by Fiona Brand
Bright blue eyes fastened on hers, and the light-bulb finally went on. Letty wanted her to look after the cat.
The shears nibbled their way through another rosebush. “I was hoping that, since he’s spending so much time at your place, you wouldn’t mind feeding Buster and keeping an eye on the house while I go and stay with my son in Boston. I’ve had the holiday planned for a month, but with all the burglaries, I’m on the verge of canceling. I couldn’t go if I wasn’t convinced Buster and the house were safe.”
A sense of resignation filled Taylor as she noted that Buster was now cleaning himself on her deck.
“Don’t worry about the food, I’ll have that delivered, and you won’t need to check my mailbox. I’ve stopped the newspaper, and I’ll arrange for the post office to hold my mail until I get back.”
Taylor frowned as she closed her front gate behind her.
A series of burglaries, targeting houses that were empty while the occupants were away on holiday, had been making headlines in Cold Peak for the past couple of weeks. Appliances were taken, and in a couple of instances pets had disappeared and hadn’t been recovered.
The mini crime wave had shaken the residents, and it was a sharp reminder that quiet, sleepy Cold Peak wasn’t as safe or innocuous as it seemed.
Twelve
Cold Peak boasted three computer shops/Internet cafés. During her lunch hour, Taylor strolled to the closest one.
When she stepped through the door, a lean, dark-haired kid with glasses and a name tag with Neil printed on it unfolded himself from behind a computer screen.
“I need a new security suite for my computer.” She gave him the make and model, and watched as he pulled a box off the shelf behind him.
The packaging was familiar. “I already have that one.”
“Have you been updating it?”
“Every week. It didn’t do the job.”
His eyes glinted. He moved farther along the shelf and retrieved a box from a locked cabinet.
“This is what you need. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it. I use it myself.”
She paid for the program and completed the rest of her shopping, adding in a can of tuna and an extra carton of milk for Buster.
When she got home that evening there was an entire box of cat food on her front step with a delivery docket from one of the supermarkets. She glanced over at Letty’s house, but the place looked closed up.
She picked up the carton, unlocked the door and walked inside. Letty hadn’t said exactly when she was going, just that she would be away for a few days, but it looked like she had already left.
Buster materialized from beneath the wisteria and glided in the door behind her, his attention on the box of cat food.
He ate a whole can in one sitting. Taylor hadn’t yet tried to pick him up, but he looked like he weighed about twenty pounds and none of it was fat. His paws were large, the claws, when he extended them, like razor-sharp hooks. One ear had a notch chewed out of it and at some stage he’d gotten a gouge across the nose. Beneath his fur, he no doubt had any number of old wounds. Cute he might be, but in cat terms, Buster was the equivalent of a badass.
Taylor missed out on her usual run in favor of doing some yoga. It gave her a chance to rest her ankle and, if she was honest, to avoid the possibility of another one-on-one with Fischer.
After showering, she made herself a salad and put a potato in the oven to bake. Periodically, she checked on Letty’s house, which was partly visible through her kitchen window. As she dressed the salad, Taylor noticed that sometime in the past few minutes the curtains had been closed, which meant Letty was home after all, and had probably decided to have an early night.
After dinner, she carried her purchase through into the sunroom. After uninstalling her previous security suite, she slid the new disk in and started the installation process. Buster ambled into the room and sat staring out of the French doors at Letty’s house. He hadn’t shown any propensity to leave, and Taylor was reluctant to shoo him out just yet. If she was looking after him for the next week, he might as well make himself at home.
When the download was complete, she pressed a button and initiated the program, then watched as it processed the operating files on her computer. A report flashed up on the screen. One program had compromised her system.
She studied the file name highlighted. It looked like her old security system, but it couldn’t be. She had uninstalled the old system before she had installed the new one.
She copied the highlighted file to a Zip drive, and placed the Zip in her bag. She would take it into the computer shop during her lunch break and ask Neil to take a look at it.
On impulse, she found the box containing her disks, slipped the disks into an envelope and propped the envelope beside her purse. She would get Neil to copy the disks for her before she risked downloading them onto her computer. After almost losing her research on Lopez, she wasn’t taking any more chances.
Just before going to bed, she picked Buster up and took him out onto the deck. The moon was up and almost full, casting a silvery light over Letty’s house, which was still in utter darkness. Repressing a shiver at the cool bite in the air, she closed the door behind her so Buster couldn’t scoot back inside and carried him across to the hedge, intending to drop him over. Just before she reached the hedge, Buster went rigid. A split second later, he exploded out of her arms and disappeared beneath a thick clump of hydrangeas.
Clutching her arm where his claws had dug in, she walked back into the house, ran the tap over the kitchen sink and cleaned the scratches. Dabbing her arm dry with a paper towel, she walked back outside, this time with a flashlight. She didn’t know if Letty had a cat door or if she routinely put Buster outside at night, but she was betting that he normally slept inside, in which case, she wasn’t comfortable with Buster being locked outside all night.
