Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1)

by Smartypants Romance

  I’d underestimated my ability to remain carefully detached with these women. The honesty in Kat’s eyes was utterly disarming, and Sandra was so magnetic it was like my cast-iron secrets wanted to fly across the room to her. It was somehow easier to just surrender the truth rather than try to hide it behind rules of socially acceptable sharing. “He and I had been together since my senior year of high school. I tried to break up before I went to college, but he convinced me we should stay together, and later, when he proposed, I said yes. One night while I was still away at college, I decided to go home and surprise him. I drove all night to get there. I thought that somehow maybe he’d been expecting me, because I found his front door unlocked. Except it wasn’t me he’d been expecting.”

  Kat’s expression battled between sympathy and anger. Sympathy won. “Oh no,” she said sadly.

  I scoffed a little at my own overshare, but also at how much the memory still ached. “You know that feeling you get on a twisty road when you’ve been reading, the first time you look up and realize you’re about to puke? It was like that when I walked into his bedroom and saw some short-haired blond chick on my side of his bed. I must have gasped or something, because they both woke right up.”

  I could still picture the expression on Mitch’s face when he saw me standing in the open door to his bedroom. He had looked sick, and he might have even said my name, but the only thing I truly remembered was feeling like I was going to throw up.

  “I turned and left, and then I sat in my car until my hands stopped shaking enough to drive. And while I sat there, I mentally played back every phone call, every date, every interaction we ever had, trying to find the clues that he was cheating on me.”

  “Did you find them?” Sandra asked, as though it was inevitable that I would.

  I gave a mirthless laugh. “Once I started looking, that was all I could see. In fact, the next two guys I dated after Mitch had no chance. Every time they were late from work, every cagey answer, every unanswered phone call was them cheating on me. It was pretty awful – I was pretty awful. It wasn’t until I started catching other people’s cheating spouses that I could finally distinguish normal human failings from infidelity.”

  “No wonder you look for the exits,” said Sandra. “The rhetorical question I’m not asking is if just knowing the exit exists is enough, or do you have to go rattle the handle and try the door to make sure you can get out.”

  I raised my glass to Sandra and took another sip, feeling a bit of confidence settle under me. “Good thing you’re not asking, because I’ve exceeded my quota of self-revelation for about the next decade, and I’m fresh out of navel-gazing.”

  “How gross are fuzzy navels?” Kat asked in a voice that instantly revealed how very tiny she was in relation to the strength of the alcohol in her glass.

  “Grosser than gross,” announced Sandra.

  “What’s grosser than that?” I chimed in. Adolescent jokes were an excellent way to deflect from probing questions, and I sensed that these women would let me.

  “What?” Sandra asked, looking gleefully like she expected something highly inappropriate to come out of my mouth.

  “When you open your oven door and your rump roast farts.” The fifth-grade humor was followed by too much laughter and a round of frog-in-a-blender jokes followed by the completely random assortment of topics that make the best conversations memorable. I was finishing my second lemon drop when I realized I genuinely liked these women. That revelation was immediately followed by the sound of the front door opening and Sandra’s voice calling out.

  “Don’t come in, we’re having a panty dance party.”

  Sandra and Kat dissolved into giggles, and I melted backward into my chair as though I could possibly become invisible.

  “As Shane is still here, I find that amusing, but unlikely,” Alex’s voice rumbled from the hallway.

  I was instantly, unaccountably offended. “Why wouldn’t I be wearing panties?” And then I clapped my hand to my mouth and stared at Sandra with horrified eyes. “Oh crap,” I whispered, which set off a whole new wave of giggles from the other two women.

  I got to my feet in what I hoped was a dignified manner, considering that my real foot had gone to sleep, and I couldn’t feel the other one anyway.

  Alex appeared, wearing a half smirk. “Hello, Shane.”

  I smiled at Sandra and Kat, who were still giggling helplessly. “Thank you so much for tonight. You have a gorgeous home, you make a fantastic drink, and you even manage to make oversharing feel slightly less painful than a poke with a sharp stick.”

