11:00 a.m.
IF HIS job didn’t depend on his being online, Victor Suarez would never go online.
As it was, Victor left zero traces of himself on the internet. As far as the web was concerned, he had never been born.
He could not understand people who left pieces of their lives all over the place (on Facebook, in Google searches, in countless smartphone apps) for practically anyone to pick up. Did they also leave their doors unlocked and their windows wide open? It was the same thing to Victor.
But most people went through life assuming that whatever personal information they released to their banks (or their favorite online retailers or even their local pizza shops) would be guarded by the employees of those institutions with their lives. The truth was, most organizations’ internet security wasn’t worth a damn. And the few companies that actually bothered…well, they didn’t bother to stay current. State-of-the-art cybersecurity ate into profits, after all.
Lunacy.
Victor poured himself another extra-large mug of strong black coffee—he was trying to graduate from Diet Coke—and spent an hour doing a deep dive into all things Hughes family.
He skipped the online troll stuff. That was basically useless. Anyone with an internet connection could have an opinion about anything; opinions were as common as hydrogen atoms.
No, what Victor loved were the document trails, the paperwork backdrop of the universe: Legal agreements nobody bothered to read. Direct messages that senders assumed were private. Interoffice memos that meant nothing to most people in the outside world…except Victor, who would put them aside until he found the place where each one fit.
All the information on everyone was out there. Sometimes it was in bits and pieces, like a shredded document. You just needed the mental tape and stamina to put it back together again.
Like the Google Maps search Francine had run on her phone a month ago, directions to a modest building in Center City, Philadelphia.
The address felt random until Victor realized it was the office of the city’s top divorce lawyer, Charles “Chuck” Castrina. From there, it took only a few minutes to figure out the full story. Francine Pearl Hughes had officially retained Castrina’s services that very day. Victor’s boss, Cooper Lamb, was going to turn cartwheels.
Victor took another slug of coffee, thinking, Not the same as Diet Coke, not even close, and kept digging.
Now here was something interesting—the people trashing Francine were not the usual online trolls. These were high-end trolls. Online gamblers, mostly high rollers and whales, all of whom were none too pleased about the postponed NFC championship game. They felt like the rules had been changed; this was not the same bet it had been just a few days ago.
Conspiracy theories were abundant. Many centered on the excesses of the Eagles’ father-and-son owners. And quite a lot of them linked Archie Hughes’s murder to someone trying to influence the outcome of the game and, possibly, the Super Bowl. Victor believed some of the theories in these private posts; these were people with real money on the line.
Still, there was no smoking gun—nothing concrete to share with Cooper yet.
But Victor continued to dig. He put on another pot of coffee but made a mental note to restock his minifridge with Diet Coke. He could handle only so much coffee.