The Dangerous Protector

by Janet Chapman

  Willow turned from putting the container in the microwave. “A man came here today? But I didn’t call the cable company. It’s working fine.”

  Mabel blinked behind her thick glasses. “He said he had a work order. He showed it to me.”

  “Did you let him in?” Willow asked softly, sitting down across from her.

  Mabel shook her head. “I didn’t have to. He said you told him where you keep your spare key.” She reached out and touched Willow’s hand. “You shouldn’t do that, kiddo. You shouldn’t tell strangers where you hide your key.”

  “I don’t have a key hidden,” Willow told her, looking toward the living-room door. “Did he come inside?”

  “Oh, dear,” Mabel said, nodding. “Were you robbed?” she whispered, also looking around.

  Willow got up, went into the living room, and found that nothing seemed out of place or appeared to be missing. Aware of Mabel following her, Willow walked into her bedroom, saw that everything was just as she’d left it this morning, and came back out past Mabel and stepped into the bathroom. Again, nothing looked out of place.

  Her apartment had only one bedroom, but all the rooms—the kitchen, bedroom, living room, and even the bath—were comparatively large. The apartment sat on the back end of a huge old nineteenth-century town-house, and Mabel Pinkham had been renting to Willow for the last two years in order to supplement her Social Security check.

  Mabel’s only family—an older sister and younger brother—lived in Rhode Island. But when Mabel had been widowed three years ago, she had refused to move closer to them, explaining that Maine was her home now. Mabel had plenty of friends and a strong community of services for the elderly here in Augusta, and had quickly developed a motherly affection for Willow from the day they’d signed the lease.

  For Willow, the feeling was mutual. Mabel Pinkham was like a grandmother to her. Willow had even taken Mabel down to Puffin Harbor several times, for a change of scenery and bit of adventure. Mabel, Willow and Rachel had quickly discovered, loved eating lobster and could pack it away faster than a growing boy.

  “Nothing looks disturbed,” Mabel said, wringing her frail hands and scanning the living room. “I cleaned in here just yesterday. I had to remake your bed,” she said, shaking her head. “You must have been in a hurry to leave, because it looked like a five-year-old had made it.”

  Mabel was also Willow’s cleaning lady, although clean was a relative term to someone with poor eyesight. But Mabel needed to feel useful, and the extra money helped her out, and Willow didn’t mind sharing her apartment with a few dust bunnies.

  Duncan must have tried to make the bed yesterday morning. Willow was glad he hadn’t still been in it when Mabel had let herself in to clean.

  “Should we call the police?” Mabel asked.

  Willow walked to the living room door. “I don’t think we need to,” she said, looping her arm through Mabel’s as they stepped out onto the porch. “Nothing is missing. It’s probably just a mix-up with the cable company.”

  “But how did he get in, then?” Mabel asked, opening her own door at the opposite end of the porch. “I watched him. He was blocking the knob with his body, but he opened it easily.”

  “I don’t know,” Willow admitted, walking into Mabel’s parlor with her. “But I don’t want you to worry about it. And from now on, I’ll make sure I lock the deadbolt when I leave.”

  Mabel sat down in her chair by the window. “I should have called your office today when he showed up.” She looked at Willow, her wide brown eyes suddenly brightening behind her thick glasses. “Are you working on any interesting cases?” she asked. “Maybe the man was a spy, and he was looking for information.”

  Willow smiled and patted her arm. “Excuse me, did you say your name was Miss Mabel or Miss Marple? Have you been listening to Agatha Christie tapes again?”

  Mabel pursed her lips and frowned. “You’re an assistant AG, Willow,” she said in a motherly, scolding tone. “You prosecute people who wouldn’t hesitate to break into a person’s home.”

  “Contaminated wells don’t bring criminals out of the woodwork,” Willow said, walking to the parlor door. She stopped and looked back at her. “I don’t want you worrying about this, understand? I’ll call the cable company first thing in the morning and find out what happened. Are you okay for the night? Do you need anything?”

  Mabel waved her away and picked up her small tape player. “I’m fine. I’m going to finish my book and then go to bed. You lock your deadbolt tonight.”

  Willow stepped into the hallway, tested the knob on the door between her apartment and Mabel’s, then stepped back into the parlor doorway. “Our connecting door is unlocked. If you need anything, just come in. Don’t bother being polite and using the porch door.”

  Mabel slipped the headphones over her ears. “You do the same,” she said, nodding. “Good night.”

  Willow waved good night, stepped back into the hall, and locked Mabel’s porch door, then went through the connecting door into her own living room. She walked between her couch and two overstuffed chairs, stopped, and looked around. What in hell was a man doing in her apartment today? Mabel’s idea that he might have been spying sent chills down Willow’s spine, but for the life of her, she couldn’t think of any reason why.

  She walked over to the desk in the back corner of the living room and turned on her computer only to have a message pop up saying she hadn’t closed it down properly the last time. Willow frowned, trying to remember the last time she’d used the computer.

