BY THE TIME she got off the plane three hours later in Harrisburg she was a little bit calmed down, but still angry. She forced herself to look neutral as she exited the plane and headed toward the baggage claim area. She’d thought about everything on the flight to Harrisburg; she’d even tried calling Donald but had only gotten his voice mail so she left a message. And what she thought boiled down to this: Sam Greenberg must really value her skills and talents, otherwise he wouldn’t trust her to send her out of town again on such short notice. She also realized that at least she was working—so many people with college degrees and skills were either unemployed or underemployed. And finally, she still did not know the extent of the project. It could be something really challenging, something she would like, and it could be good for her career.
So when she saw Sam Greenberg waiting for her in the baggage claim area with another man she didn’t recognize, she tried not to let her fatigue and irritation show. Sam was dressed in a blue conservative business suit. The other man was older and rugged, with a face that seemed chipped out of granite. He was wearing a black suit and had steel gray hair. “This is Mr. Lawrence,” Sam said. “From corporate headquarters.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Michelle said, shaking his hand quickly.
“Nice to meet you,” Mr. Lawrence said, nodding. “Sam has told me all about you. Welcome to Corporate Financial.”
Sam got right down to business. He handed Michelle two thick padded envelopes and a thick business-sized envelope. “Sylvia was able to get you a flight that leaves in an hour,” he said. “Your tickets and itinerary are in the envelope, along with information on your car and accommodations. The material in the padded envelopes pertains to the project. There are several CD ROMS inside as well. You’ll be meeting with the client, representatives from Red Rose Medical Insurance, at their corporate headquarters tomorrow morning at nine a.m.”
“Red Rose?” This piqued Michelle’s curiosity. “What’s it about?”
“The documents will explain better than I can.” Sam put his arm on her shoulder as they walked slowly to collect her suitcase. “Basically it’s the last stage of a long-term project with them in which we’ve completely overhauled their Human Resources Policies, their management, their Business Administration departments, Accounting, IT, and their Insurance Services. They’ve been working with our system now for five years and they report that their business has improved drastically since they’ve undertaken our services. What this last phase of the project is will merely be the closing formalities: finalizing the code for the intranet site across all sectors of the company, primarily. There will also be some revisions to their documentation.”
“How long will I be there?” Michelle asked.
“I anticipate you’ll be finished by Thursday,” Sam said. They were now standing by the luggage conveyor belt as the system began cycling baggage around. Other passengers from Michelle’s flight were already watching for their bags. “In between that time, Alan Perkins from New York and Mr. Lawrence along with your colleagues from Corporate you met in El Paso—Alma Smith and Dennis Harrington—will be orienting you in some Corporate
Financial Consultancy business.” Michelle barely remembered Alma Smith and Dennis Harrington. They were working on another phase of the Building Products project. “These sessions will be held at the Embassy Suites. Alma and Dennis will arrive Sunday evening and you’ll have your first meeting with them Monday morning.”
Michelle grasped the thick envelopes, already resolved to having a not-so-good weekend. “And my return flight is Friday?”
“Friday at eight a.m.” Sam smiled at her. “You arrive back in Harrisburg shortly after noon in time for a three day weekend.” The subtle suggestion that she could have that Friday off didn’t lessen the bad news that this weekend was being spoiled, or that his so-called generous hint that she didn’t have to report in to the office on the day she returned was in some way a make-up for her. Either way you looked at it, she was losing three days of her life. “There’s a corporate credit card in one of these packages with your name on it for expenses, including clothing purchases if needed, and laundry. And, of course, entertainment.”
“Great.” Not that the notion of charging entertainment like movies and dining at fine restaurants constituted a replacement for the loss of her weekend, but what else was she going to say?
“If you need to make any kind of arrangements for personal business at home, let me know,” Sam said.
“I’m okay,” Michelle said. Technically, her personal affairs were fine. She still had to contact Donald, and all of her bills were paid online, so she was covered financially. “Right now I’m just hungry. I want to get my bags, grab a quick bite to eat in the lounge, and then I want to catch this flight.”
“That’s what I like to hear!” Sam looked pleased. Mr. Lawrence smiled.
They waited while she collected her luggage and accompanied her to the tiny lounge located in the airport. As Michelle wolfed down a quick sandwich, she filled them in on the Building Products project, covering the basics. “I can email you more specific stuff over the week,” she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin.
“That would be great,” Sam said. He glanced at his watch. “Mr. Lawrence and I should be going, though. We have a six o’clock appointment with the board in Lancaster regarding this Red Rose thing. Mr. Lawrence leaves Sunday evening for Chicago to join you. I’ll call you tomorrow night and fill you in on the details, and you can give me news of your meeting with them.”
“Sounds good.”
By the time Sam paid her bill and she shook their hands, her restlessness and depression over this sudden turn of events was back. When she finished checking her bag in, she went back through airport security and waited at gate B2 and tried Donald again, feeling nervous now as she got his voice mail. She quickly left him another message, told him she’d been called out of town to Chicago for another project on short notice—sorry, she really couldn’t help it but her boss basically intercepted her at the airport and what was she going to do? Tell him no? “I’m sorry,” she ended, and now she could hear herself; she sounded tired, fatigued, and upset. “I don’t want to go, I just want to be home. I’ll call you the minute I get into Chicago, okay?” Beat. “I love you. Bye.”
