Page 22 of When I Accidentally Snagged a Serial Killer

“Thank you.”

I watch her over the rim of my cup. “Legal things?” She glances up and blushes. God. That’s adorable. “You break into things,” I say.

Her head snaps up. “I did not say that.”

“Didn’t need to.”

With a huff, she sits back and crosses her arms over her chest. “You know a suspicious amount about guilty faces for a pastry chef.” I wait pleasantly. She groans and rubs her eyes. “Fine,” she surrenders. “Sometimes people need information they can’t get through conventional channels.”

“That sounds like hacking.”

“Argumentative.” She straightens proudly.

“What do you call it?”

“Digital trespassing.”

I nearly choke on my coffee. “How’d you get into that?”

She picks up the straw and balances it across the top of the mug. “Looking for my father.”

I stiffen slightly. “Missing?”

“Depends who you ask.” She taps the straw. “He disappeared when I was seventeen.”

“And you started doing this trying to find him? Did you ever find him?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“And you kept searching.”

“I’m stubborn.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Of course. I couldn’t become fascinated by an accountant. No. I had to find the woman whose side hustle consists of accessing information people don’t want accessed. This will end magnificently. Possibly in prison.

“What kind of jobs?” I ask carefully.

“Mostly boring ones.”

“I doubt that.”

“They are to me.” She shrugs. “People trying to find someone who vanished owing them money. Women who think their boyfriend has another wife in Indiana. Anonymous harassment accounts. Stolen photos. Catfishers. Sometimes I find people. Sometimes I scrub people.”

My coffee stops halfway to my mouth. “Scrub?”

She snatches up the wrapper and twists it tighter. “Addresses. Photos. Old accounts. Personal information sitting on sites that have no business keeping it. Things people don’t want following them forever.”

“You make people disappear online.”

“Pieces of them.” She rips it, piece by little piece.

Her tone is casual. Mine isn’t, at least internally. I make people disappear too. But considerably less metaphorically.

“How much does digital trespassing pay?” I ask.

“Enough to get by, I guess. But I don’t take every job.”