She glanced at her watch—it was just past nine. There was time to do a good night’s work.
It took an act of will to lock up the boat and leave. She wanted a stiff drink, badly. Kip Barrett was not allowed, not the reality of her, not even the idea of her. Kip had her job to do and it was difficult enough without kisses getting in the way. The work, she told herself. The work is all that matters.
* * *
At first Kip simply drove. She turned randomly and found herself crossing the GW Bridge, then onto Westlake. Aurora would be faster, but all she could do was drive.
Her body trusted Tam, so did her heart. Giving into the moonlight or the chocolate or whatever that was—her head didn’t agree it was okay. Her mind, in fact, was hopping mad at her arms, wrapping so eagerly around a suspect.
Where’s your sense, girl? She could remember every word of the only time her grandfather had scolded her. He would know what to do—and she didn’t even need to ask. She knew what to do about her body and heart, and that was control them. She wasn’t an adolescent, and just because she was burning didn’t mean she got to play with fire.
After several blocks, she sped up for a green light and decided to turn. She wouldn’t have noticed the headlights that made the same turn if not for the slight squeal of the heavy sedan’s tires.
She made a couple more turns and ended back on Westlake. She thought she saw the same headlights come into her rearview mirror. The left-hand low beam was directed slightly more groundward than the right. Even as she told herself not to be paranoid she was turning off Westlake, this time going all the way over to Aurora. The lopsided headlights followed. They followed her all the way south to Broad Street, where she zipped onto Westlake again. The hair on her arms stood up. It looked like a late-model sedan from here, tan or white.
She didn’t think it was in the least paranoid to link this pursuit to her investigation, but who could know about it? Who would be scrutinizing her and Tamara? Again, horses not zebras. It was far more likely that a couple of punks had spotted a woman driving alone and thought they’d have some fun scaring her or worse. The sedan gained on her at each stop sign—not exactly threatening, but not falling back. They’d have to know she knew they were there by now, but they hadn’t tried to trick her. They must think she was stupid enough to lead them home.
She sedately drove down from the peak of First Hill. At a less tense moment she would have savored the glitter of lights stretching below her. She made a couple of quick turns and pulled into a mall parking lot, still disgorging the last shoppers of the day. She abruptly turned right down a row and zipped past a car in the process of backing out, earning an angry honk and gesture from the driver. The driver resumed backing out—no room for the sedan to get by. Kip hooted at her success.
Kip quickly pulled back onto Boren, then floored it to make the next light. It was a split second from red when she went through, but there was no cross-traffic. She kept up her speed until she made the next light, then she knew from experience that a steady 41 mph. would take her all the way to Ranier without stopping. Unless the sedan was willing to run a lot of red lights, they’d never catch her. Punks usually looked for easier prey than she had turned out to be.
She meandered down Ranier, then headed back to Broad Street and home. There was no sign of the sedan as the Camry glided into the parking garage under her building. She made sure the security gate closed completely behind her before she got out of the car. There was no traffic on the street outside, no idling motors or footsteps. Kip relaxed and gathered up her briefcase and laptop.
Though she was tired there was work to do. She followed her work habits, even though she was no longer sure she was on the case. She updated her log, noting the gist of her report to Tamara, the day and time again, and what they’d discussed. She made no mention of the delectable meal, the chocolate, and the resolve-melting passion that had erupted as she was leaving. She would kick herself for that later. Paperwork completed, she decided she should look through the reports Buck had provided her one more time.
She had scarcely removed them from her briefcase when her cell phone rang. Speak of the devil.
“I have one of your reports,” Buck announced.
“You do? But I have what I asked for.”
“One of those guys was married, so I did the wife too.”
“Oh—Nadia Langhorn?”
“Yeah, her. I want to be paid for her too.”
“Fine. I’ll get it in the morning on my way to work. Was there anything unusual about it?”
“Yeah—that’s why I’m even bothering, plus, I do want to get paid. But there was something weird. Nadia Rachel Belize, now Langhorn, was adopted the day before Tamara Sterling was, in a town about a hundred miles east. She has the same holes surrounding birth parents as Sterling. Also born in Germany.”
“Are they related?” The most bizarre explanations occurred to her first—they had both been kidnapped as children, white slavers, some kind of child porn ring moving kids around. Stop, think and listen, she told herself. That was when the Berlin Wall fell—refugees from behind the Iron Curtain?
“How would I know? Their adoption decrees won’t track back to any databases and Langhorn’s passport app has the same lack of verification that Sterling’s does.”
“They can’t both be in some kind of deep cover situation.” Buck was just being paranoid. She felt a chill when she remembered that Tam had admitted the adoptive parents weren’t real.
She had fallen from one mystery that was still a familiar pattern and into another that was beyond her experience. Right now, with her nerves shattered, her heart pounding and her body acting out some kind of hormonal lust fantasy, she knew which mystery she wanted to solve more. It was the one that was none of her business.
* * *
After a poor night’s sleep, Kip woke with a start. She had barely opened her eyes when the alarm went off. She forced herself through her morning routine, with the exception of coffee. There wasn’t enough caffeine in the world and she already had the jitters.
