by Leah Braemel
Oh God, maybe he’d heard something. Chad must have sensed her worry. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “He’ll be all right.”
“You don’t know that. You’re just saying that.”
“He’s a survivor. Now let’s go into Sam’s office and find out for sure, all right?”
Once she was seated in his office, Sam sat at his desk and glanced between Chad and John Lake, his IT manager and fellow Minnesotan, his frown deepening. “First off, Sandy, I want you to know that I consider you a valuable part of this company.”
Oh shit. This wasn’t about Troy. If it was, John wouldn’t be in on the conversation.
“I’ve never had a problem with your work,” he continued. “You’re conscientious and you keep this office running better than any previous executive assistant I’ve had.”
“Thank you.” Oh, God, this didn’t sound good. There was a but coming, wasn’t there? Was Hauberk having financial difficulties? Was she about to be laid off?
“I know you’re trusted with a lot of private information but there are some things in this office that you have no need to know. That’s why some files are not open to you.”
What was he getting at? “I know.”
His brows drew together so hard a line formed between them. “You know John has a program set up to alert us if anyone tries to get into the secure files, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Did you also know we monitor all attempts to access those files?”
“Yes.” She shook her head. “What’s this about?”
John handed her a printout. “Your ID is shown as trying to access protected files numerous times throughout the weekend.”
She flipped through the printouts. Most of it was gibberish but her username had been highlighted in fluorescent pink. The first attempt was Friday night at 11:35 PM, the last Sunday at noon. “There must be some error in the program. I wasn’t online at all this weekend. I wasn’t even home.”
“Sandy, the system logs the IP address of everyone who logs in.” John pointed to a number following her username. “Each connection on your ISP is assigned a unique number. And that’s the number that comes up every time you log in from home. We checked. Your user name. Your IP number. They all match.”
“We need you to be honest with us.” Sam pressed his thumbs together as he leaned forward. “We can tell you were looking for the location of our safe houses, Sandy. If that information gets out, that puts our clients and our agents at risk. Are you prepared to accept the responsibility if someone gets killed?”
“This wasn’t me, Sam. Honest. I didn’t even take my laptop home this weekend. It was sitting right here in the office. You can ask Scott. He’ll vouch for me.”
“Do you have a password on your router?” John asked.
“Yes, of course. One of your guys set it up for me when I started working here.”
“Have you changed the password lately? Or given it to anyone else?” John took over the questions.
“Jazz knows it—we share the apartment—but she doesn’t know either my VPN password or my Hauberk passwords. So I don’t think it could be her. Besides, she was with me both Saturday and Sunday.”
“Is Jazz short for Jasmine? And what’s her last name?” Chad tapped the screen on his tablet, Sam ready at his computer.
“Jazz is her nickname. Her real name is Jessica Guidry, but she couldn’t have done this. I told you, she was with me all weekend.” Okay, not Friday night but that shouldn’t matter, should it? The logins were the entire weekend, not just Friday.
“What does Jessica do, Sandy? Is it possible she needs money?”
Shoot. They’d find out if she lied. “She tells people she works at a call center for a pizza company but she’s really an exotic dancer at a place named The Blue Angel off Woodmont. I know she’s got money in the bank—she’s saving up to go back to college.” She leaned forward in her chair. “She doesn’t think I know about it though, so please don’t tell her.”
Sam snorted. “Why the hell do you need to live with a stripper, Sandy? We pay you enough that you could rent your own place.”
“Because when I moved here I needed somewhere to live. She was my friend and she offered. And she’s still my friend so I don’t see why I need to move out. I like having someone there, all right? Holy cow, Sam, I can’t believe you’re judging her like this. She’s trying to find another job but she doesn’t have many skills other than being able to dance so it’s not like there’s a lot out there, especially in this economy.”
“I’m not judging her. But why the deception, Sandy? Why lie to you about it?” Sam asked.
