“That’s why I’m having a hard time believing you didn’t know who you were working for.”
“I worked for the fraud division. It was my job to hack into people’s lives, to investigate and uncover those guilty of cybercrimes and fraud against the company. Hell, there were several cases that my leads assisted the police—that Whitman Enterprises even worked with local authorities on. Did I know that I was working for a shell company that hid an extortion ring? No. I had a great job doing what I’m good at, what I enjoy doing—poking my nose into other people’s business, finding the dirt on bad guys—and I got to know at the end of the day, my job was done. A little Netflix, steak, beer, and Chunky Monkey, and I got to start it all over the next day. I was the good guy. I paid taxes. Then your file came across my desk, and nothing was the same again.”
He stopped when they hit the intersection of the private road and Kancamagus Highway, checked his six, saw nothing, and waited for an oncoming car to pass. It gave him a chance to study her, to gauge where her head was at. She seemed sincere.
“I don’t know what they put in my file, but the simple facts are I believe my wife and child were kidnapped to shut me up about the company’s involvement in a suicide. Guy named Washington. My wife is dead because I didn’t stop investigating. I won’t stop until I can prove that and put the people responsible behind bars.” He turned onto Kancamagus Highway, squinting against oncoming traffic’s headlights. “I must be doing something right, because now they’ve decided to kill me, too.”
Marnie hadn’t been holding onto anything as she prepared another bandage for his temple, so she fell across the seat, bumping into him. “Sorry.” She tilted her head up, and her face was so close her lips were an inch from his. She froze. He froze. He found himself leaning toward her. An oncoming car honked, their headlights blinding him. Dane swerved back into his lane, feeling like a fool.
“Sorry.” He’d wanted to kiss her, and she was attracted to him and wasn’t hiding it. What the hell was going on here?
“I distracted you. It was my fault.” She finished unwrapping another bandage and pressed it into place.
He struggled to stay on task. “Why didn’t you go to the cops when you found the files?” That’s what a normal person would do. “Call them. Drive to a police station.”
“I stole them.” She shook her head.
“A whistle-blower is protected under the law.”
“Yeah?” She smiled, and it was a real smile. Her teeth weren’t perfect, like every other mouth in his generation altered by orthodontia. Her front tooth was a little crooked. He liked it.
“How did you know to find me at the cabin?”
She opened another bandage. “If you pay taxes on it, I can find it. You weren’t with your family, so—” She shrugged. “I came to the cabin.”
“If I hadn’t forgotten about my snares, I would have been on my way to the airport already.”
“Stop turning your head or I’ll tape the wrong thing shut.”
The tip of her tongue was sticking out of the side of her mouth, making her look like a hitter at bat. Her being so close to him, pressing up against him, it was making him antsy. It was making her antsy, too, he could tell. She was squirming a bit, couldn’t meet his eyes, and she kept licking her lips. “Are you almost done?”
“If you want to look like Frankenstein’s monster, I can stop now. The more butterfly bandages I use, the smaller the scar.” She had long, delicate fingers. Piano fingers, his wife used to say. Alice and his daughter played, took lessons. Before.
She was still opening more bandages. It was a scratch, for shit’s sake. Why was she making such a big deal of it? He felt ungrateful and defensive, but he needed her to back off. She was too close. “A man could die of blood loss waiting for you to fix him.”
“It would take more than a few bandages to fix what’s wrong with you.” She pressed a little harder than necessary against the last bandage. “There.” He winced. “I’m done.”
She grabbed more from the kit, lifted his borrowed T-shirt, and gave him a front-row seat to her injury—three inches long and a half-inch wide—and her slim waist. She was more muscular than he’d expected. It explained why someone who looked so frail had the constitution of the Energizer Bunny. She pulled the two sides of the seeping wound together, taped it shut with three bandages, and then pressed her hand over it.
“Tell me about the files,” he said.
Marnie sighed. “Okay. I guess the honeymoon is over.”
“Honeymoon?” There it was again. That visceral attraction that flared at the least provocation. It linked them whenever their gazes met, and a sort of sizzle happened in the air when she was close. He didn’t trust it. Wouldn’t. But he wanted to. Whatever she had to say next would probably decide whether or not he decided to bring her to the safe house. His family had to come first. He’d make sure Marnie Somerville remained safe, but he had enough connections to do that without bringing her into his tight circle of trusted people. “Stop messing with my mind and spill your guts, please.”
She smiled, and he liked it.
Chapter Five
Marnie sat stiffly, trying to ignore her discomfort, her injury and being soaked to the bone. “I found notations in your records that indicated addendums were in Ian Whitman’s personal, encrypted network. They were pertinent to a line of query I was pursuing, but no one gets to see those files. Whitman’s network is off-limits for a reason, and employees know better than to ask. But I wanted in, so I broke in.”
Her arrogance surprised him a bit. “Rules aren’t meant for you?”
“I wanted to see the addendums.”
“Why bother?”
“What?” It was as if she couldn’t fathom his point.