  It had been last week, when she’d balanced her checkbook. Most of her work from the office was done on her laptop, since working on state files on home computers was not allowed. Yet somebody had turned on her computer to look for something. But what? Her personal finances? Her financial program was password protected, but Willow knew a simple password wouldn’t stop a computer hacker from getting into it. Was she in danger of identity theft?

  Willow sat down at her desk, opened her finance program, and quickly scanned through her bank accounts. She checked all the balances in her savings and checking accounts to see if there had been any online activity—such as transfers.

  After ten minutes of searching all her accounts, Willow leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms under her breasts, and stared at the computer screen. Everything looked normal. Still, tomorrow she was calling her bank and putting a freeze on all her accounts, for at least until she got back from her little vacation and could sit down with the bank manager and decide what to do about them. Identity theft was one nightmare she was not up to dealing with right now.

  Willow reached for the mouse and properly shut down her computer, then stood up and looked around her silent apartment. She hugged herself as another shiver raced through her. This couldn’t possibly have anything to do with her sick lobster; only the lobstermen, Duncan, Jane Huntley, and Kee and Ahab and Luke knew what was happening. And she trusted all of them.

  So what had her intruder been looking for?

  Chapter Eight

  The last time Willow had been this distracted had been in her first year of law school, though she couldn’t remember feeling quite this restless. The image of Duncan Ross wouldn’t stop popping into her head, making it difficult to concentrate on the well-water tests she was supposed to be analyzing.

  But instead of comparing road salt levels that had grown increasingly higher this past year, she kept seeing Duncan sprawled across her bed two mornings ago, his arms thrown wide and his powerfully muscled body tempting her to phone in sick and crawl back into bed with him. She kept seeing his usually amused, vibrant green eyes pinning her in place, just daring her to kiss him senseless. Or she would picture him leaning against his car in the Trunk Harbor parking lot Saturday morning, waiting for her to come back from the sea and knowing he’d spent the night worrying about her.

  This had to stop. She couldn’t let Duncan get under her skin so deeply that her heart became engaged. She had promise
d herself years ago that a bit of healthy passion was okay, but loving a man to the point that nothing else mattered was strictly forbidden.

  She simply could not fall in love with Duncan Ross.

  Willow realized she was tapping her pen on her desk rather violently and immediately set it down, buried her face in her hands, and groaned. Dammit, the guy was driving her crazy. He was disrupting her life to the point that she couldn’t tell if she was sexually frustrated or just plain angered by her inability to put Duncan in a neat little box marked BOY TOY.

  How hard could it be to have a simple no-strings affair?

  Willow snorted and picked up her pen again. It was damn hard when the boy had the persistence of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Duncan was far from subtle in his claim that he wanted her, but that had been apparent from the day they’d met. He had spoken about love, but had never actually told Willow he loved her. And now there was a betting pool on their wedding, even though Duncan had never asked her to marry him.

  Willow remembered how his face had reddened when she’d said she had placed her own wager on their wedding, which meant that Puffin Harbor’s preoccupation with their love life disconcerted him—apparently more than it did her. But then, she had grown up in Puffin Harbor and knew the townspeople loved nothing more than to speculate and gossip about one of their own. It was harmless entertainment, usually, though being the brunt of that gossip certainly did have its drawbacks.

  For one thing, she couldn’t openly date Duncan now, which forced them to conduct their affair long distance. That was certainly possible, though Willow did worry about scandalizing her landlady. Mabel was nearly blind but she wasn’t deaf, and Willow’s bedroom shared a wall with Mabel’s bedroom.

  Her desk phone rang, and Willow tossed down her pen again and noticed it was an in-house call. “Hello,” she answered.

  “I’m missing some of the Kingston files,” Karen said without preamble. “I’m in the archives, putting away all the files we…ah, borrowed, but some are missing. Are they on your desk?”

  Willow started rummaging through the much more manageable stack of files beside her. “How do you know some are missing? I thought you snuck them out without signing for them.”

  “I kept my own list so that I would know what I took. And two are missing.”

  “They’re not here,” Willow told her, looking toward the bookcases. “I gave you everything this morning,” she added, sliding her chair back and searching the floor under her desk.

  “You didn’t open your briefcase this morning,” Karen pointed out. “Did you take any of them home?”

  With the phone held to her ear by her shoulder, Willow leaned over again and started rifling through her briefcase after taking out her laptop and setting it on her desk. She found a few folders, but none of them were DEP files. “I kept everything together, Karen,” Willow said, straightening and glancing around her office. “You took everything I had down with you.”

  “I have to go,” Karen whispered. “Somebody just came in and I don’t want them to catch me in this section.”

  “If they do, just tell them you’re replacing a geological survey I borrowed.”

  “That you didn’t sign out,” Karen reminded her, only to let out a sigh. “We’re going to start an interdepartmental war.”

  “Take no prisoners,” Willow said with a laugh, hanging up the phone. She stood up and began a methodical search of her office for the missing files, starting at the bookcases and ending up at the credenza under the windows just as Karen burst through the door.

  “It was Ronald Gibbs from DEP,” Karen said breathlessly, her eyes shining with the excitement of sneaking around. “I was able to distract him by asking him out on a date.”