Then she picked up her carry-on bag and the bag containing her laptop and headed to the departing gates to board her flight.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN DONALD BECK got home that evening at eight-thirty he felt a flare of concern and a hint of fear rise in his belly. Michelle’s car was not in the garage. No telling where she was; her flight could have been delayed. Donald pulled the car into his spot in the garage and left the door open, then pulled his briefcase and coat out of the backseat and entered the house through the kitchen.
The house was dark. No sign of Michelle anywhere. He turned on the light in the kitchen and headed toward the phone on the wall to check messages when he saw movement in the darkened living room.
His heart leaped in his throat and for a moment he was paralyzed as the shadow materialized into a man rising from the sofa. The man was holding a handgun and he was pointing the weapon at him. “Who the hell are you?” the man said.
“Oh my God!” Donald said, automatically backing up. He dropped his briefcase and took an involuntary step backward. “Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!”
“Who are you?” The man said again. Donald could tell the man was nervous; wired. Speed freak, he thought. It was some pissant speed freak who’d broken in the house, to steal their belongings to sell for meth or something. “Where’s Michelle?”
At the mention of Michelle’s name, Donald felt his fear grow. “What have you done with her? Where is she?”
“What the hell do you mean what have I done with her? I haven’t done shit to her! Who the hell are you?” The man’s voice cracked with intensity. Donald saw him more clearly now as his vision adjusted to the shadows. The man was five foot nine, thin and
wiry, dressed in black jeans and a dark long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His features were handsome, eyes dark and penetrating, hair dark, almost black. He was clutching what looked like a black semi-automatic pistol.
“I...I live here,” Donald stammered. His hands were raised in the classic Don’t shoot me! stance.
“You Michelle’s husband or something?”
“Boyfriend,” Donald said, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “Please...you don’t want to do this.”
The man seemed to relax and lowered his weapon. “Shit,” he said. Then he gestured for Donald to step into the living room, waving him in with the gun. “Get the hell in here, but turn on the light first.”
At the sight of the man relaxing and lowering his weapon, Donald did as he was told, still deadly afraid. He stepped forward cautiously and flipped on the light to the living room. With the living room now bathed in light, he caught a better look at the intruder and his fear started turning to curiosity as the man replaced the handgun somewhere at the small of his back beneath his shirt. The man turned to the sofa and sat down.
“What’s going on?” Donald asked, standing near the entrance to the kitchen and the living room. Behind him the dining room was still dark, as was the rest of the house. “Why...are you looking for Michelle? What’s going on?”
“When’s the last time you spoke to her?” the man asked. He was sitting on the sofa, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. Donald saw that the man’s forearms were tattooed.
“Last night,” Donald said automatically. What he wanted to say was, who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house? But he didn’t; the instinctual urge to do something to protect himself and his property was momentarily paralyzed.
“She didn’t call today?”
“I don’t know. I was seeing patients all morning and was in surgery this afternoon. I haven’t had a chance to check my messages.”
“Check ’em now.”
“Who are you?” Donald was feeling a little more bold now that there wasn’t a gun pointed at him.
“My name’s Jay,” the man said. “I met Michelle Monday evening in El Paso.”
Donald knew who the man was now. He remembered Michelle mentioning him on the phone a few nights ago. Something about Jay suddenly no longer being with the company she was consulting for; she’d feared he was let go due to something he’d said at a bar the night she met him. “Michelle mentioned you to me,” he said. “Something about she met you Monday, went out with a group of your co-workers and that you didn’t show up to the office the next morning and she later learned you were let go.”
“Yeah, that’s me.” Jay O’Rourke glanced out the window quickly, as if checking to see if the house was being watched. “And I don’t have much time to explain shit, so you’ll have to trust me. Okay?”
“Where’s Michelle?” Donald asked.
“Check your messages. Let’s see.”
Donald pulled his cellular phone off the clip on his belt and flipped it open. “There’s a message,” he said. He pushed a button, brought the phone up to his ear and listened. His eyes met Jay’s briefly and he nodded. When he was finished listening to the message he punched another button and folded the cellular phone up. “That was her. She must’ve called when I was in surgery. I didn’t have the phone with me then and I didn’t get a chance to check my messages. I was so wrapped up with what was happening.”
“What did she say?”
Donald didn’t know if he could trust Jay, but something told him Michelle had trusted him. She’d certainly spoken favorably of him the other night, and she rarely had nice things to say about the people she worked with. She either spoke neutrally of them or negatively. If she’d spoken well of somebody that meant she really liked them. That convinced Donald. “She said her boss called her when she was at the airport in El Paso and told her she had to go to Chicago this weekend on another project. She sounded upset. She said her boss met her at the airport in Harris-burg with her flight arrangements, a corporate credit card, and materials for the project. She was just about to board the flight when she called.”
