by Diane Kelly
Trey came up behind me, nuzzled my neck, and swept me up in his arms. It would’ve been more romantic if he hadn’t grunted with the effort, but I’d take what I could get. He carried me into the freezer and set me down in the middle of the small room, the dim lamplight glinting off the stainless steel walls which gave off faint, warped reflections, like funhouse mirrors.
Trey glanced at our reflections on the wall. “This’ll be kinky.”
I pushed the door almost closed, leaving it open only a crack to ensure I could hear the phone if someone called in with an emergency. We had our own emergency going on in the station, a crime of passion to commit. As fast as we could, we freed ourselves from our clothing, both of us leaving our socks on to save time. Rather than risk falling off the top bunk and breaking our necks or cramming ourselves into the narrow bottom bunk, we yanked the thin mattresses off both bunks and tossed them side by side on the floor. I quickly spread the clean sheets and blanket over them.
Trey was booted up and ready. I was logged on and prepared for input. We wasted no time with foreplay.
The first time we made love was frantic and rough, a much-needed release. The second time we paced ourselves, taking more time, giving each other more attention. The third time was a fun, lazy bonus, with as many laughs as moans.
Exhausted, we lay in silence for a few moments. My head was pressed to Trey’s chest, listening to his heartbeat as it eventually recovered and slowed back to normal. His body felt warm against mine, the hair on his legs tickling my thigh as I draped it over him. I wished the freezer could freeze time, keeping us in this moment forever so that Wednesday would never come, so Trey would never leave.
After a few minutes of bliss, I glanced at my watch. Dang. “Bernie’ll be here soon. We better get our clothes on.”
I finished dressing before Trey and stepped out of the freezer, leaving him behind to put the rest of his clothes on. I was putting on a fresh pot of coffee for Bernie when the emergency line rang.
I darted to the front counter and grabbed the receiver. “Jacksburg PD. What’s your emergency?”
“I fell,” came a man’s voice.
“Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance?”
“No. I’m not hurt. In fact, I feel great. I fell in love.”
Trey. I groaned though my heart pumped like there was no tomorrow. “That’s so corny.”
He chuckled into his cell phone, and I could hear his laugh both through the receiver and through the cracked door behind me. “It may be corny, Marnie, but it’s true. A man only lies about being in love if he’s trying to get into a woman’s pants. I’ve already gotten in your pants three times tonight so you know I’m being honest.”
I held the phone, unable to speak or move, unable to emotionally deal with the fact that his words simultaneously brought me intense joy and immense grief. Footsteps sounded behind me and Trey stepped around the front of the counter, sitting down on one of the counter stools, his cell phone still held to his ear.
“Well?” he asked through the phone. “Do you love me, too?”
Slowly, I set the receiver down, my eyes brimming with tears. I blinked them back so he’d be more than a mere blur in front of me. “What if I do love you, Trey? What good will it do us? You’re leaving in three days.”
When I turned away, he stood, setting his phone on the counter, grabbing my shoulders and forcing me to face him.
“So you do love me, then?”
The tear that escaped and ran down my cheek gave him my answer. Of course I loved him. Completely. Absolutely. Desperately.
“Come out to San Jose,” he pleaded. “See what it’s like out there. You might like California.”
“I belong here, Trey.” I’d forsaken my family and friends to move to Dallas with Chet, and I’d ended up lonely in a city of three million people who constantly seemed to be moving a hundred miles an hour. I couldn’t live like that again.
I blinked back the tears. “Why don’t you come back here? You’ve told me you like Hockerville. You still call it home.”
Trey dropped his hands from my shoulders. “You know I can’t find a decent job here.”
“You’ve had plenty to do,” I reminded him, even though we’d already been through this before. “Working at the school, putting together that website for the Chamber of Commerce—”
“That’s easy stuff, Marnie. I’d go out of my mind if that’s all I did. I didn’t spend four years in college and another getting my masters in computer science just to upgrade systems. I need to be on the cutting edge. I need something challenging. Silicon Valley is where all of that is happening.”
“You told me the traffic out there is a nightmare. You told me that the price of real estate is outrageous.” My voice rose in volume and pitch, sounding as frantic and distraught as I felt. “You said—”
“All of that is true, Marnie. But it doesn’t change the fact that I have a great job out there, a job I really like.”
We stared intently into each other’s eyes as if each of us were trying to will the other into submission. Clearly we’d reached an impasse. There was no point in further discussion. For both of us, happiness was not only a function of the people in our lives, but of purpose, of place. We were both mature enough to know that love alone isn’t everything, isn’t sufficient by itself. Love could lead to resentment and regret, love could backfire if it required too many sacrifices by one person or the other.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a moment, forcing myself to mentally switch gears. “I don’t want to spend what little time we have left arguing.” I opened my eyes and looked at Trey. “As long as you’re here, would you mind actually taking a look at our computer system? It crashed when I was in here earlier today.”