  “You did what?” Willow squeaked. “You actually asked him out?”

  The color in Karen’s cheeks deepened. “I, ah—he started to ask me what I was doing, and I just blurted out that we should go to Gilly’s tomorrow night for a drink.”

  Karen Hobbs was a cute forty-six-year-old bundle of energy who had sworn off men last year after a nasty divorce. Willow imagined that Ronald Gibbs had been as surprised by Karen’s offer as she was.

  Karen covered her red cheeks with her hands and shook her head. “You owe me big-time for this,” she whispered, apparently just realizing what she’d done. “At least an extra personal day, preferably in July, on the hottest beach day that comes along.”

  “Done,” Willow said, sitting back down. She frowned at her blushing secretary. “Where do you suppose those files are?”

  Karen dropped her hands and looked around the office, then scrunched her shoulders. “I don’t know. I checked everything I brought down to the archives, hoping they were tucked inside another folder, but they weren’t.”

  “Do you know which ones are missing? You said you kept your own list.”

  Karen pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “One was the Kingston site denial four years ago, and the other one was also from Kingston, but it was the site approval file from three years ago.”

  “I’d like to know what’s in those two files and why they’re suddenly missing. Do you suppose they’re on DEP’s electronic database?” Willow asked, glancing at her blank computer screen. She gave Karen a crooked smile. “And do you think you can get into that database and print it out for me?”

  The gleam suddenly returned to Karen’s doe-brown eyes. “I can get in,” she said with a confident nod. “And I won’t so much as leave a mouse track behind.”

  Having a secretary who was fond of computers was a blessing, Willow decided, but having a secretary who was also fond of sneaking around in other departments was even more of a boon. When Willow had asked Karen to dig through DEP’s archives on Monday, and to not let anyone know what she was doing, Karen had been positively enthused. Apparently, being secretary to a state’s assistant AG could get a bit boring.

  Karen came around Willow’s desk and turned on the desk computer. “Willow,” she moaned. “I’ve explained a hundred times that you shut down your computer by telling it to shut down,” she scolded, shaking her head. “And not by turning off the button.”

  “I did shut it down properly when I left last night,” Willow said, peering around Karen to see the message that had popped up on the computer screen. “Could there have been a power surge or something?”

  “No,” Karen said, crossing her arms and tapping her toe while she waited for the computer to check for corrupt files. “You have a battery backup that prevents that.”

  Willow wasn’t computer illiterate, but neither was she a technogeek like Karen. “I’m sure I locked up the office when I left last night so even the cleaning crew wouldn’t have to clean around my mess,” Willow said, frowning at her door. She looked up at Karen. “Somebody must have been in here. And yesterday a man posing as a cable repairman was in my apartment,” she added softly. “I called the company this morning, and they said they hadn’t sent anyone out. But my landlady saw him go inside my apartment, and I’m pretty sure he searched my home computer.”

  “And two files are missing,” Karen added, also in a whisper as she looked around the office before bringing her gaze back to Willow. “What’s going on? What exactly are we investigating?”

  “Sick lobster,” Willow told her. “Jane Huntley at the Lobster Institute thinks it might be pesticide poisoning.”

  Karen gaped in surprise. “How have you kept this quiet? Lobstermen get vocal when their livelihoods are at stake. How come this isn’t plastered all over the news?”

  “The contamination is contained to a very small area, and the lobstermen being affected asked me to quietly check into it, since those who have said anything have had their equipment sabotaged.”

  The computer toned that it was ready for work, and Karen turned and started tapping keys on the keyboard. Willow got out of her chair, and Karen immediately sat down without taking her eyes off the screen.

  “Would the guard station out fr
ont have a log of who was in the building last night?” Willow asked, turning to lean against her credenza to watch Karen work. “And would it say what time they left?”

  “Probably,” Karen said, looking up from the screen. “But you need a good reason to ask for it. Besides, there’s all sorts of people roaming around here at night—like the cleaning crew for one thing, and those carpenters who started remodeling the bathrooms on this floor. They work at night, when they’ll cause the least disturbance. There were at least four carpenters still here this morning when I came in.”

  “Can you tell what was looked at in my computer?”

  Karen was watching the screen again. “I’m checking that now. It appears whoever gained access was just browsing through your files. Nothing’s been deleted and none of the files was actually opened.” She started typing again. “You have to tell John that someone’s been in your office and apartment, and going through your computers.”

  “I will…eventually,” Willow said, shaking her head. “We really don’t have much to tell him yet, do we? It’s possible I didn’t bother to shut my computer down properly last night. I was tired and in a hurry.”

  “What about someone breaking into your apartment?”

  “Nothing was touched other than my home computer, and I never keep anything on it.” Willow waved at her laptop. “I only keep work files on my portable.” She canted her head. “Can you download those missing files directly onto my laptop from the DEP database?”

  Karen looked up with a frown. “Is that wise? If someone is after those files, you shouldn’t be carrying them around.”

  “We don’t know that they are. This could all be nothing. We could have misplaced those files, it’s possible I shut off my computers incorrectly, and we could be getting paranoid just because we’re trying to keep a secret.”