Though her composure was in tatters, she dressed with care. A black suit with a mixed animal print blouse came close to stylish. She even opted for a skirt and medium-height heels instead of trousers and more comfortable slides. It seemed important. She didn’t feel like a professional but at least she could look like one.
After last night’s business with the car on her tail, she kept track of cars behind her on her way to Buck’s, where she paused long enough to retrieve an envelope he heaved out the door in response to her knock. Proceeding to work, she saw nothing out of the ordinary in her rearview mirror. It had been a bunch of punks, she assured herself. Nevertheless, she was glad to get to the secure parking garage. She felt stretched like a balloon over too many worries.
Still, it felt bizarre to sit down at her desk as if nothing had happened last night between her and Tamara. As if she had nothing else to do but work on exhibits and numbering.
She waited until it seemed like most of her colleagues had settled into their own work before she pulled the report on Nadia Langhorn out of the envelope. Buck had been accurate. Mrs. Langhorn’s missing data weirdly matched up with Tamara Sterling’s. She’d taught Italian out of college before abandoning her teaching career in favor of marriage. In spite of the southern Italian looks, she’d also been born in Germany, popped into existence in the U.S. at the age of eleven and adopted by parents Kip had to assume didn’t exist any more than Tam’s did.
She told herself that it had nothing to do with anything that affected the case or her life or her heart or—
She shoved the papers into her briefcase. She didn’t know what to do next, and Tamara hadn’t given her any prompting, either. She prodded a pesky folder back into a stack only to have the whole pile unbalance and swirl across the only open place on her desk, knocking over knickknacks and what was fortunately an empty water bottle.
She caught sight of the picture she kept on her desk
of her and her grandfather, after a day’s sailing. She pulled it from under the disarray. She wished she’d spent more time at Jen’s birthday celebration. She had missed all of the summer, again. There were blue skies, somewhere, but no sign of them here, in her crowded cubicle.
Normally, she would have said she was a calm, cool, collected type, but when her boss cleared his throat behind her she shot to her feet.
“Sorry,” Emilio said immediately. “Planning your next vacation?”
She glanced at the picture still in her hand. “More like wishing I was already there.” She set the frame down where it wouldn’t get knocked over by the files again. “What can I do for you?”
“I just took a call from a new client. We haven’t worked for them before. They’re looking for a quick job. Pierce a corporate veil of a takeover threat. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
“Um…I’m not quite done with checking the exhibits. I’ve still got about four hundred.”
“Is that all? I seriously thought you wouldn’t be done until next week.”
The deadline you gave me was tomorrow, she wanted to say. Nothing for it then. She took the note from him.
“Call for more information.”
She glanced at the note. “Well, I’ll certainly see what I can dig up.”
Emilio slapped her playfully on the shoulder. “Just do your best. You’ll have my job before too long.”
“As if I want it,” Kip retorted at Emilio’s retreating back. She leaned out of her cubicle and called after him, “All that sitting around in the Jacuzzi, sipping mimosas and pulling the strings of the poor plebes who report to you. I don’t think I could take it.”
Emilio gave her a simple but eloquent hand gesture in response just as he turned the corner. It meant he loved her right back.
She called the client, took notes on the various players in the competing companies, then spent the next two hours pulling credit and corporate filing information. It was more tedious than not, but she eventually wound her way to the top dog in the corporate chain, a vast holding company for a consortium of venture capitalists. One of them was on the board of the company facing takeover—oh, the intrigues of business. She typed up her notes and e-mailed the report to Emilio.
She felt pretty good. She hadn’t even thought about Tamara. Much. She would just go on with her work and wait for Tamara to decide what next. If she didn’t hear from her by tonight, she would make contact herself.
She was down to nearly three hundred files left to go when her desk phone rang. Without lifting her gaze from the numbers she was copying, she snatched it up and said, “Barrett.”
“One would think you hadn’t eaten last night.”
“Sorry, I’m trying to meet a deadline.” Tell me what you want, Kip wanted to say. Give me a clue, anything, so my heart can beat steadily again.
“I have some information for you. And before you ask, no, it’s nothing you can trust without question since I did it myself.”
“Could you tell me more about that, please?” Kip tried to use an ordinary tone in case any of her near neighbors could hear her.
“Our keycard security was hacked, and I picked up a few traces of the programmer’s style. Just little things, the order of the steps, the coding of the workaround that kept the security protocols from issuing reports, but whoever did it probably learned their trade in North America.”
“You can tell that?”
Tamara’s answer was immediate and confident. “Yes, within a reasonable doubt. An Eastern bloc hacker does things one way, those out of southern Europe another, the Indonesian hackers have their own stamp too. It’s like accents.”
“That doesn’t narrow down our list much, does it?”
“Actually it does. There’s only three North American-based people who can do what’s being done at the banks, and I’ll assume this is all the work of the same person, given the security I had in place. Two are freelancers, and both have happily worked for various employers with ties to organized crimes.”
“The third?”