Trey cocked his head. “What were you doing in here on a Sunday?”
Uh-oh. I couldn’t tell him I’d been researching the Ninja’s owner. I used the excuse I had handy, the same one I’d given Linda earlier. “Catching up on paperwork.”
Trey followed me over to my booth. He slid onto the bench and I slid in next to him. He leaned down to push the button on the tower under the booth. The machine emitted a loud whirring noise, the screen giving off an occasional flicker. Trey angled his head as he listened. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Trey listened for a few more seconds, then climbed under the table, wrestled the case out from beneath the booth, and set it on the tabletop, the back of the unit facing him. He spent a few seconds examining the case. “Got a screwdriver?”
I went to look in the department’s junk bin stashed behind the counter at the dispatch desk. After searching through miscellaneous office supplies and tools, I found a small flathead screwdriver and took it to Trey.
He removed the computer’s back panel and gently pulled out the machine’s guts, boards with chips and circuits and wires. He played around with them for a bit, then rendered his diagnosis. “Your power supply’s going out.”
Despite the power supply problem, Trey managed to get my computer up and running and, before I knew what he was doing, he’d backtracked into the searches I’d run that morning. The Ninja’s vehicle registration record popped up on the screen, showing the owner as Bartholomew Edmund Jonasili.
Trey stared at the name for a few seconds, his face contorted in confusion, then it morphed into anger. He turned to me. “I’m not even gone yet and you were checking up on the motorcycle guy?”
There was no denying it. I nodded. But I also fibbed. “He hasn’t contacted the station yet. I need to track him down, see if he wants to file a report. Insurance companies usually ask for a copy of the police report.”
“If he wanted to file a report, he would’ve contacted you.” Lightning flashed in his eyes. “Here I am like an idiot telling you I love you, and meanwhile you’re trying to hook up with someone else? Has our relationship just been a game to you?”
I shook my head. “No, Trey! It’s not like that at all.”
He cros
sed his arms over his chest. “Then how about you tell me what it is like, Marnie.”
I paused, looking down at my lap. When I looked up, tears were running down my cheeks, tears I didn’t bother to fight or wipe away. “It’s going to kill me when you leave, Trey. I . . . I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. If you and I can’t be together, I need some hope for . . . something.”
Trey’s face softened and we sat in silence for a few seconds, both of us trying to come to terms with our hopeless situation, our conflicting emotions.
Finally, Trey gave a frustrated sigh. “Might as well check out the other units while I’m here.” I stood to let him out of the booth, and he spent a few minutes booting up each of the other computers and checking our server, scribbling notes on a yellow sticky-note pad as he went along.
I perched on Dante’s booth while he jotted some notes, glancing down at his illegible chicken scratch on the notepad. “What’s that say, venus?”
“Virus. You need new virus protection software. The one you’ve got installed is way out of date.”
“Everything we’ve got is out of date.”
Trey went online and submitted an order to a computer supply company, opting for express shipping. He consulted the screen. “The part should be here Wednesday morning by ten. The virus software can be downloaded from the internet. I can install them for you before I leave for the airport.”
Wednesday. It would be the last time I’d see Trey before he went back to California. And it was coming much too soon.
CHAPTER THIRTY
POOR PENMANSHIP
When I greeted Selena at the station Monday morning, she gestured toward the cell behind her. “What are the mattresses doing on the floor?”
Oops. Trey and I had forgotten to put them back on the bunks after last night’s sexual tri-fecta. “Janitor must’ve cleaned back there.” That would be the day. The lazy guy only cleaned the cell once a month. But with as little as we paid him, I wasn’t about to complain. “I’ll take care of it.”
After returning the mattresses to the bunks, I slid into my booth. I supposed I could have looked up the Ninja’s registration and obtained the address for Bartholomew Jonasili, but there’d be time for that after Trey left. Instead, I called the bank that had issued the the card to Taylor Heidenheimer, whose application I was still waiting on, along with Logan Mott’s. When I told them I had a possible third fraudulent application, they escalated my call, transferring me to a supervisor who agreed to get the applications and statements e-mailed to me ASAP. The bank staff may not give a rat’s ass about Taylor, Logan, or Zane, but they cared about their bottom line and didn’t want to end up with a bunch of uncollectible accounts. I didn’t know whether the applications would yield any useful information but at least it was a place to start.