She’d committed a felony because she had questions about an addendum to his records. Her job was to tail him, get dirt on him. Addendums indicated information already discovered and logged. “You didn’t know WE was dirty. What information could have motivated you to risk your job and commit a crime against a cybertech company that specializes in security?” She squirmed in her seat, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer. “What was in the addendum? The secret to world peace?” He checked the rearview. If a car was tailing him, he couldn’t tell. There were three directly behind them and one in the distance. He’d hit I-93 south soon and was running out of time to make a decision. Could he trust her near his family, or did he need to drop her off at the nearest police station?
“There were rumors you and your wife were estranged.” She glanced at him. “Were you?”
He didn’t see the connection. “How could that information help you?”
“Were you?”
“Yes. If she hadn’t been killed, we would probably have gotten a divorce. She hadn’t been happy for a while.”
“She cheated on you?”
“Do you know something I don’t?” He wouldn’t be surprised. Any hurt that news might have imparted was dwarfed by her murder. He’d prefer Alice cheating with a hundred guys and alive than her chaste and dead. If only for Elizabeth’s sake.
“I was trying to find out.” She said it so matter-of-factly. Something that had torn into him since before Alice’s death was a piece of trivia in a file somewhere, pored over by strangers. His stomach hurt from thinking of the many ways that was not cool. “How is any of this any of your business?”
Marnie snorted, clearly amused but trying to hide it. “None of this is my business, MacLain. That’s why I’m running for my life. That’s why people want me dead. Believe me, I’m paying for my curiosity.”
“Let me get this straight.” He kept glancing at her, trying not to drive off the road while reading her expression. “You’re sitting here because you wanted to know if my wife cheated on me.”
“When you put it that way—” She didn’t look any happier than him. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get caught.”
He didn’t know which was more alarming, her cluelessness
or her hubris. “You wouldn’t get caught? Hacking into Whitman Enterprises!”
She cringed away from him. “I have skills!”
“Skills?” He still couldn’t decide, clueless or hubris, but his instinct said she wasn’t dangerous. Not to him.
Her regret for dropping that piece of intel was obvious. “A story for another day.”
“More delayed gratification. Lucky me.” As soon as he said it, he regretted how his words could be interpreted. Why did his mind always go there with this woman? She wasn’t the lush, pouty type he was known for choosing. Alice had been all woman, curves, curls, fashionable at all times. Marnie Somerville wouldn’t have caught his eye in a bar—unless he took the time to look at her face. Her flawless features, exotic and stunning, were enough to make a man stare, but she was so slight of figure, he feared he’d break her if they ever slipped between the sheets. He pressed his foot harder on the gas pedal, impatient to end this ride and the feelings she was dredging out of him. “So. You hacked Whitman’s personal server.” There was a red light ahead, adding to his frustration. He lowered his foot on the brake pedal, slowing the truck.
Marnie shrugged. “I snooped.”
“You make it sound like a lark.” Who did that? Someone who routinely broke the law. “What you did was a crime. You hacked in—”
“Barely.”
“—and Whitman Enterprises doesn’t get hacked.” The light turned green, allowing him to barely slow down as he took the turn onto I-93 south. If they were being tailed onto the interstate, he didn’t see it, but he’d take the scenic route to the safe house just to be certain. “I’ve spent the greater part of the last year trying to find someone who could. The company is always a step ahead.” Frustratingly so.
“For the last two months for you, the company was me. Like I said, MacLain, you were my account. I was told you were skipping out on payments and it was my job to find where you’d hidden your money, who you might have given it to, who you knew, everything.” She wouldn’t meet his gaze, and he needed to look at the road, so he felt at a disadvantage. “Last week, instead of reporting what I dug up to my boss, I sent it to you.” She had to be talking about the Tuttle information. “I gave you the codes and passwords to access accounts in a Cayman Islands bank to see what account Tuttle’s deposit originated from. His bank wiped the information but not the record of the transaction. I was able to trace it to the bank of origin. Getting the account codes wasn’t easy. You’re the cop. I figured you could do the rest and find out which account and who owned it, because every time I used WE’s tech to dig deeper, I risked getting caught.”
“What you did was illegal,” Dane said. And he was thankful. “You took a huge risk.” He’d told no one about that email. The only people that knew about it were him and the person who sent it. Another mystery solved. “Why would you do that? You thought I was skipping out on payments. You thought—”
“That you were a bad guy?” She grimaced. “It didn’t take long to see that wasn’t true.”
“Sending me that information—” He checked the rearview mirror. “You had to know it would lead us here, to people chasing us, wanting us dead.”
“Why would I think helping you discover who paid Tuttle to kill your wife would implicate my company? I had no idea where that information would lead you. It was only after I saw the files on Whitman’s personal server tonight that I started piecing things together. Sure, I knew Tuttle didn’t kill Alice, but that’s all I knew.” She sat up, agitated. “It’s been quite a night. I should be watching Netflix and opening my second beer.”
“You saved my life instead.” A stranger she was hired to eavesdrop on, whom she was supposed to find dirt on. What made her make the leap from adversary to Team MacLain? She said it was because he wasn’t a bad guy. He felt like he was missing something here.
She ran her fingers through her hair, grimacing when she found leaves and dirt in its length. “I’m beginning to think I was more of a hindrance than a help. If I hadn’t come, you wouldn’t have been at the cabin when they arrived.”
