by Lynn Bulock
Chapter Three
“I still say this is ridiculous.” Jake’s expression wasn’t quite as grumpy as a frown or a glare, but there was a serious cast to his features that Holly wasn’t used to.
She sat at her desk, determined to stick to her guns. “Sorry, this isn’t negotiable. I was the one driving when Red got all scarred up. I’ll handle all the insurance paperwork. Just give me your card and I’ll do it.”
“With everything else you have to do?” Jake waved an open hand over her desk, highlighting the piles of paperwork, print requests, sticky-note-covered documents and more that kept them from seeing the surface.
“And your workload, we both know, is going to let you handle this before next Christmas?” Holly shook her head. “Face it, Jake, you have to admit I’m right this time. Or at least that my way makes more sense. If you wait until you handle this yourself, it will be February, at least. And if you wait that long, you could be inviting rust spots on Red.”
Holly was pretty sure she had him now. While she might not understand what drove her boss to the endless round of social engagements he usually went to, she did know one thing: the two vehicles that he drove were far more important to him than any of the women he went out with. It wasn’t a priority she would have chosen in her own life, but it was Jake’s.
Jake harrumphed some, and pulled up the side chair next to her desk. Holly felt a twinge of surprise; he never did this unless there was a serious discussion coming on, and she wasn’t sure that even repainting one of his precious vehicles rated that.
“Okay, I’ll let you do it your way,” he said, settling into the chair. “But you have to promise me something.”
“What?” Even for Jake, she wasn’t about to make promises without hearing the details.
“That you’ll be careful while you’re out in public with Red. And it’s not because I’m afraid for the car, Holly. I’m getting a little bit worried for you.”
Now it was her turn to scoff. “What for?”
“It’s the case we’re working on. When Rose was here a week ago, she warned me that somebody working for Escalante might target me because of what I’m doing. I didn’t believe her then, but I’m starting to think she was right. And I don’t want my problems spilling over into your life.”
Holly blinked. This just hadn’t entered her mind before. “Okay, I’ll be careful, even though I think you and Rose are probably getting worked up over nothing. You were probably right when you said it was a kid that did this, or just somebody being ignorant.”
“I hope it is. But until I can be sure of something like that, I want you to look out for yourself. Human beings are worth more than anything with an engine, Holly, and I want you to remember that.”
“I will.” It wasn’t a sentiment she was prepared to hear from her boss. Especially not said with such warmth and conviction, those blue eyes boring into her in a way that made her feel extremely warm. Suddenly it was time to change the subject to almost anything else.
“So, what’s the next step in taking down Alistair Barclay?” The project was taking up more and more of Jake’s waking hours, and because of that, her life as well.
Jake shrugged. “You tell me. The man might have been unfamiliar with computers to a large degree, but somebody working for him was very, very good with them. And the programs that someone wrote to hide and encrypt Barclay’s personal files are good. I keep thinking there’s something I’m missing that could help me unlock all this, but I don’t know what it is.”
Jake was already looking through his open office door, anxious now to get back to the puzzle. “Go in there and work on it. I’ll tell you if I’m going any farther than the copier in the hall, okay?”
“I expect no less.” And whatever else she knew, Holly was sure that she’d do whatever Jake Montgomery expected of her. He headed to his office, and she went back to untangling the piles of notes and paperwork on her desk.
As she plowed through the piles of stuff, sifting out the important tasks and taking care of them, setting aside what she could for later, an idea began to form in Holly’s mind.
By eleven that morning she’d gotten through the worst of the piles of paperwork on her desk, and made the phone calls and e-mails that were necessary to take care of the things that came next. She knocked on Jake’s partially closed door. “I’m going to the drive-though insurance claims office and I have one other stop to make on some errands. So I’ll need your car keys. And yes, before you ask, I have my cell phone.” She hadn’t worked for Jake this long without being able to answer at least half the routine questions before he asked them.
He smiled wanly. “I figured you had your cell phone. And now you’re going to ask if I want you to bring back lunch, right?”
“Wrong. I’m going to remind you that you have the monthly update lunch meeting to get all the regional heads-up bulletins. Even I can’t get you out of that one. It starts in an hour. If I’m not back, do I need to call you and remind you?”
Jake looked positively glum. “I guess not. Some things I have to remember on my own. Which is a shame, because I’d really love to tell them I forgot this one. Meetings. Bah, humbug.”
“Gee, all you need now is a Santa hat and you’d be right into your normal holiday spirit,” she teased. Of course it wasn’t far off. Jake went to the usual round of society and charity holiday events every year, but he grumbled about wearing a tux and doing the party circuit every time. He might be more than a little relieved to get out of most of that, given the evidence he needed to build against Barclay. Holly felt like telling him the best news of all—that she might have found the key to unlocking the codes he’d been working on for over a week. But in case her idea was out of line, she held off. No sense in giving Jake false hope. She borrowed his keys and went off on her errands, trying to keep from whistling cheery tunes as she left the building.
An hour later she was done with the insurance claim business and cruising down the side streets of Colorado Springs, looking for El Rey Construction. She found it without too much problem, and went into the shabby building, hoping to find the one person who could make her boss’s day.