There was a pause, then, “That would be me.”
“Oh.” It’s not her, Kip thought. It just can’t be. “Was there anything else?”
“Yes. I have the lists of employees who weren’t supposed to be in the accounting file room but were. That list is distressingly long—nearly fifty.”
“Ouch.”
Tamara made a noise of displeasure. “You said it. Fifty people and not one staffer found it odd. I’m not happy.”
If this was the truth, and not all made up, it moved Kip substantially along her ETO. An outside-hire hacker and inside collaborator as a theory of the crime worked well. It would leave Tamara, in particular, in the clear. Except—oh why did there have to be an except? Except Tamara could still be responsible for the whole thing.
Just as she asked again, “Anything else?” a shadow fell across her desk.
Emilio leaned in, started to speak, then motioned he’d wait until she ended her call.
Kip knew she was blushing. He couldn’t know who was on the phone, but she felt as if he’d caught her red-handed. She put the mouthpiece against her shoulder. “Yes, boss?”
“I just wanted to say beautiful work on that job this morning. Client’s very happy.”
“Thanks. It was pretty easy.”
He left her to her phone call and when she put the receiver back up to her ear, Tamara said, “That’s everything I have.”
“Thank you. I need to think.” It was absolutely true. The next steps would take a careful tiptoe act. That is, if she wanted to treat this new information as reliable.
“I understand. Tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’ll be in touch.”
She stared at her phone, brain ticking. She was stuck at the same crossroads. One road Tamara was innocent, the other guilty. The “innocent” road was much easier. Much more plausible. Decisions and swift action could happen on that road.
The other road was dark, difficult. It ended in betrayal and pain. She didn’t want to go down that road, not in the least.
But she still could not forget, no matter how much her heart wanted her to, that the dark road existed.
* * *
“You look like hell, Tam. Let me run out and get you a big plate of something hot.” Mercedes stacked several files as she picked them up from Tam’s desk. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you skipped lunch yesterday. And I’ll bet you’re going to work this weekend.”
Tamara smiled her gratitude. Mercedes’ stated job duties did not include Mother Hen, but she liked to play the role. And she was right. Other than meals with Kip and Diane, she hadn’t been eating properly. “Order something in for both of us and we’ll keep working on this report.”
Mercedes grinned with approval, having almost forgiven her for not spilling details about the rapidly fading bruise. “I’ll be right back. While I’m gone, you think of something relaxing to do this weekend. You need a break. It’s only Thursday. Not too late to get theater tickets or something else fun.” She was still making suggestions as she closed the office door behind her.
A moment later the intercom beeped. “Hank Jefferson is on two. Do you feel like cole slaw?”
“I’ll take it and I’d love cole slaw.”
Mercedes chuckled and hung up.
“What do you hear, Hank?”
“I hear things that are not too good.” Hank’s usually easy-going tone was noticeably absent. “I’m also sending you an expense claim you’re not going to believe. It took a lot of drinks and lunch at Morimoto to get Avery Jessup to tell me why Big Blue canceled.”
“I’ll sign it,” Tamara said. “What did you find out?”
“Well, I’ll just be blunt because this is all the biggest load of bull I’ve ever heard. You are stealing from the company to pay for a jet-set lifestyle including drugs, ladies like that model Cantu, plus gambling. You’re also an overbearing tyrant and most of your senior staff is on the verge o
f quitting.”
Tamara found she couldn’t swallow. She managed a couple of quick breaths, then said hoarsely, “Let’s take that from the top.”
“I’m not kidding. Somewhere someone started what is getting to be a viable rumor—it’ll be in the Journal’s ‘On the Street’ column any day now. It’s bull. I told the client so, but he insisted he got it from a very, very reliable source. An inside source.”
Tamara closed her eyes. This rumor had to have something to do with the embezzling. The same person or persons. It was time to trust someone. She and Hank went back to the Bureau. They’d worked long hours together and she’d never been uncertain of his loyalty or ethics. If she couldn’t trust Hank, of all people, she was in deeper trouble than she knew.
“You there, Tam?”
“There’s more to this than I’ve told you,” Tamara began. “Someone is stealing from us.” She succinctly filled in what Kip had unearthed.
“Wow,” Hank said when Tamara was done. “You think the theft and these rumors are related?”
“Yes—I think I am, or SFI in general is, the target of both. Think about it. Why would someone who could do this think so small? And they’ve carefully avoided the trust accounts, which could borrow trouble with unexpected parties. It’s us—me—they’re out to destroy.”
“If their goal is to destroy your credibility and take SFI out of the picture, this would do it. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Start reminding your press contacts that there are some people who would stop at nothing to assassinate my character. Or to make sure I wasn’t credible as a witness.” That could well be it, she thought. She would have Mercedes pull together a list of open dockets. She should have already taken care of getting that done.
“I don’t know if it’ll help, but I’ll do it right away. Diane up to speed on this?”
“She doesn’t know about the embezzlement. I’ll tell her when she gets back in town. She’s back up here tomorrow night, I think. She’s dealing with her own rumors.”
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