The Ex Who Hid a Deadly Past

by Sally Berneathy

  She opened the closet door. Her clothes and vacuum cleaner were packed tightly into the small space with several boxes crammed under and behind them. The boxes could have been searched and moved and rearranged. She didn’t pay a lot of attention to their condition or placement.

  “You never were a very good housekeeper.” Charley stood beside her, peering into the closet.

  “You never were a very good husband.”

  He left.

  It would take a long time to search through the contents of the closet. Were recorders sensitive enough to pick up her voice from inside a box shoved behind clothes? Surely not.

  This was ridiculous.

  “I think I found something,” Charley said.

  Amanda’s heart fluttered then stabilized. Something. Could be a dust bunny or another stray sock.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Over here, on this ugly lamp shade your stupid sister put in here.”

  “Hey! Don’t call my sister stupid.”

  “You called her—”

  “I never called her stupid, and it doesn’t matter what I called her. She’s my sister. You don’t get to call her anything.” She moved closer to the lamp on her bedside table. “I don’t see anything except that...that interesting lamp shade.”

  “Here.” He pointed to the side of the shade next to the wall. “Look inside that fold.”

  Amanda peered closely at the area beside his finger. “I still don’t see anything.” She pushed aside a pleat in the purple fabric and gasped.

  A metal disk about the size of a quarter.

  Someone had placed that object in her lamp shade, and she had slept beside it for at least four nights since she’d returned from vacation.

  Maybe longer.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Amanda gazed at the shiny object in the palm of her hand. “Is that a...?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

  “A recorder?” Charley supplied. “Maybe. I don’t think it’s a miniature flying saucer.”

  Her legs turned to spaghetti. She sank onto the bed, unable to stand.

  Conjecture was one thing, but actually finding a device in her apartment, knowing someone had invaded her home...that was creepy. And scary. And confusing.

  Why did somebody do this? Why did that somebody post her conversation on the Internet and make it sound as if she was still in love with Charley?

  Somebody was pretending to be her in the bar.

  Somebody had murdered a man and left her hairs on the body.

  Somebody was slandering her on the Internet.

  Who could be that angry at her?

  Lenny was the only person she’d upset recently.

  And he was dead.

  That ruled him out.

  “Come on, Amanda,” Charley said. “Let’s confront Dawson with this...this thing. I’ll bet he’ll crack and confess when he sees it.”

  The small metal object was cold and heavy in Amanda’s hand. Everything pointed to Dawson, but it made no sense.

  “All right,” she said softly. “We’ll talk to Dawson.” She made no move to stand.

  “Come on,” Charley urged.

  Amanda wrapped her hand around the disk and rose slowly. “Okay. Let’s go talk to him. Get this cleared up.”

  She walked outside, down the steps, into her shop.

  When had her light-weight

  boots changed to ten-pound lead weights?

  Dawson sat on one side of the work area, his attention focused on an engine he was rebuilding.

  She crossed the vast area in her heavy boots, more exhausted with each step.

  “Dawson...”

  He looked up from his work. “Yes?”

  She stood motionless for a moment. She’d been devastated when she first learned of Charley’s betrayals. She’d trusted him enough to marry him. She trusted Dawson enough to hire him, to give him her friendship. She didn’t want to believe he’d betrayed her too.

  “Show it to him,” Charley ordered.

  Amanda extended her hand and lifted her fingers one at a time to reveal the object. “What...?” The word came out as a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What do you know about this?”

  Dawson took the object, pushed his glasses higher on his nose, and examined it. “An XRZ 710 microphone? It’s okay, depending on what you want to use it for. It’ll relay sound adequately a few feet, but if you want to transmit music and keep the tones clear, you need a better quality microphone.” He handed it back to her. “I’ve got a couple with longer range and less distortion if you want to borrow one.”

  Amanda blinked. Giggled. Had to refrain from laughing with relief. That was not the answer of a guilty man. She leaned over and hugged him.

  He blushed.

  “So it’s a microphone, not a recorder?” she asked.

  “Yes, a microphone. It could transmit to a recorder within a ten to fifteen foot range. It’s not a very powerful microphone.”

  “That means there’s a recorder hidden ten to fifteen feet from your bedroom,” Charley said.

  Amanda shivered. Another foreign object in her apartment? In the shop? Not likely to be outside with the current weather.

  “I’ll find it.” Charley left the room.

  “Where did you get it?” Dawson asked.

  Amanda hesitated then settled on a sort-of truth. “I found it.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t pay for it. It’s not quality equipment.”

  Her tormentor didn’t use quality equipment. What did that mean? He or she had limited funds? Didn’t care enough to buy the very best?

  “Where did you find it?” Dawson asked.

  This was the opportunity to update Dawson on what was going on, ask for his help. He wasn’t involved. She was certain of that. Ninety-nine point nine percent certain.

  “In my bedroom, hidden in the folds of my lamp shade.”