“You’d have to ask her, but I’ve always assumed it’s because she was embarrassed about it.”
“How long have you known her?” Chad asked this time.
“In person, since I moved to D.C. three years ago, but we’d been chatting online a couple years before that. She’s a good person and I like her a lot. She gets me.”
John cleared his throat. “Do you write your passwords down, Sandy?”
Thankful that he was getting the conversation off of Jazz, Sandy held up her spiral-bound notebook. “Do you have any idea how many passwords I have? I have the laptop’s power-on password, which is different from my VPN password. Then there’s my email password, the password to Sam’s email for when I have to check it for him. Not to mention Chad’s password, and Troy’s. And all my personal email addys. I can’t keep track of them all. They change every month, and none of them make any sense. I can’t remember passwords that are nonsense like Tm79Bx3. It’s impossible to remember them all.”
“Where was your notebook this weekend?”
“On my desk at home. I went out Friday night, came home to pick up a change of clothes on Saturday morning and Jazz left with me. The apartment has been empty and the security system turned on since then. So unless there was a burglar—which your security system should have registered—no one could have used it.” Damn, now she was getting pissed. “Look, I really think you’re barking up the wrong tree here.”
“We’re hoping we are.” John’s patient manner only served to tick her off more. “Does anyone else have the password to your router? Because they could access it without actually getting into your apartment.”
Oh. All right, now she saw what he was getting at, she calmed down. “Jazz’s boyfriend has used our system to check his email. Well, he was her boyfriend but they broke up Friday night.” Something big must have happened but Jazz had refused to say exactly what. She wondered if perhaps it had something to do with this. But wouldn’t Jazz have told her? “His name is Mitch Young. He’s a fund manager at some financial firm in Silver Springs. I don’t know anything more about him, but Jazz could tell you.”
Chad tapped Mitch’s name into the search box and pressed Go. “We’ll check him out. How about any other friends who’ve stayed over and needed to check their email?”
“Maybe a couple friends.” She gave John their names. “Jazz may have told a couple of her friends too. But that only lets them get on the router not into the Hauberk system, right? Because I swear I’ve never given my Hauberk passwords to anyone. And if someone did get in, they wouldn’t have to do it from my apartment, would they? They could be in Asia or Europe and send out some false signal making it look like they’re in the area, couldn’t they?”
“They could, but they aren’t,” John said quietly. “We’ve tracked the hacker and every single time we’ve traced him back to your location. I’m sorry, Sandy, but we use state-of-the-art tracking systems. They’re not wrong.”
Oh crap. There had to be some other explanation.
A moment passed, and another before Sam broke the silence. “Is there anyone else who has a key to your apartment and would know the code to the security system?”
“Just Jazz knows the code, of course. And I’m assuming the landlord has a key. And I guess someone here at Hauberk probably knows the security code?” Troy ha
d it too, but since he was out of the country, there was no need to mention him, right?
“Is Jazz home right now?”
“No, she said she’s got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.”
“All right.” Chad looked between Sandy and Sam. “I want to send Scott and Andy and one of John’s technicians over to your place to check out the system. Maybe one of her neighbors is piggybacking off the connection.” He looked directly at Sandy. “They’ll check your router’s security and set you up with another system.”
“Of course. Let me get my key.”
Chad held up his hand before she stood. “One other thing, who else knew you were going to be away for the weekend? It’s possible that whoever you were with deliberately invited you so they could use your system without interference.”
“Scott invited me to stay at Troy’s place so we could paint it while he was away.” It wasn’t a lie. Exactly.
“Chad, why don’t you get started on checking on Miss Guidry and her boyfriend? John, have your guys look into Sandy’s work laptop.” Sam locked his gaze with hers. “I want to talk to Sandy alone for a moment.”
Once the door closed behind them, Sam sat back in his chair. “You may have been with Scott and your friend Jazz on Saturday and Sunday but you were with Troy Friday night. I find it interesting that you failed to mention that detail. Anything you care to tell me?”