Crouching down, she directed the beam beneath the hydrangeas, but the foliage was too dense for it to penetrate more than a few feet. After searching along the thick border of shrubs that edged the backyard, Taylor decided to try another tack. For all she knew, Buster had slipped back through the hedge onto Letty’s property and, if there was a cat door, was already safely tucked up inside.
Flicking the flashlight off, she strolled through her front yard, out onto the sidewalk and carefully opened Letty’s front gate so the latch wouldn’t creak. Moonlight flooded the front yard as she walked up the neat path.
The gracious lines of the house looked faintly creepy by night. The verandas were thickly twined by gnarled stems of wisteria and climbing roses, and towering oaks and elms plunged the sides of the house and the backyard into dense shadow.
Flicking the flashlight back on, but taking care to cover most of the beam with her fingers so that only a narrow slit of light glowed through, she checked the doors and windows. If Letty didn’t have a cat door, it was possible she left a window open wide enough for Buster to get in, although with the burglaries, that wasn’t likely.
She circled the house then returned to the rear porch, which was roomy enough to accommodate a set of wicker furniture and an assortment of plants. After establishing that Buster wasn’t under the couch or either of the chairs, or crouching in the thick jungle of potted plants, she stepped back out onto the lawn, flicked the flashlight off and waited for her night vision to improve. She checked the luminous dial of her watch. Twenty minutes had passed since Buster had bolted. There was no way he could have gotten inside Letty’s house, which meant he was either still on the loose outside or he had sneaked back into her place.
A faint rustling in the trees off to her left kicked her pulse up a notch. Cursing herself for not thinking to carry a weapon, Taylor flicked the flashlight on and flooded the area beneath an ancient oak with light. Aside from a clump of lilies, the area was bare of everything but dried leaves and a few scattered acorns. She shifted the beam sideways as something small and shadowy streaked up the trunk of the oak. Her stomach muscles un
clenched. A squirrel.
Keeping the flashlight on but directing the beam away from the windows of the house in case she woke Letty, she walked through to the front yard. The squirrel hadn’t made a sound when it had bolted up the trunk of the tree. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her, but for a few brief moments the old paranoia had flooded back and she had been certain someone, not something, had been there.
After the shadowed dimness of the backyard, the combination of moonlight and street lighting was almost ludicrously bright. Letting the gate snick shut behind her, Taylor quickened her pace. Paranoid or not, checking Letty’s house over had reminded her that she had left the door to the sunroom partially open. If there was someone creeping around, they had had free access to her house for the past few minutes.
She checked the kitchen and the sitting room. Everything appeared to be as she’d left it, but the tingling feeling at her nape was still there. Keeping her tread silent, she walked through to her bedroom, placed the flashlight on the bed and retrieved her gun from the closet. Snapping the clip in place, she checked the two spare rooms, then ghosted through the rest of the house, opening doors and checking cupboards.
A sound in the direction of the sunroom froze her in place. Even though the sound had most likely been made by Buster sneaking back inside, she held the gun in a two-handed grip as she paced silently down the hall.
When she stepped into the sunroom, a furry head popped up from behind her computer monitor. Round green eyes stared at her like miniature lamps. Her gaze dropped. The source of the noise was obvious in the pens scattered across her keyboard. Buster must have knocked the jar of pens over when he had jumped up on the desk.
She closed the sunroom door and locked it before he could get out again and set the gun down on the desk. Buster was wedged in behind the monitor. If he hadn’t looked up, she wouldn’t have seen him at all, which was probably the point. He was hiding.
Walking through to the kitchen, she rinsed and dried her forearm again, then got the first aid box down from the top shelf in her pantry and dabbed her arm with antiseptic. Normally, the small pin-pricks Buster’s claws had made wouldn’t have registered, but they had punctured the still-tender scar tissue from the bullet crease, which accounted for the extra zing.
She packed the first aid box away, and made herself a cup of chamomile tea. While she waited for the tea to steep, she stared out the window at Letty’s house. The moon was still high, glinting off the windows and the bleached weatherboards. She noticed one of the curtains in the upstairs bedroom was now partially open, which indicated that she had disturbed Letty. In all probability, Letty had checked out of her window, recognized her in the bright moonlight and gone back to bed.
Carrying the tea through to the sunroom, she sat down and sipped and tried to coax Buster out from behind the computer.
The silence in the house was profound. She checked her wristwatch, surprised to see that it was close on midnight. Cold pushed through the glass doors, raising gooseflesh on her arms and reminding her of the moment she had stared into the darkness, certain something had been there. A faint shudder went down her spine and she drew the curtains, blocking out the night.
She’d had enough of darkness and creepy old houses. The paranoia and the scar on her forearm were both reminders she could have done without.
She was safe in Cold Peak. After Wilmington, Burdett had taken extra precautions. No one knew where she was, not even Dana.
No one had followed her.
Thirteen
Neil opened the rogue computer file and studied it for long seconds, blue eyes unblinking behind thick-lensed glasses. “I can tell you what it’s not, and that’s a security program, although it’s dressed up to look like one.”