What was up with Holly? Jake wondered about her lighthearted demeanor this morning, even as he worked on Barclay’s computer for an hour and then went to the dreaded staff meeting. It was as awful as usual, replete with boring turkey sandwiches and vapid little tree-shaped sugar cookies to remind him of the season he was spending behind his office door.
There wasn’t much information in the presentation that he could use right now for anything, but mandatory meetings were just that, so he suffered through as long as he had to, and fled the moment he could for his office.
He was back at Barclay’s now reassembled computer, but it still was not yielding all of its secrets. He’d tried every random compiler he knew of, and still wasn’t having any luck with the series of passwords that would let him open the files he was sure had the information that would link Barclay with Baltasar Escalante.
While he was still muttering over the last fruitless series of code breakers, Jake heard Holly come into the outer office. She was so incredibly cheerful today, which was a surprise. Yesterday she’d been almost beside herself because the car had gotten scratched while she was driving it. Now today she was humming Christmas carols. It just wasn’t like her.
She knocked on his half-open door, and it was all Jake could do not to growl at her. He felt like Ebenezer Scrooge holed up in there, crabbing at Bob Cratchit. Except Scrooge’s clerk had never been as good-looking as the young woman who burst through his door, nearly giggling about something. This was the strangest happening of the week. The sedate, staid Holly Vance, almost giggling? Maybe the stress of the long hours was getting to her.
“Okay, what’s up? I have never seen you in this kind of mood before,” Jake said, getting up out of his chair.
“Blame it all on Miriam Atwater!”
“Who’s she? And what did she do to put you in
this frame of mind?”
“Miriam is an administrative assistant at El Rey Construction. But that’s not the really good part. Do you know what she did for a living before November 15?”
“Not a clue. But you’re going to tell me, I’m sure.”
“She was Alistair Barclay’s personal secretary.”
“I don’t think so. Wasn’t his assistant that drippy little character Rose already deposed…what was his name…Brimble or something?”
“Trimble. Carlton Trimble. And he was Barclay’s personal assistant. Merely an honorary position, to hear Miriam tell it, sort of like a valet, only work related. Trimble’s some kind of relation to Barclay, third cousin once removed or something on his mother’s side. Our Ms. Atwater was the one who did the day-to-day stuff, like I do for you.”
Suddenly Jake was beginning to understand Holly’s bubbly mood. It was almost catching, in fact. “If she’s anywhere near as efficient and helpful as you are, she knows everything there is to know about Barclay.”
“I should blush. Thanks for the compliment.”
How had he never noticed before the way Holly’s deep-brown eyes shone when she was happy? Was this the first time he’d ever seen her this excited about something? If so, he really felt like Scrooge.
“But yeah, she knows a lot. And given the lousy situation she found herself in when Barclay decided to hide her away at El Rey, she was more than happy to have lunch with me and discuss all sorts of things.”
“I hope you took her somewhere nice, and put it on my tab.” Jake was also thinking he’d need to call Rose this afternoon and tell her of another potential witness to depose in Barclay’s case.
“We had the quietest table possible at the Stagecoach. And we even used her car, which I’ll have you know came back to El Rey unscathed.” She seemed proud of the fact, and Jake almost laughed.
He sat down at the desk again and rebooted Barclay’s computer. It only took a moment for him to get the commands through to find the phantom files that wouldn’t open. “Okay, so what do you think are the passwords to these babies?” The cursor blinked at him teasingly.
“Let me go get my notebook.” Holly dashed back to her office, and came back with a small memo book. “Okay, let’s look at the list. Miriam and I had a great lunch. I know more about Barclay than I ever wanted to know, including where he went to have that horrible hair job taken care of weekly. Ick.” She actually shuddered. Jake could understand her being repelled by the conversations that must have gone on. She flipped through the notebook and sat down in the chair beside his desk.
“Can you find the creation date on the file you need to open?”
“That much I can do, for what little good it does me. So far I haven’t found anything related to the date that suggested a password. Let’s see…the first one was August 27.”
Holly looked in her notebook. “August. Okay, try Trixie for a password.”
Trixie? Feeling like an idiot, Jake typed in the name. Wonder of wonders, the file opened. He stifled a whoop. “Oh, this is great. Let’s try another one. September 15.”
“Bubbles.”
This was too good to be true, but it worked. “Unreal. We’re on a roll, here. October 10.”
“Tiffani. With an i on the end, not a y.”
“November 9.” One last one and they had the whole series. Of course, this was all still coded somehow, but at least it was open for him to start decoding.
“Hmm. That one’s a little fuzzy. Try Suzette. If that doesn’t work, go for…” She looked at the page hard, and then closed her eyes. “Oh, boy. Just try Suzette first and we’ll cross our fingers. The other one’s too embarrassing to say out loud.”
“You’re lucky.” Suzette worked, opening the last file.
“All right, explain this. How on earth did you find these passwords?”