  “The lamp shade your sister brought?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she put it there?”

  “Jenny? No. She’s annoying and self-centered, but this isn’t something she’d do. Anyway, there’s more to the story.”

  Dawson waited for her to continue, his expression curious with no hint of guilty knowledge.

  “Did you give anybody the password to our Internet?” she asked.

  His look changed to one of indignation. “No, of course not. Why are you asking?”

  “Our Wi-Fi network may have been hacked.”

  “What? Why do you think that? I tried to make our password almost impossible to hack, but almost impossible isn’t totally impossible. I’m sorry. What happened?”

  “Somebody made a recording of me having a conversation then posted something to the Internet that appeared to come from here.”

  “Somebody? Something? From here? From our IP address?”

  “Yes.”

  He scrambled to his feet. “What is it? Do you have the URL? Do you want me to take it down?”

  “I don’t have the URL.”

  “If it was posted from our IP address, I can probably track it.”

  Amanda wanted that awful piece of garbage off the Internet and had no idea how to do it herself, but if Dawson saw it, she would have to tell him about Charley, have to convince this intelligent, literal-minded man that ghosts existed, that one of them spent a lot of time in the same workplace as he did, watched him, talked about him.

  Telling Jake about Charley had not gone well. She could wait for a better time to tell Dawson. “Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal. But you might want to change the Wi-Fi password.”

  “I’ll do it right now. I’ll pick something more difficult this time.”

  “And just when I had the last one memorized.”

  Dawson arched an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Kidding. I saved the piece of paper you wrote it on.”

  “I know. That’s why I was surprised when you said you had it memorized. You labeled the paper Inter
net password, Save, and tucked it into a corner of the top desk drawer.”

  Amanda clutched her throat in horror. “Is that how the person got on our Internet?”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it. They’d have had to come into the office to do that. Our Wi-Fi can be accessed from the street, the house next door, a block away. It has a wide range. Anybody with the password could use it. That’s why I tried to make the password safe. I’ll do better this time.” Dawson hurried toward the office.

  The door into that room had not been locked when she’d entered on Monday morning, the first day back from her trip.

  If someone had broken into the shop, that person could have found the password to their network and the key to her apartment, the spare key that hung on the hook inside the office door, the key labeled Amanda’s apt.

  Maybe she should stop labeling things.

  She followed Dawson.

  He stood with the top desk drawer open and a slip of paper in one hand. “Internet Password, Save. It’s still here.”

  Amanda sank into one of the chairs. “Doesn’t mean anything. Somebody could have used it and put it back.”

  “Someone would have had to come inside this room to do that. It’s more likely someone in the general vicinity hacked into our Wi-Fi.”

  “We have people in and out of the shop all the time, and this office stays unlocked during the day. Any customer could have come in here while we were outside or distracted.”

  Any customer determined to cause her problems with Jake.

  She never discussed her personal life with her customers. How would any of them know about Jake?

  But someone had known his email address and what it would take to upset their relationship.

  Dawson had an odd look on his face, a distant, focused look as if he were processing a lot of data, trying to figure out a puzzle. Was he reading her thoughts? If a computer program existed for that, he might be.

  “Change the password,” she said, “and I promise this time I’ll memorize it and eat the paper.”

  Dawson blinked and returned his attention to the real world. “Eat the paper? I don’t think that would be sanitary. You could flush it down the toilet.”

  Amanda resisted the urge to laugh...at Dawson for taking her words literally and for being so clearly innocent of betraying her.

  But if he didn’t bug her apartment and post her conversation to YouTube...who did? And why?

  She returned to the main area, gathered the parts and tools necessary to work on a Harley engine, and sat on the floor staring at them. Her mind skittered from the YouTube video to the dead man in her driveway to Jake’s reaction to her confession about Charley to the assertion of Lenny’s spirit that she killed him to the YouTube video...

  “I changed our password to a nineteen digit sequence of random letters and numbers. I should have realized the word motorcycle would be too obvious.”

  “Motorcycle in Japanese converted to hexadecimal? I don’t think it was obvious. I think this breach was my fault. I shouldn’t have kept a copy in the desk drawer with the computer sitting on that desk. Oh, damn!” Amanda shot to her feet. “The computer! It’s got all our records and our bank account information!”

  “Whoever did this used their own computer,” Dawson said. “I didn’t find any traces of the video on our computer. I’m running some diagnostics right now, but I think we’re okay.”

  Amanda exhaled a long sigh. “That’s a relief. I didn’t write down the computer password because you made that one easy enough I could remember it.”

  “I was worried about somebody accessing our Internet. I wasn’t worried about anybody but us logging onto the computer or about an outsider finding your paper with the password in the desk drawer. Nevertheless, just in case, I changed the computer password too.” He handed her a slip of paper.

  Amanda looked at the two strings of random characters. Dawson had probably already memorized them. She did not possess his photographic memory. She’d have to find a better place to hide the paper.

