Page 320 of Mario
“No,” Matteo says.
I stop beside the table. “No?”
“No biography. No profile by Cindy Sullivan. No local article about you and Hawthorne with that byline. Nothing in the public web, nothing cached under that name, nothing that fits the description she gave. No other articles as well. Not English or Italian.”
Ricardo’s mouth tightens, but he keeps working.
My eyes move to Victoria’s laptop.
“But?” I ask.
Matteo leans back slightly. His face is calm, but there is something sharp in his eyes.
“But I found something more interesting.”
Ricardo finally looks up, his expression harder than usual.
“Dimmi.”
“It seems her laptop has been scrubbed,” Matteo says.
I feel everything in me harden.
“Da chi?”
“Bellandi,” Ricardo says.
My gaze cuts to him.
He closes his laptop halfway, not fully. “The signature is familiar enough.”
“How do you know it has been scrubbed?”
Matteo turns his laptop slightly, but I keep my eyes on him, not on the screen.
“They are not as good as they think they are,” he says. “They cleaned what they wanted gone, but they left marks all over the system. Deleted browser entries. Altered cache. Missing email threads with residue still in local storage. Remote access logs they tried to bury instead of erase properly.”
My hands curl once at my sides.
“They were in her email and browser?”
“Yes.”
Matteo hesitates for a fraction of a second, which is enough to put my back up.
“What else?”
His eyes meet mine. “Her webcam.”
The anger inside me turns to ice.
“Say again,” I say carefully.
“They had access to her webcam,” Matteo says. “At least intermittently. I do not know for how long yet. Or what they saw.”
My jaw locks so hard it aches.
Victoria in her apartment.