“That’s really none of your business.”
His jaw jutted out for a second before he nodded. “Just tell me he didn’t force you to go there.”
There was no use asking where there was. But how did he know?
“Of course I wasn’t forced to go. Troy wouldn’t do that.” Oh God. What if Sam had been one of the members who had been watching them? Her cheeks burned red hot. Damn her father for passing on his fair skin. “You weren’t there, watching, were you?”
A strange look crossed his face and he mouthed watching. “No, I wasn’t watching. I wasn’t even in the damned house—no one was allowed in until after midnight. But I did see you get out of the limo and walk up to the front door.”
No one was allowed in? But that couldn’t be right. There had been people there. She’d heard them.
“Damn it, Sandy.” Sam tossed his pen onto the desk. “I hope you both know what you’re doing, because if this whatever you have with Troy goes sour, I don’t want to lose either of you.”
“I have no plans to leave Hauberk, but again, not your business. And you have no right to judge considering you’re dating one of your employees.”
“Fine. You’ve made your point, now why don’t you go back to your desk? John’s people need that key to your apartment.”
Sandy stood, wanting to say something more, but Sam had already picked up his phone. Fuck it. If he didn’t like that she was seeing Troy, that was his problem. If he didn’t like the idea of them going to the club, that was his problem too. She returned to her desk to find one of the computer geeks in the process of unhooking her laptop from its docking station.
“I’ll only be a minute. We’re switching it out with a new one so we can run diagnostics on yours and make sure the hacker didn’t leave any password programs behind. Make sure you don’t download anything onto the new one, will you?”
His triceps burning, Scott flexed his fingers around the barbell and finished the last of his reps. Where the hell was Troy? He was damned sure he wasn’t anywhere near the Congo as he’d told both him and Sandy. But where was he? And why the hell hadn’t he at least phoned Sandy to let her know he was all right? Damn it, the man hadn’t a clue about communication some days.
“I tried to reach you Friday night. Where were you?”
Scott glanced at Andy as he set his barbell back on the rack. “I was busy.”
“I didn’t have to be a cop to make that assumption.” Andy lowered his voice, “I figured you were up at the club since you weren’t answering your phone.”
Shit. All he needed was Andy digging into his whereabouts. The cop could be like a pitbull some days. “What did you want?”
Before he could answer, Chad appeared at the gym’s door. “Scott. Andy. Hit the showers then come into Sam’s office for a minute, will you? We’ve got a job for you.”
Less than ten minutes later, Scott followed Andy into Hauberk’s management sanctum. He slowed as he passed Sandy’s desk, concerned about the way she avoided looking up at them, instead of greeting them with her normal bright smile. “You all right, Sandy?”
“Fine.” Except she didn’t raise her eyes.
If there was someone less fine, it was the woman in front of him. What the hell was going on? Shit, had something happened to Troy?
“Sandy?” He crouched down beside her and softly asked, “Come on, honey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m fine.” Tread carefully. He’d learned long ago that when women said they were fine, they meant the opposite. From the way she snapped out the words, something definitely wasn’t fine in Sandy’s world.
“Scott? You coming?” Andy called from the doorway to Sam’s office.
“Yeah, in a minute.” He stayed squatting in front of her. “Come on, Sandy. Talk to me.”
Her eyes rose to meet his gaze. Instead of the tears he’d expected, her whole expression blazed with anger. “Someone hacked my Hauberk account. They’ve been using my system to look for Hauberk’s safe houses. If I get my hands on the douchebag who did it, I’ll cut his balls off.”
Shit. At least it was something containable, not that Troy had been hurt or broken up with her or anything. “It’s okay, beautiful. We’ll cut them off for you. And look at it this way—it could have been worse. They could have gotten to you.”
“Yeah, I know you’re right. I feel violated.”