  Dawson cleared his throat.

  She looked up.

  “The post on the Internet, what was it about?”

  She dropped her gaze. She couldn’t look Dawson in the eye while she lied to him. “Nothing important.”

  “You sat in the parking lot with Jake for sixteen minutes before you went up to your apartment and came back with a microphone you wanted me to identify. Then you told me our network had been hacked and somebody posted something you don’t want me to know about. Is this related to Jake?”

  Amanda’s gaze jerked up to Dawson’s. There was such a thing as being too smart.

  “I’m not trying to pry,” he said. “You’re my friend. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  She resisted the impulse to hug him. She didn’t want to make him blush again. “Thank you. If I give you the information, can you take it down without watching it?”

  “I’ll be unable to avoid seeing some of it, but I won’t watch the whole thing if I can avoid it.”

  Jake had said he would send her the phony email containing the URL. She went to the office, logged into the computer with the new password, and checked.

  As promised, Jake had forwarded the email sent to him from amandalcaulfield at her email provider. The only difference between that address and her legitimate address was the l in the middle.

  Her evil twin knew her email provider, knew her WiFi password, knew where she worked and where she lived, knew Jake’s email address. It shouldn’t have been surprising she also knew her middle name was Lindell. But it added another layer of creepiness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Amanda wrote the URL on a slip of paper and took it to Dawson. “When you get a chance, please take down that video.” She drew in a deep breath. “If you want to see what’s on it, you can watch it and we’ll talk about it.”

  Dawson nodded and went back to the office.

  Amanda’s gaze locked on the open door. The desk and computer were off to one side so she couldn’t see what he was doing, couldn’t see if he looked shocked or disgusted.

  He appeared in the doorway.

  Amanda sank to the floor, picked up the nearest part...a worn out brake pad...and studied it intently.

  Dawson’s feet came into view at the edge of her vision.

  He sank down facing her and waited.

  She laid the brake pad on the floor and looked at him.

  “You don’t miss Charley,” he said. “That video is bogus.”

  “How much did you watch?”

  “Only what played while I was figuring out how to delete it, but I think I saw most of it. Is this related to the microphone you found?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess. That’s my voice, and I said those words a couple of nights ago in my bedroom. But somebody took things I said and moved them around to make it sound like something it wasn’t.”

  “Editing an audio file is easy. But who would do that?”

  “That’s the big question.” Amanda shifted her position. The floor was not comfortable, and this was not a comfortable conversation.

  “This is all related to Jake, isn’t it?”

  “No! Well, yes, somebody sent the video to him, but...” She drew in a deep breath. “I have an evil twin. She probably did this.”

  Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, Dawson blinked rapidly.

  “I didn’t want you to worry,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you I’ve been framed for Lenny’s murder.” In a nonstop burst, she told him everything...her hairs on the body, her trips to the bar, the men who thought they recognized her including Bert. She left out the part about Lenny’s ghost accusing her of killing him. “And nobody believes me! Not Teresa or Charley or even Jake!” She sucked in a deep breath to prevent herself from bursting into tears.

  “I believe you,” Dawson said quietly.

  “You do?” Amanda rubbed a finger under one eye in case any moisture had slipp
ed out. Finally somebody believed her.

  “If you’d wanted to kill Lenny, you wouldn’t have done it on your own property.”

  Not exactly the complete trust in her innocence she was looking for, but it was better than nothing.

  “Do you think it’s possible Jake had something to do with these strange events?” Dawson asked.

  “What? No. You’ve accused Jake of being a womanizer and now you’re accusing him of being connected to...what? The murder? The video? The men in the bar? I just spilled my guts. It’s your turn. Why are you saying these things about him? Where are you coming up with this?”

  Dawson looked at the floor. “I can’t tell you my source.”

  Amanda folded her arms and lifted her chin stubbornly. “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Won’t. I promised.”

  “You promised? So you got this information from a person, not from researching the Internet? The Internet can’t hold you to a promise. It has to be a person.”

  He was silent for a moment as if he were deciding whether answering that question would break his promise.

  Amanda loved his integrity and loyalty...but not when those traits thwarted her goal.

  She decided to take a stab in the dark. Well, in the twilight anyway. Not too difficult to figure out the identify of this individual he’d made a promise to. Dawson was a very private person. He didn’t socialize a lot. “Jerrilee told you those things, didn’t she?”

  His startled gaze jerked up to hers. He didn’t deny it. That was all the answer she needed.

  She leaned closer. “Does Jerrilee know Jake?”

  His facial muscles tightened and he compressed his lips as if to keep the words inside.

  “Oh, come on! Surely she didn’t make you promise not to tell me that!”

  He looked miserable and said nothing.

  Why would Dawson’s girlfriend want to keep her association with Jake a secret? “Did she once date Jake?”

  He thought for a moment then shook his head vehemently.

  Three questions, one answer. It was a start.