He reached for the can of soda sitting beside the scrunched-up wrapper of the burger he’d just eaten for lunch and gulped a mouthful as he continued to read. “Cool.” He gave her an apologetic look. “Whoever wrote this was smart. It’s designed to mimic the security suite it bypassed.” He grinned. “Smart, but not smart enough.”
He finished the drink, crumpled the can and tossed it into the trash can beneath the counter. “Looks like it was installed about six months ago and it’s been sending stuff to this address.” He pointed at a row of code.
“You mean dialing out?”
“Not on its own, because then you’d know. It just sends while you’re online.”
“Can you locate the server?”
“Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile…” He rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a disk. “I’m guessing that you’re going to have trouble removing that sucker, so run this through your machine. It’s a program I designed to uninstall hostile software.”
She slipped the disk in her purse, then pulled out two twenties.
He looked faintly embarrassed. “You don’t have to pay me. I don’t even know if I can find the server.”
And obtaining the name of the server probably wouldn’t give her anything extra to go on. Even if she could get the server to hand over the personal details of the account, the chances were that whoever had registered it had given a false name and paid cash. But, blind alley or not, right now, she didn’t have anything else to go on.
She put the bills down on the counter. “You’ll probably have to do it in your spare time, so it’s not fair if I don’t pay. If you can locate the server, I’ll pay a bonus.”
Slipping the disks he had copied for her into her purse, she drove back to work, making a stop at her bank on the way. Aside from renting a safe-deposit box to keep her personal papers and the disks safe, she now had decisions to make regarding the money from the sale of her apartment in D.C. At the moment it was sitting in an account, but she was seriously considering buying a house in Cold Peak and she needed to check out the viability of the investment.
After signing up for a safe-deposit box and securing the disks, she requested information on mortgage rates. When she stepped out of the interview room, a familiar set of shoulders sent a mild shock through her system. Fischer, dressed in faded jeans and a white T-shirt that clung across his chest, was just finishing up with a bank teller. The bank was close to the gym, so she shouldn’t be surprised to see Fischer here.
He arrived at the door a split second before she did and waited for her to walk through ahead of him.
“How’s the ankle?”
She was aware of his focus on her legs and the fact that he was enjoying the view afforded by the short sundress she was wearing. “It’s fine.”
“If you want a lift back to work, I’m on my way there now.”
She spotted his truck, which was parked in the space directly behind her SUV, and the tension in her stomach tightened another notch. She was almost certain he knew he had parked behind her vehicle, because her SUV was parked at the gym every day she worked.
Reaching into her handbag, she pulled out a set of keys. “It’s okay, I’ve got my car.”
He shrugged and slipped dark glasses on the bridge of his nose. “It was worth a try. I’ll see you back at work.”
As she slid into the driver’s seat, she caught a glimpse of the truck in the rearview mirror. Taking her time, acutely aware of Fischer behind her, she fitted her key in the ignition and latched her seat belt, waiting for him to pull out first. When he didn’t, she realized he was waiting for her, which meant he would be tailing her all the way back to the gym.
Jaw tight, she put the car in gear, signaled and pulled out, trying to concentrate on traffic as Fischer nosed in behind her. Minutes later, she parked in the private lot behind the gym and tried to ignore the fact that Fischer, just two spaces down, was already out of his truck.
Collecting her bag, she locked the SUV and strolled toward the back door of the gym. Fischer held the door, letting her precede him into the building. The act was polite and any number of men would do exactly the same thing, but with Fischer it felt different. He wanted to make her aware of him, and he had succeeded.
What she was feeling for Fischer didn’t make any kind of sense. For weeks she had been immune. Now, suddenly, she was turned-on.
The only explanation she could come up with was that she had changed, not Fischer. Her biological clock was ticking, courtesy of the attempts on her life, and Fischer had just happened to walk into the frame.
Despite the hormones, the timing was wrong. The place was wrong. Until Lopez was caught, everything was wrong.
When she got home that evening, Letty’s house was still closed up, the curtains drawn, and Buster was lying on Taylor’s sundeck. Hooking the strap of her purse over her shoulder, she walked down the neatly kept path and knocked on Letty’s front door. She waited a couple of minutes, then knocked again.
Just to double-check, she called out then walked around the back. When she tried the back door, that was locked, too. She checked the garage, which was also locked, but when she looked in the window, the Buick was still there.
Frowning, she studied the car. Letty drove everywhere in it. If she had caught a flight out, though, it made sense that she would have gotten a taxi to the airport, because long-term parking was expensive. Either that, or her son had driven from Boston to pick her up.
Feeling uneasy, because she had assumed Letty would fill her in on when she was leaving and when she was due back, and leave a contact number just in case something went wrong, she walked back to her house.
Changing into track pants and a crop top, she went out for her evening jog. When she got home there was a truck with C. K. Hansen Lawn Mowing printed on the side parked in Letty’s driveway and she could hear a lawn mower. Walking around to the rear of the house, she waved at the man pushing the mower until he cut the engine. “Did you know Mrs. Clayton’s away on holiday?”
The guy, presumably C. K. Hansen, took off a ball cap to reveal a shaved head that went with the steel earrings punched through both ears. He wiped the sweat off his face. “It’s okay, she paid me in advance.”