  “You’re coming back,” said Sandra with the kind of confidence a person could be envious of.

  I grinned. “Probably. I get the feeling you don’t hear ‘no’ very well.” I looked at Alex as I passed him in the doorway. “You have excellent timing. We had moved off the dirty jokes and were headed down the path toward truth or dare.”

  “Never play truth or dare with my wife,” rumbled Alex with a smirk. “She doesn’t pull punches.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.” I gave Alex a brief smile, then slipped past him down the hall and out of the apartment. It was bad enough to discover I actually liked Sandra and Kat, but to find the hacker tolerable too? That was going too far.

  25

  Shane

  “It’s the differences between men and women that keep things interesting.” – Gabriel Eze

  I had an appointment to meet a client at ten the next morning, and even though her apartment was only two L stops from mine, I was very nearly late. First, my alarm bitch-slapped me awake, which, with a lemon drop hangover and a side of overshare, was just rude. Then Oscar had spent twenty minutes on our walk in the park daring a squirrel to come down and face him like the rodent it was. When I finally wrestled him back home, my hound promptly curled up on the sofa and was already asleep as I raced out of my building.

  Rose Hawkins surprised me. She was in her forties, super fit, and seemed confident in the way of a star athlete. She’d gotten my number from a friend whose sister-in-law left her husband because I’d taken photos of him kissing his secretary. I remembered the case, even though a husband kissing his secretary was like generic brand toilet paper – common, cheap, surprisingly uncomfortable, and likely to result in skidmarks.

  Rose put a cup of black coffee in front of me and sat across from me at her kitchen table. “I want you to warn Barry’s girlfriend about his blood pressure,” she said without preamble.

  I was blowing on my coffee to cool it down and nearly spluttered it onto the table.

  “You want me to warn her?” I asked.

  She sipped her own coffee with an air of casualness that made her words seem entirely reasonable. “He hasn’t been taking his blood pressure meds, and it’s too high without them. On one hand, regular sex is probably a good thing, but she’s in her twenties, and I’m concerned he’s putting on a good show for the hot, young girlfriend that he just can’t sustain.”

  I cocked my head to one side as I looked at her. “You do know that I’m the kind of P.I. who catches the cheaters at the cheating, right?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not cheating if he has my permission.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, if it’s an open relationship, why do you need my help?”

  “We both know that there are people in this world who are excited by forbidden things. Barry is one of those people, and the young woman he’s currently dating – her name is Tomi – she seems to be interested in him primarily because he ‘belongs’ to someone else. I love my husband, and I want him to be happy. I’m afraid if I tell Tomi about his blood pressure, she’ll dump him because it’s not exciting enough to be with a guy who has permission.”

  “Or she’ll dump him because he’s a bad risk,” I said wryly.

  She winced. “I guess there’s that.”

  I spent the rest of the meeting trying to convince Rose not to hire me, but she insisted I take a check as a r
etainer. She hugged me when I left, and I thought about how strange my life had become. I thought I could actually be friends with Rose, and just last night I’d had drinks with women I genuinely liked. When I left California, I left all my high school and college friendships behind. Sparky had become a friend of sorts, and Jorge too, but women were harder for me. Because of the work I’d spent the last few years doing, the only women I’d met were either suspicious or vindictive, and those weren’t healthy friends to cultivate.

  I wondered where Gabriel fit into this puzzle that had become my life. We ran together, we had significant conversations about Star Wars and Hamilton and hacking into people’s finances, and the attraction between us felt like a downed electrical wire, all sparky and dangerous to get close to. I worked with the man, and I needed the money from this job too much to risk it over a guy. But probably more importantly, Gabriel was nice and normal, with normal family relationships and a normal background that didn’t include hauling a hundred pounds of emotional baggage wherever he went. The minute he figured out what was hiding in my closets, he’d be out the door so fast I’d barely even feel the breeze.

