”
    “So don’t,” said Dillon.
    “Stop playing shrink and tell me straight.”
    Tensions were high, and Nick stepped between the two brothers. “I think what Dillon is suggesting is that we try to track him through other means.”
    Connor sighed, rubbed a hand over his rough face. “The money.”
    “Exactly,” Dillon said. “The payments need to be going somewhere. And, frankly, I don’t care about the law right now.” He glanced at Peterson. “Find the financial institution, get the DA, Andrew Stanton, to write any warrant we need, and see what trail we can find.”
    Peterson went through the file he’d given Dillon and handed Connor a stack of paper. “These are the known bank accounts on this guy. Most have been shut down, many are inactive. We haven’t found a pattern to them, only that he opens them right before a live feed, and closes them immediately after, transferring the funds to another account. Last time we seized most of his money, and now we don’t know what he’ll do. Our profiler thinks he’ll withdraw the money every couple of hours to prevent losing it all.”
    Patrick said, “Have Nick’s credit card company track the payment. Get every confirmation number you can, contact information. It’ll be a dummy company, but eventually it’ll lead somewhere. It has to.”
    Connor wasn’t happy, but it gave him something to do. Nick clapped him on the back. “Where can we work?” he asked Peterson.
    “I’ll