The mood inside Sam’s office was grim. There were no chairs left so he and Andy stood by the closed door. Chad was already there, looking just as pissed off as Scott felt. The IT manager, John Lake, occupied the other visitor’s chair, his grey hair sticking up on end, bags under his eyes from too many long nights from the looks of it. Frustration radiated from Sam as he stared out the window, his fists balled on his thighs.
“Gentlemen, we believe we have a possible suspect as our hacker. One Mitch Young—he’s been dating Sandy’s roommate Jessica Guidry. Scott, I understand you’ve met her? And that she was with you and Sandy this weekend?”
“Yeah, though I was told her name was Jazz. As far as I know, she was in the apartment alone when I was there Saturday morning. I guess it’s possible someone was in her bedroom but I didn’t see anyone.”
“How’d she act when you arrived?”
Guilty, now he looked back on it. “She was jumpy. She didn’t want to get near me. Kept her back to me and stared out the window until Sandy mentioned she wanted to go back to Troy’s and paint. All of a sudden Jazz was all ‘hey, I want to help’ and next thing she was packed and pushing Sandy and me out the door as if she couldn’t get out of the place quick enough. Rest of the weekend, she was hard to judge. Sometimes she was real quiet, others fidgety. Come to think of it, it was like she was nervous. Sandy figured it was probably because she and her boyfriend had had a fight but now I’m wondering.”
Sam withdrew the cigar he habitually kept in his shirt pocket and toyed with it. From the teeth marks on the end, Scott wondered if it was the same one he’d kept in his pocket for the last six months, ever since he’d promised Rosie he’d give up smoking. “D’you think she was trying to distract Sandy and used that as an excuse to keep her away from their place?”
He lifted one shoulder for a second and let it drop in a half-hearted shrug. “Could be.”
“All right, then for now we’ll treat them both as suspects.” Chad thumbed the button on his phone. Both Scott and Andy pulled out their notebooks to take their own notes. “Here’s what we’ve found out so far. Jessica Ann Guidry. Twenty-eight years old. Single. Never married. No criminal record. No outstanding warrants or arrests. A couple speed
ing tickets over the period of five years. Not a registered voter. According to Sandy, she’s currently employed as a dancer at the Blue Angel out in Alexandria.”
Andy hissed in a breath. “That’s a rough joint. Or it used to be back when I was on the force.”
“Dancer?” Scott leaned forward, glancing between his partner and his boss. “Am I right in thinking by dancer you’re talking exotic?”
“Yup, the Blue Angel is G-string and pasties optional. We busted quite a few of their girls for their extra services—” Andy curled his fingers and made air quotes, “—while I was in Vice. Bouncers didn’t enforce the no-touch rules. Owner didn’t care either. I’ve heard that the owner sold out last year so I guess it’s possible they’ve cleaned up their act.”
“When Sandy introduced us, she said Jazz works at a call center and Jazz didn’t correct her.” Then again, would a woman volunteer she was a possible hooker to someone like him?
Chad’s scowl deepened. “Apparently Ms. Guidry prefers not to tell her best friend her real profession and Sandy lets her get away with it.”
“So we’re keeping her on the list of suspects,” Sam added. “If she’s lyin’ about that who knows what else she’s lyin’ about.”
Chad turned back to his report. “Parents are divorced. Father’s last known address was in Richmond, Virginia, dropped off the radar approximately twelve years ago. Mother currently resides in Ocala, Florida, and works as a housekeeper at a no-name motel. From what we’ve been able to dig up so far, until she started working as a dancer four years ago, she was habitually late paying her credit cards. She’s now got over twenty grand in a bank account and her credit cards are at a zero balance. Mostly cash deposits from the looks of it, so there’s no way to check if she’s making her money from more than just stripping.”
“Maybe she wants to get out of the dancing business,” Andy speculated. “If someone offered her enough money for access to the router and Sandy’s accounts.”