After completing the call to the bank, I headed out on the police bike to keep an eye on motorists. Tiffany passed me, heading the opposite direction as I went down Main. Radar indicated she was eleven miles over the speed limit, but I decided to cut her some slack under the circumstances. Despite all the crap she’d given me, I pitied her. It must be hard to find out your father was a lying, cheating son-of-a-bitch. With daddy now in jail, she’d probably be cut off, have to take out a student loan and—God forbid!—transfer to a public university.
It was a slow morning, only two speeders, one expired registration, and one seatbelt violation. Around noon, I grabbed some takeout at the Burger Doodle drive-thru and returned to the station. I settled in at my booth with my burger and logged into my computer, fighting the urge to shout “hooray!” when the waning power supply cooperated and the machine booted up. After logging in, I pulled up my e-mails. In my inbox sat a response from the bank’s legal department with multiple attachments.
I took a big bite of my burger and chewed while I read the e-mail. Attached are the documents you requested. We have been unable to reach these customers at the phone number provided on their applications. We have frozen each account pending verification of the cardholder’s identity.
Good. Maybe the frozen accounts would slow down the identity thief.
I pulled up the attachments. The first was a credit card application in the name of Logan Mott. The second was an application in the name of Taylor Heidenheimer. The third was an application in Zane’s name. To my surprise, all three forms were handwritten. That fact seemed unusual given that many financial transactions were handled online now and the proverbial “paper trail” was a nearly outdated concept from the pre-digital world. These days, most trails were electronic. The statements, which were also attached, showed several purchases made on each card from upscale department stores. No restaurants, gas stations, or grocery stores were listed. The identity thief evidently only used the cards for online shopping and hadn’t attempted to use a card in person. Smart strategy. A security camera at a bricks and mortar location could have easily recorded images of the thief and any vehicle the thief might have been driving.
After clicking my mouse to print out the documents, I rounded them up from the printer and carried them back to my desk, laying the applications side-by-side on the tabletop for comparison. The children’s names were printed in small blocks across the top of the forms. On all three forms, the box in which the applicant was to identify themselves as a Ms., Mrs., or Mr. were left blank, probably on purpose. The home address listed on each of the forms was 612 Renfro, the Parker place. The social security numbers for each of the kids matched the ones the parents had provided. So far, nothing I’d read was unexpected or useful.
My eyes moved to the bottom of the pages. The signature lines contained a left-slanted signature. The T in Taylor was pointed, the cross line angled down on both sides of the vertical line, making the letter look like an arrow. The I’s in Heidenheimer and Nichols were punctuated with angled slashes rather than dots. The small T’s in Mott were likewise crossed with angled slashes.
My pulse picked up speed. I think I’ve seen this handwriting before. But where? When?
I racked my brain, closing my eyes to think, but I came up empty. Could the guilty party be someone I knew? Someone from church? An old high school classmate who’d signed my yearbook? One of the many residents who’d come by the station to pay a traffic fine? A server who’d taken my order on a notepad? A client of Dad’s who’d paid him by check?
So much for brain power. The only handwriting I could remember with any clarity was Trey’s, and his illegible chicken scratch looked nothing like this.
The same phone number was listed on all of the applications. The 214 prefix told me the phone had been purchased in the Dallas area. Not a surprise. Given the lack of retail options in the area, many locals drove to Dallas to shop. I logged into a reverse phone number lookup website and typed the number in, but the search yielded only the name of a prepaid cell phone provider. There was no way to pinpoint who had purchased the device. Thanks to prepaid cell phones, criminals could communicate without their calls being traced since law enforcement had difficulty linking the phone numbers to the guilty parties.
“Selena,” I called. “Can I borrow your cell phone?”
She looked up from her computer, where she was playing Mall-a-Palooza, having worked her way up from the Level One Clearance Rack to the Level Ten Trunk Show. “Something wrong with the phone on your desk?”
“I don’t want Jacksburg PD or my name coming up on recipient’s caller ID.” No sense letting the identity thief know the cops were closing in, and allow the thief to cover his or her tracks. Of course the identify thief was probably already wondering where the orders that had been delivered earlier in the week had gone, but maybe the thief would think someone else had stolen them from the Parkers’ porch.
Selena walked over to my desk and handed me her phone before returning to her station behind the front counter. I dialed the number on the application. The line rang thirty-two times before I finally gave up and disconnected. I glanced back at the application. The same numbe
r that had been listed as the personal phone number for the applicants was also listed as their work phone number. Their alleged employer was “Made-Up Manufacturing, Inc.,” a fictitious business if ever I’d heard of one. A quick internet search told me that my suspicions were correct. There was no such business.