  I said all that out loud to myself even as I practically ran to catch the L downtown in my hurry to get to Cipher and see Gabriel.

  “I think I have a way to track down Quimby’s wife,” I announced when I sat down at the boardroom table. A coffee waited for me, and I plunked a bag of fresh croissants between us. Gabriel opened the bag with the relish of a hungry kid. It was at such odds with his handsome dignity that I had to take a sip of coffee to keep from smiling at him.

  “Everything Greene found is up on the board,” he said, nodding toward our corkboard pinned with note cards. “Denise Quimby hasn’t used her credit cards, and there’ve been no hits on her name since she left.”

  “I might know who she went with,” I said as I pulled my laptop out of its sleeve and booted it up.

  A raised eyebrow was all the answer I got because he had a mouth full of croissant.

  I pulled up the notes from my impromptu visit to ADDATA and the various snippets of conversation I’d overheard. “You remember the ADDATA programmers I ran into?”

  “At the taqueria,” he confirmed.

  “Right. One of the people they gossiped about was a guy named Mickey Collins who’d run away with the boss’s wife.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Yeah, we ran the name down, but there were too many to get a definite hit, so Greene shelved it until we have more to go on.”

  “I might have a lead on Mickey’s ex-girlfriend,” I said, glancing across my coffee at him as I sipped it. I liked watching his face change with his thoughts. I was able to read each one as it crossed his mind, and I wondered if he was just that expressive, or if I had a superpower where Gabriel Eze’s face was concerned. At the moment, his face registered surprise and admiration.

  “Tell me,” he said as he wiped his hands on a napkin and got up to refill my coffee cup without asking, a very attractive trait in a man.

  I accepted the full cup with thanks and held it with both hands while I blew across the top. “I have a new client whose husband’s young girlfriend is named Tomi,” I said. Gabriel’s eyebrow arched at that. “The programmers mentioned that this guy, Mickey, had just broken up with his girlfriend, Tomi, because she had gotten together with a married guy. I realize it’s the equivalent of a circus contortionist’s maneuver, but I have some girlfriend-tracking to do.”

  Gabriel didn’t hesitate. “Do you want company?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “This is the boring part of my job, all computer searches and legwork. What are you going to do while I’m tracking down the alley cat?”

  “You’re fairly judgmental about infidelity, aren’t you,” he said.

  “You would be too if you got to witness as much home-wreckage as I do.”

  He studied me. “Why do it then?”

  “It pays the bills,” I said.

  “So does dog walking, and substitute teaching, and exotic dancing, and washing cars.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are those suggestions for alternate employment?”

  “Why? Do you fancy dog walking as a career?”

  “Actually, I was thinking a car wash staffed with exotic dancers would probably make millions, but stripper poles get slippery when they’re wet, so maybe not.” I appeared to give it serious thought and enjoyed the sharpening of his gaze on me.

  “And now I have that image with which to torture myself. Thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome.” I smiled innocently and stood up to leave.

  “Where are you going?” he asked quickly.

  “To catch Denise Quimby.”

  “I’ll walk you downstairs,” he said as he stood and pulled the strap of his canvas bag over his head and across one shoulder.

  I studied the bag, and then I sighed. It was going to pain me to give him this point. “All right, you win. Show me the inside of your magic bag before we go.” Ever since he’d waxed poetic about the glories of the photojournalist bag he’d taken in exchange for a fancy hotel room, I’d been dying to see inside it.

  He grinned and pulled the bag off over his head and unbuckled the leather straps. Then he hesitated and said seriously, “I’m not sure you’re ready for this. To be honest, it’s a bit like showing you the inside of my drawers.”

  I arched an eyebrow and buried my smirk beneath a solemn expression. “You wear drawers? I figured you more as the commando type.”