“They would have tracked me down. Maybe found me with my family. What you did was courageous and stupid. Now your life is on the line.”
“I signed my death warrant when I hacked those account numbers for the Cayman Islands bank, and there was nothing courageous about that. I wanted to help you but didn’t think I’d get caught. Now they’ll get in my computer and see what I’ve done. It was stupid of me, but how was I supposed to know Whitman Enterprises was evil? And, well—” She bit her lip, looking at him as if she were embarrassed.
“Well, what?”
“You’re right. I was stupid. I hacked into Whitman’s servers to get answers totally unrelated to Tuttle, and because the answers mattered only to me, I mistakenly thought it was no big deal.” She wouldn’t meet his eye.
“About my marriage.” He heard his teeth grinding.
“When I received a push notification that you’d used your credit card for the flight to the Caymans—a move you should have known better than to make, you should have used cash—I knew I wasn’t the only one that would get it.”
“Not hiding my activities was my only way to make waves. I was hoping Whitman would make a move, slip up. And he did.”
“That push notification was grounds for my boss to escalate your account and take it from me. It was tonight or never if I was going to get the addendum. I didn’t think I’d get caught, and if I did, I thought I could talk my way out of it. So I waited until everyone left for the day and broke into Whitman’s office, his personal server, and, well…snooped.” She grimaced.
“Tell me.”
“So many accounts. Not just yours.”
“How many?”
“Enough.” She lifted her arm, brushing off mud and grass. “Cheating spouses, fraud, tax evasion. Typical crap, but profitable if your business is extorting people.” He could see she was cold, and although the truck was warm, the mud and her wet clothes were making her miserable. He was in no better straits, but he wasn’t tiny like her. He could take this and more. He cranked up the heat to its highest level and angled his vents so they’d blow on her also. The drive wouldn’t be quick. He worried about her. It wasn’t that long ago he’d thought she was dying, and though he wanted to get to the safe house quickly for her sake and his, he couldn’t risk being followed. Dead by exposure was no more deadly than death by gunmen. He took a random exit and aimed south, hoping he was making the right decision. He’d pick up the interstate again when he knew he wasn’t being followed, and get her safe and warm at the farmhouse as soon as he could.
“You copied incriminating files.” He realized he’d decided to trust her. “The MPD will have to take notice and arrest Whitman.” There was finally an end in sight. It hadn’t sunk in yet.
“Yeah, about that.” She took off her boot and fumbled with the lining. Then she revealed a flash drive. “This almost cost my life. Proof of everything you’ve suspected about Whitman Enterprises and more. I copied what I could, but—” She pressed her hand on her wound.
MacLain felt a rush of gratitude. She’d risked a lot to help him. “You should have gone to the cops. It would have been safer.”
“I was afraid they were coming for you. And don’t forget, I was in a car chase with the guy that shot me. I didn’t know how much time I had to warn you, and anyway, cops are predictable. They’d need convincing.”
“You could have called 9-1-1, told them what you knew, made me and the gunmen their problem. It would have been the smart move.”
“I haven’t been all that smart lately.” She stared out the window into the night. “Like I said, cops are predictable. They’d ask questions I’d need to answer honestly, or why bother going to them at all. We both know those answers would give them the right to hold me, maybe permanently.” She shook her head. “I’ll fix this my way. It’s safer.”
“Marnie,” he said, “you’re in danger because you tried to help me. In my
book that makes your safety my responsibility. You’re coming with me to the safe house.”
“Huh?” That got her full attention. “No. You have enough problems without me adding to the mix.”
“And once you’re there, I’ll take the files in.”
“Yeah, about that—”
“There are still people I trust in the MPD.” He’d get her to agree to stay with Harper and Elizabeth.
She shook her head. “They lied to me, MacLain, and used me to hurt people.” He could see she was upset, but there was a process in place. “If you were innocent, how many of the other people I helped track were also innocent? I have to know. I have to fix it.” She scrubbed her hands against her face, and the drying mud flaked in spots. “They turned me into the bad guy, something I’ve been running from my whole life. I’m not going to let them get away with it.”
“Those other accounts—” Of all of them, he was the only one she came to save? The thought gave him pause. “Will those files be enough for the feds to shut the company down?”
“Your file is enough. The rest is cake.”
“Why?” He was afraid of the answer, but needed to know.
“Alice’s murder was videotaped.” Her reluctance to deliver that news didn’t lessen the blow. He felt punched in the gut. Sick with it. He forced himself to keep breathing and work through the image of Alice suffering.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Damn. I’m so sorry.”
He pressed his foot harder on the gas pedal as a cold languor settled over him. He’d use these emotions to strengthen him, to continue to protect his family at any cost. No one would hurt them again. And he was close. This hell he’d been living in was almost in his rearview. He could be patient…for now.
“Can you leave this to me?” she said.
He would have laughed at the mere suggestion if he wasn’t convinced she was absolutely serious. “Leave what? We take the files and give them to the feds. There’s proof Ian Whitman and Alice’s killer committed crimes on those files. This is a done deal.”
Betrayed by a Kiss Page 5
