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“And not a murderer,” I feel the need to point out again.

“Definitely not.” I’m surprised it’s Colby who says it, and he shrugs when everyone turns to him. “I know a murderer when I see one. It’s in the eyes. I’ve faced enough of them.”

Eian wraps a protective arm around him, even though he is one of those murderers.

“Okay, so now that’s cleared up.” Harrison brings back order as always. “Do we think Gotcha is the one who paid Amanda? Who contacted her?”

Eli’s fingers click faster on his keyboard.

“I found the files of deleted texts the detectives got from her phone. I haven’t been able to pinpoint where the burner phone could’ve been bought, but I’m working on it. I’m still following the origin of the money Amanda was paid, but it’s a fucking rabbit hole.” He sounds so put off by this, and I can’t blame him. “I found five different accounts that fed the money into the account that paid Amanda”

“Okay,” Iris breathes out. “But where would Gotcha get that kind of money? Who in the Turris has access to so much?”

Beatrice scoffs. “Not me.”

“Yeah, me either.” Now we all stare at Eli, and he must feel it because he spins his chair around and shrugs before speaking in a voice so high pitched I know we got to him. “Not legally anyway.”

“Boy,” Michael says, a warning.

“I’m not a thief, Dad,” Eli says and rolls his eyes petulantly. “I’m just saying I could get access to that money, but not legally.” He waves a hand carelessly before spinning back around. “In any case, if Gotcha is pulling all the strings, he could’ve persuaded whoever the mole is to give the money to him. All the other Chairs have more than enough money. Zack and Virginia would too, I bet,” he muses.

As the Heir to the Chair of Wealth, Zack is a slam dunk in my books.

“Zack would know how to move money from various accounts,” I say what I guess we’re all thinking. “I doubt Virginia would do any of this.” The Heir to the Chair of Residence prefers a life of luxury, rather than one of crime and schemes. She’s always hopping on flights from one of her family’s five-star hotels to the next.

“Why?” Iris rolls her eyes. “Because she’s a woman? This is the twenty-first century, Tucker. Women can do anything men can do, including being complete psychopaths.”

“Believe me, I’m well aware,” I drawl. “She’s barely in the city, though, and whenever we have a meeting she looks half asleep. Virginia doesn’t care enough.” She doesn’t have a comeback for that.

“But Gotcha could just steal the money,” Beatrice reminds us. “Wouldn’t they be good enough to funnel away money from thousands of accounts, Eli? If they could almost hack your company, they could hack any bank in the world.”

That . . . is unhelpful.

But Eli is shaking his head.

“If a hacker has that kind of money, especially one who doesn’t give two shits about human lives, then they’re going to destabilize a country, not build a website for a small-time human-trafficking ring.”

And that is unsettling.

“Maybe they’ve evolved, or they don’t want to conquer a country,” Iris counters.

“Maybe,” Eli says, but it sounds like he believes it as much as he believes the earth is flat. “I just don’t know.”

I hate that he feels so defeated, that it’s mostly all on his shoulders.

“Okay, can we go back for a bit?” I pipe up.

“What are you thinking?” Baron asks.

“Why kill Jim?” I wait in case any of them has an immediate answer, but they don’t. “Like seriously, what is the end game here? We know they hurt Michael to distract Eli so his servers would be more vulnerable and they wanted information Crawford might’ve stored there. We thought it was the deeds for the foundation of one of the buildings we use and he still owns.” I start listing off everything we’ve deduced. “But then they fail and they make this elaborate plan to kill Jim?” I wait for them to get on the same page as me. “What does he have to do with anything?”

“Maybe he found out who the mole is,” Iris says after a tense moment. “Maybe he knew something we don’t, or . . .”

“I need to check if Amanda’s phone was hacked,” Eli says loudly. “If she was, and Jim texted her something, said something to her, then maybe we can figure it out.”

That’s a start but . . .

“What if this isn’t connected at all?” I voice the one possibility no one has brought up. “What if this was a ploy to get Jim off someone else’s back? What if it’s someone from another team—baseball, basketball, hockey, he made plenty of enemies in all the leagues and he was the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the NHL. Maybe someone just wanted him out of the way.”