“Shit!” Jay muttered.
“What’s this about? Why are you here? And how the hell did you break into my house?” For the first time since meeting Jay, Donald felt himself growing angry.
Jay groped for his breast pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I need a smoke. Mind if we step outside? I’ll tell you all I know there.”
“Yeah, sure.” Donald’s curiosity grew, as did his fear. “Is...she’s not in danger, is she?”
“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I don’t think so. I dug Michelle the minute I met her, and it’s rare I meet somebody in her position and like them automatically. I think she’s fine, but she’s not going to know what the hell’s going on and that concerns me.”
“She’s in some kind of danger, isn’t she? Does it have something to do with her job? Is she involved in some kind of corporate scandal?”
Jay looked up at Donald and put his finger to his lips. When he answered, his voice was low. “Outside,” he said. He rose to his feet, placed a cigarette in his mouth, and headed through the darkened dining room as if he already knew the layout of the house, and opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard. And Donald, still stunned from finding Jay in his home and having a gun pointed at him, could only follow him outside.
Donald slid the back door shut softly as he joined Jay on the patio. Jay lit a cigarette and took a drag. “I needed that. I haven’t had a smoke in three hours. That’s how long I’ve been in your house waiting for her to come home.”
“How’d you get in?” Donald asked. It sounded like a stupid question; he should’ve been pressing Jay to tell him what the hell was going on.
“Side door of the garage,” Jay said. “Sorry. The deadbolt’s shot to shit now. I had to snap the lock to get in.”
“Couldn’t you have just walked up to the house and knocked on the door when you saw me pull up?”
“I didn’t want to chance that,” Jay said. He took a deep drag and exhaled second hand smoke. “I didn’t know if the place was bugged or not—it isn’t, by the way. I made a sweep of the house when I got in and it’s clean.”
“Why would you think my house is bugged?”
“Because I found out my place was bugged Monday night when I came home from the Lone Star.”
“How...” Donald’s mind was spinning, trying to connect the dots. “I don’t understand.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” Jay O’Rourke’s voice was low and he seemed to be an entirely different person now as he leaned close to Donald. “And I wouldn’t have noticed if Julie, my wife, hadn’t mentioned that our phone line was acting up. She was up when I came home Monday night and mentioned it to me, and I had to call a buddy anyway, so I tried the phone. And there was this echo, kinda faint, but I could hear it. I hung up the phone and slipped out the back door to where the dmarc is on the side of the house. I checked the line and there it was. A bug.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “I took it off, went back into the house and picked up the phone again and called somebody else, another friend. No echo. I knew something was up, but I didn’t want to scare Julie. She went to bed and I spent the rest of the night tearing the place apart and found more of ’em stashed under furniture and pictures in every room of the house, even the bathroom. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.”
Donald said nothing. He took it all in, wondering what this was leading to.
“The next day I faked being sick so Julie wouldn’t worry. She took Danny to day care and went to work, and I called in sick and finished tearing the place apart, looking for more bugs. I checked my computers, ran spyware programs, and did some debugging and found stuff planted on my computer. I blasted those out. I started getting paranoid, tried calling Michelle but got her voice mail. I didn’t want to leave a message, didn’t know if I could trust the cell phone. So I drove over to
the hotel she was staying at, since I’d heard from Brian that she was staying at the Hampton near the airport. I knew one of the other Corporate Financial guys was staying there and—”
“Alan Perkins,” Donald said.
“Him and a couple others,” Jay said. “Alma Smith and Dennis Harrington.”
Donald nodded. “Michelle didn’t mention them to me, but she did say there were some other people from Corporate Financial at Building Products.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I found out where they were staying, what rooms they were in, and I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I knew I didn’t trust Harrington and Smith for shit. I didn’t like them the minute they started this bullshit project with Building Products. They’re the biggest corporate zombies I’ve ever seen.” Another drag of the cigarette. “Anyway,” Jay continued, his voice lowered. “I found out where Dennis was staying. The maids were doing some house cleaning, and one of their carts was in the middle of the hallway. I saw a passkey lying on top of a pile of laundry and snagged it. I went to Dennis’s room and slipped the passkey in the slot and opened the door slowly and stepped inside.” He took another drag of his cigarette and Donald could see that Jay’s features looked troubled. “And...this is no shit man. I swear to God I saw this...I stepped into the room and the smell was the first thing that hit me. It smelled like something dead. You dig?”
Donald nodded. “Yeah.” Donald had smelled plenty of decomposing bodies in medical school when he’d worked in dissection.
“I’m thinking Dennis is a sloppy fuck who doesn’t throw his food away, you know what I mean? So I step inside and there’s a body on the bed. I was a little startled at first, but then I recognized the face in the darkened room. It was Dennis, and he looked like he was asleep at first, but the closer I got into the room, the stronger that dead smell was. I leaned over him, not even knowing or caring what kind of excuse I was going to have if he woke up and saw me. And...” Jay took another drag of the cigarette. “I leaned over him and that dead smell was coming from him. I’m not shitting you, man. Fucker smelled like a decaying body.”
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