  He looked confused for one moment, and then laughed. “Do Americans even say drawers anymore? In England, a person’s underthings are called pants, which, I must say, causes no small amount of merriment when shopping for trousers in this country.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” I said, peering into the bag as he flipped back the canvas flap. He made a show of covering the opening.

  “Huh uh. No peeking. I’m giving the tour.”

  I scowled at him and waved my hand. “Get to it then, before I lose interest.”

  He then proceeded to extol the virtues of the waxed canvas and leather bag like it was an Italian sports car. The Velcro camera compartment separators to hold lenses and filters – repurposed for computer, water bottle, wallet, and keys – were actually pretty cool, but my favorite elements were the hidden pockets on either end of the bag. Gabriel looked confused, so I explained.

  “Hidden pockets are to women what little red dresses cut down to Argentina and slit up to Canada are to straight men. They are the fiction of fashion, the unicorn of usefulness, and almost impossible to spot in the wild.”

  “I wore a kilt once with hidden pockets,” he said.

  “You … a kilt.” I struggled for words while my brain processed the image of Gabriel in a kilt. “Most women’s skirts won’t hide a panty line, but a man’s skirt gets hidden pockets?”

  “It’s only called a skirt if you wear something under it,” he said with a sly grin.

  Gah! His smile was playful, but his laser-sharp gaze didn’t let me look away, and I felt a betraying flush creep across my cheeks.

  “Okay, I’m leaving now,” I said, finally tearing my eyes away and shouldering my briefcase.

  As we left the conference room, Gabriel asked, “Are you coming back today, or shall we plan to debrief tonight?”

  My gaze narrowed. “I’ll text you when I’m home.”

  The elevator opened when I hit the button, and he stepped inside with me and pressed L. When the doors closed, Gabriel spoke. “Come up to my place if you’d like. We can work there.”

  I turned to face him with wide eyes. “You’ve moved in?”

  A smile crept onto his face as he shrugged. “My partner lives in the building. It’s convenient.”

  I was still staring at him when the elevator doors opened, which is why I saw his expression harden to granite. He grabbed my hand and pulled me forcefully out of the elevator and around the far side, out of sight of the lobby desk.

  “Wha—” I began, but
he made a silencing gesture and instinct took over. I hugged the wall to my back and caught Gabriel’s eye as I heard the sound of men’s voices. He mouthed the word “Quimby” and then motioned for me to move past him so I could hear what was being said. I nodded my assent, and somewhere past my pounding heart, near the back of my brain, I had the thought that this was Gabriel in full commando mode.

  “I need to talk to O’Malley,” Quimby snarled. He must have been standing at the desk with his back to the elevators, otherwise he would have seen us when the doors opened.

  The sound of a receiver being replaced in its cradle was followed by Van’s emotionless tone. “He’s not picking up, Mr. Quimby.”

  Quimby gave a giant sigh. “Then get me that other one.”

  “Which other one, sir?”

  “The black one,” he said impatiently.

  An edge laced Van’s voice. “Which black one. There are several of us.”

  “God! The one with the accent!” Quimby was losing control of whatever small hold he had on his temper, and I might have smiled in anticipation of Van’s wrath if my stomach hadn’t been tied up in so many knots.

  It sounded like Van spoke through a clenched jaw. “Would that be a Southern accent, a New York accent, one from the Bahamas, from Chicago, or from the UK?” he asked. “Because we have a whole lot of accents here.” Now Van was messing with him.

  “I don’t know accents, I just know he has one. And a weird name … Easy, or something like that.” I looked over at Gabriel. He seemed watchful and alert, but not overly concerned about Quimby’s interest in him.

  Van picked up the phone again and dialed a number. “I’ll just see if he’s in.”

  Quimby didn’t bother to ask for Gabriel’s name, and I moved closer to the corner where I could see the edge of his shoulder. He was tapping his fingers on the counter in a way that seemed impatient and anxious.

  The phone was replaced in the cradle again. “I’m sorry, he’s not answering his phone.” I noticed that Van hadn’t revealed Gabriel’s name to Quimby.