Holly grinned again. “Like I said, I took Miriam to lunch. We talked a lot about her former boss and all his bad habits, including the fact that he was all over town at every social event possible, and always with a different…uh…flavor of the month, so to speak.” Her cheeks took on a shade of rose Jake didn’t think possible. First giggling and now blushing? He was seeing more depth to Holly in this one conversation than he’d found out in two years.
“So these are all the names of his…companions of the moment?”
Holly nodded. “For all his canny behavior in some areas, Barclay didn’t strike me as too bright in others. And you’ve said before that somebody more than likely set up his computer system for him, including the encryption. That he wasn’t all that computer savvy. So I figured he’d want passwords that were easy to remember for him, but wouldn’t make much sense to anybody else unless they knew him well.”
Jake shook his head. “What a loser. Not only did he use these girls just to be seen with them out in public, but he reduced them to a list of possibilities for passwords.”
Holly shrugged. “You knew he wasn’t a nice man, Jake. And it’s not likely that he saw these young women as people. From what Miriam said, he doesn’t see much of anybody as people, just means to an end. That was what made me think of getting the list of names from her, with her trying to remember which ones came when. Maybe if her boss had been more considerate of them, and of her, Miriam wouldn’t have this information to pass on to us.”
Now this was the Holly he knew, more thoughtful and quiet. Still, Jake was so excited to have a solution after the hours of work he’d put in that he was almost beside himself. “Well, remind me to appreciate you and be considerate of you, plenty. Holly, you’re a genius.”
They both stood at once, and the pat on the shoulder he reached out with in congratulation became something else. Jake wasn’t sure how their bodies got that close to each other that quickly. All of a sudden the simple pat on the shoulder he’d intended became more of a collision, with Holly stumbling a half step toward him, eyes wide. His reflexes were good, and he grabbed Holly to keep them both from crashing to the floor. That’s all it was, a movement to steady them both.
But somehow it turned into something else as their bodies collided and Holly’s flushed face got closer and closer to his own, his arms around her in his split-second reaction to their mishap. His arms closed around her instinctively at first, then even more strongly as the warm, supple feel of her registered in his brain.
Her surprised, parted lips were there, and the jolt when they met his nearly knocked Jake off his feet in a way the accidental impact hadn’t. It was the briefest of kisses, surely nothing like those he shared with any of the half-dozen casual dates he’d had in the past months. But this was Holly, not some casual date. This was like nothing he’d experienced before and it stunned him.
“Wow. Sorry. I mean…Holly, you’re still a genius.” He let go of her in a hurry, but they still stood very close together next to his desk. He was so aware of her, from the texture of her soft sweater to the floral scent of her shampoo.
“Thank you. For the compliment.” She seemed even more stunned than he did. “Guess the other was…”
“The heat of the moment. Won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t.” Her answering smile was brief, and somewhat saddened. It reminded him all too much of the Holly he saw every day, and made him wonder what had built the wall around her that she kept so staunchly in place.
“Thank you again for this information, Holly. I can’t say enough to tell you how important it is to the case.” He looked back at his computer screen, anxious to save all the information he now had access to.
“You’re welcome, Jake. And now I’ll let you get back to work.” She wasn’t humming Christmas carols any more, Jake noticed. But it was the last thing he noticed that afternoon about Holly, as the new information she’d handed him enticed him back to his quest for Alistair Barclay’s hide.
Holly sat at her desk, trembling. What on earth had just happened? Had she really kissed Jake? Surely not. At the very least, she’d certainly let him kiss he
r. It just didn’t make sense. Her relationship with Jake Montgomery was strictly business. There was no room in it for kisses or anything else of that nature.
Still shivering, she tried to deal with all her confused, tumultuous thoughts. This was the first time in nearly five years that anyone had kissed her. At least anyone male, whom she might have cared about in a romantic sort of way. She hadn’t had a date, or a kiss, since the last trial she’d been this involved with had finished up. That one had been much more traumatic and closer to home.
Will it ever be over, truly over and behind me? she wondered, tears in her eyes. She breathed a silent prayer that Jake would stay involved in his work for the time it took to compose herself and get back to work herself. Looking around the office, she tried to find something that would draw her into the task at hand without making her think of the kiss she had shared with Jake.
Miriam Atwater’s address and phone number were there directly under her purse, written on a slip of paper that stuck out from under a corner of the leather. Holly pulled out the slip and got out the note cards she kept in her desk for special occasions. Willing her hands not to tremble, she grabbed a pen and began a note to the older woman. “Dear Ms. Atwater,” Holly wrote. “Thank you again for our delightful conversation at lunch. I cannot begin to tell you how much Mr. Montgomery appreciated your help.” By the time the note was finished, her hands had stopped shaking, and Holly was able to go on about more mundane tasks that kept her busy the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening while Jake stayed in his office.
She expected him to say something about their earlier encounter when she wished him good-night after dark, but he was so engrossed in Barclay’s computer that she had to call to him twice just to get his attention. And only the fact that he’d obviously changed shirts and wore a different pair of wool slacks the next morning told her that he’d gone home at all in between her “goodbye” that night and her “hello” the next morning.
“How early did you get in here? Or did you just stash a change of clothes somewhere that I didn’t know about?” she asked suspiciously.
