You Can't Run by Hope Davis (best way to read books .txt) 📗

She made eye contact with Kevin as soon as they  were alone.

“Do you want to talk about something?” She asked him quietly.

He shook his head and moved his arm out from under her hand. “I’m going to go. I’ll talk to you later.” And then he was out the door and down the walk before Naya could even give him a kiss goodbye. As the door shut she found herself standing there still holding out her hand and wondering what had just happened.

Just what had he and Vance talked about?

CHAPTER 24

NAYA

The night was all too short, and as Naya rolled out of bed the next morning she checked her phone to see if Kevin had messaged her. Nothing.

Her heart fell a little bit, but she couldn’t focus on being bummed now. She had a case to solve.

She slid on her work clothes and clipped her gun and holster to her belt. Forgoing coffee, she looked in on Vance quickly, who was still sleeping, then was out the door not more than fifteen minutes after she had woken up.

She didn’t know why she felt such urgency, she just had a feeling this case was about to break. Some piece of information they were waiting for today had to be the piece they needed to put the puzzle together.

Naya pulled into the work lot just after seven-thirty, incredibly early, only to spot Atlas’ truck in its usual spot. Damn! She wondered how he always managed to beat her?

Slightly defeated, she stepped out of her car and made her way in the building.

By the time she got to her desk, Atlas was already reading some sort of report that had landed on his desk. She saw another copy on her desk.

“I don’t know how you do it.” She huffed as she sat down and began reading, it was the RunTracker data for the three victims.

“Magic.” Atlas snickered, still busy reading.

Naya knew she read faster than Atlas, and if she tried, she could surely beat him to the end of the report, but she also knew that a woman’s life could be relying on this and she needed to read carefully. So instead, she pushed her competitive nature aside for the moment and invested herself in the reports.

Each stack was the print outs of the women’s last ten runs, they included a rough map of where the woman ran, as well as their speed, and distance.

Naya looked over the maps for Julia Charles, the routes varied quite a bit; it seemed like she really had been committed to switching it up. When she got to the last page, her last run, during which she had been abducted, she stopped and tilted her head. The line just stopped. It was if she was beamed from her route by magic. She separated this page from the stack then went on to read the one’s for Shanice Woods.

She hadn’t varied her route as much as Julia, but she had run much faster, after all, she had been a champion racer. But the story was the same, Shanice was running like normal, and then the route just suddenly ended. There was no visible struggle, or evidence of any kind, that the women even had a chance to attempt to escape their attacker. She separated this page as well, placing it with Julia’s.

She didn’t know what to expect from Alia Larson’s RunTracker data, but it read a lot like Shanice’s, a semi-varied route, less than Julia but still as varied as it could be with limited options. But when she got to the last page, she saw that Alia had indeed finished her run just as they had seen. So just as they had deduced, she had been abducted at some point after she re-entered the building.

Naya set Alia’s stack of data aside and set the last runs of the Julia and Shanice side by side.

“How do two women, who are fast and seasoned runners, just get beamed into space?”

Atlas must’ve been thinking the same thing, as he was looking at the last run of Julia Charles. “It’s as if he knew they were going to be there.”

Naya flipped through the packets again. “But both women varied their route regularly. There is simply no way to predict that either of them would have been in that place at that time.

Atlas suddenly sat up straight in his chair. “Wait. What if this guy somehow had access to the app?”

“What do you mean?” Naya could feel her brain was still waking up a bit. She shouldn’t have forgone the coffee.

“I’m saying, what if this guy is a programmer for this app or something? How else would he have this information? Even if he was the girls’ friend on the app these women varied their route way too much to predict. But what if, he could access the app and watch them as they ran?”

Naya felt her mouth fall open. “My god.” She whispered. “Call tech right now, I want to know how easy this app is to hack.”

Atlas already had his phone in his hand. “On it. And can you contact RunTracker? Let them know there’s been a possible breach and our tech guys will be in contact shortly to discuss their security procedures and obtain a list of local employees.”

Naya nodded and rushed to looked up their phone number on the documents and dialed.

After she hung up, she turned towards Atlas. “Do you think the tech guys will have an answer for you today?” She was thinking about the clock ticking . Another woman was going to go missing tonight.

“I think so. They were already downloading the app to try to hack it while I was on the phone with them.”

Atlas’ phone rang in his hand, he hurried to