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“Actually, the tech should’ve had him in this morning. I put in the request since there was such concern from Grand County—I wanted to cover our bases. I haven’t heard about any results yet, though. Those would go straight to the Denver marshals. Once I set up the initial paperwork, I’m pretty much out of the loop. If someone does go outside of their monitor’s set parameters, the call goes to the Denver marshals, with a backup call to the Denver sheriff’s departments. But their offices are here in the same building, so I usually hear about it.”

“You don’t work for the sheriff’s department?” Bree asked.

“Parnam is a state employee, not law enforcement,” Tanner said.

“Exactly. I’m just in charge of paperwork. I don’t make the decision on who goes free or not—that’s the judge. I don’t chase down the people who decide to hammer off their anklet—that’s the cops. I’m just trying to make sure everything gets filed correctly.”

And the dude did not sound very excited about his job—not that Bree blamed him.

“So just go ahead and do what you need to do. You said it would only take a few minutes?” Parnam leaned up against the doorway.

She doubted he would know enough about computers to understand what she was going to do, but it would be a lot more complicated with him looking over her shoulder the whole time. She glanced over at Tanner, who gave her a brief nod.

Tanner put his hand on Parnam’s shoulder. “Conrad, you probably don’t get told this a lot, and that’s a shame. But your job is very important. Just think of how long it would’ve taken for Mrs. Ellis to be notified that Jared had been released if it wasn’t for you. I appreciate your hard work.”

Bree sat down at the computer and managed not to roll her eyes. Tanner. That man could be the epitome of fierce warrior when the need called for it. She’d seen that herself when he’d fought to save their lives a few months ago. He’d been nearly dead—covered in his own blood from multiple gunshot wounds—and still managed to save them both.

But damned if he couldn’t also charm his way out of most situations. He was just so likable. Parnam wasn’t immune to Tanner’s charm either.

“Thank you for saying that,” the other man said. “I hear plenty if something goes wrong, but nobody ever thinks to say thank you for things going right.”

Tanner made a sound of agreement and cleared his throat. “Well, we are thankful that you’ve done your job so well.” Bree kept her eyes glued on the computer so she wouldn’t snicker. “Would you mind showing me the way to the marshals’ offices? I want to make sure that they understand the severity of the situation too, like you do.”

“Yeah, absolutely.” She wasn’t surprised to hear that Parnam wanted to show Tanner, his new bestie, anything he needed to see. “Will you be okay in here by yourself, Ms. Daniels?”

Bree looked over her shoulder at them and smiled. “Absolutely. It will probably be much quicker for me without you two.”

The two were chatting like pals as they walked down the hallway.

She didn’t waste any time accessing the system and familiarizing herself with its particulars in just a few minutes. She immediately brought up the file on Jared’s ankle monitor and pored over the data. It was identical to the report Tanner had shown her this morning, the same one that had been sent over by Parnam yesterday.

Of course, that didn’t mean the anklet system hadn’t been tampered with, just that Parnam probably wasn’t in on it.

Closing down the tracking system, she opened a source-code editor and quickly coded a program she’d already developed in her mind, bootstrapping it so it could run immediately. The program was simple but powerful. It would determine whether any outside shells were attempting to hide the real data concerning Jared.

She was almost disappointed when it came back with nothing.

Closing that, she wrote another quick program—the coding coming easier to her than conversation would to most normal people—to look for GPS manipulation. That was pretty high-level, and she’d be impressed if Jared had somebody savvy enough to know how to reconfigure data based on that.

It was how she would do it.

But after a few more minutes it became clear no one had hacked Jared’s monitoring system through that method either.

She tried the half dozen other ways she could think of to infiltrate the monitoring system but was either shut down by the system itself or found no evidence that the system had been tampered with in any way.

Finally, she just sat back and stared at the screen in front of her, having to come to grips with what the data was telling her. Jared was clean.

She closed her source code and compiling windows and pulled up Jared’s file again, staring at his picture. There was no doubt he was a handsome guy. Midthirties, blondish-brown hair, piercing blue eyes. A charming smirk, even in his mug shot.

“How did you do it, you bastard?”

His picture didn’t respond.

She reopened her windows and wrote another program quickly to see if Jared might have just delayed the transmission of data in some way. That would’ve been pretty clever also. By the time the police realized they’d been fooled, he could’ve done all sorts of damage to Marilyn and the kids.

But that came back negative also.

Bree sat back, feeling something she didn’t often at a computer: stumped.