The Priority Unit (Maine Justice Book 1)

by Davis, Susan Page

  “I was going to shave, but I don’t know if I can.”

  “Grow your beard for a couple of days,” Eddie counseled.

  Harvey didn’t like the sound of that, now that he and Jennifer had made lip contact, but he didn’t say anything. Eddie went across the hall for Beth and Jennifer. The three of them gathered up Harvey’s things, and the nurse brought a wheelchair. Harvey felt silly getting into it, but he didn’t want to try walking down miles of hallways.

  As they pushed him out of ICU, Eddie nodded toward another room.

  “LeRoy Nason’s in there. Doesn’t look real good, but he’s still hanging on.”

  Jennifer brought her car to the hospital entrance, and Eddie helped him get in.

  Eddie practically hauled him up the stairs to his apartment, one step at a time, and pain grabbed Harvey with every effort. Two thirds of the way up, he said, “If I ever get up there, I’m never coming down.”

  “You should have come to my place,” said Eddie.

  “What good would that do? You live on the third floor.”

  “Yeah, but we have an elevator.”

  “Which is broken,” Harvey said.

  “No, they fixed it.”

  “After five years? Now you tell me.” He looked up at the landing. “We’re closer to the top than the bottom.”

  “We can do it,” said Eddie.

  He gave Jennifer Harvey’s keys, and had her and Beth go ahead. Jennifer unlocked the door, and Harvey thought, Here we go. She’s going to see the beast’s lair.

  Jennifer and Beth waited for them in the hall. Eddie and Harvey limped into the kitchen. Harvey looked around. There was a tablecloth on his new table, and a healthy houseplant in the center. The counter and sink were spotless. He looked at Eddie.

  “Mrs. J.,” he said softly. “I told her Jennifer might come here today.” Harvey nodded.

  The living room could have looked better. Harvey wished he’d had time to pick out a sofa. There were the three chairs, the ugly coffee table, and his computer setup, plus the board bookshelves and the two new barrister’s bookcases. Eddie or Rebecca had put his recent book acquisitions in the new shelves, so there were no piles on the floor. On the coffee table were another plant and that day’s Press Herald. He wished he had some art on the walls. There used to be a sampler Grandma Lewis had made, and a Matisse print, but they had gone with Carrie.

  Jennifer and Beth trailed along behind them, taking it in.

  “I knew you’d have lots of bookshelves,” Jennifer said, when she entered the living room. “Where do you want your razor?”

  “Uh, in the bathroom, I guess. Just leave it on the sink.” The bathroom shouldn’t be too bad. He looked at Eddie, just in case.

  “She cleaned everything,” Eddie assured him.

  Harvey stood in the bedroom doorway a moment. The sleigh bed was made up with sheets and the new log cabin quilt. He glanced at the dresser. Eddie had set all his gear on top: badge and gun, wallet, phone, handcuffs, and notebook. Harvey stifled the impulse to go over and rearrange them.

  “Sit,” said Eddie.

  Harvey gingerly lowered himself to the edge of the bed. Eddie knelt and took his shoes off. Jennifer and Beth peeked through the doorway.

  “What a beautiful bed,” said Beth. “Is it an antique?”

  Eddie caught his eye and winked.

  “No,” Harvey said, “it’s a reproduction.”

  “Okay,” said Eddie, “can you swing your feet up and lie down?”

  “I think I want a shower.”

  “Better rest a while, Harv.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want your clothes off?”

  “No. And you don’t all have to stay. I’ll be fine.”

  Jennifer came into the room and stood over him, looking at him with serious, gray eyes. “I’d like to stay a while. You’re not supposed to try to get up by yourself. You’ll need help.”

  Eddie took the prescription form from the dresser. “I’m going to go get your pills, then I’ll come back, Harv. If you want to take a shower, I’ll help you then.”

  “That’s good, Eddie.” He lay back, realizing how tired he was.

  Eddie left, and Beth came to the bedroom doorway. “Harvey, your neighbor downstairs says she’s sending chicken soup up for lunch. She wants to know how many people are eating here.”

  “Well, if Eddie comes back, four, I guess. Are you staying?”

  “If you guys want me.”

  “I think—” Jennifer hesitated. “I want to stay, but I’d feel kind of funny being here alone with you. I mean—we don’t want to give people the wrong impression.”

  Harvey said, “Beth, do you have any experience as a chaperone?”

  She smiled. “Can I have free reign in the kitchen?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Great.” She disappeared.

  Jennifer went around the bed and sat down on the extreme edge.

  “Is this okay?” she asked.

  “No. Come closer.”

  “Not without my duenna.”

  “I can barely move.”

  “You’re okay,” she said. “But you should be asleep.”

  Harvey took a deep breath and winced. “Did you call your parents?”

  “Yes, and they are very concerned about you. Do you still want to go up this

  weekend, if you feel better?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great. I told Mom we might. I’ll call her again tomorrow if it looks like a go.” She punched up the pillow on her side of the bed and leaned against it, sitting up

  against the headboard. “This is a nice bed.”

  Harvey smiled. “You know what I’d really like you to do for me?”

  “What?” Suspicion tinged her voice.

  “Go to the store where I got this and pick out a sofa for me. They’ve got hundreds of them, and it’s overwhelming.”

  “Well, what do you like?”

  “I never thought about it. No flowers.”

  “Something masculine looking?”

  “Not necessarily. Something that will look good for a long time and be comfortable to stretch out on, I guess. Whatever looks good to you.”

  “I’ll go with you when you’re on your feet.”

  “Okay.” He thought of a small embarrassment that might occur. “Don’t tell Eddie, though?”

  “Why not?”

  “Mmm, he’d just think I was nuts.”

  “Nuts to buy furniture?”

  “No, it’s just something I said to him yesterday. Forget it. He’d understand.” He looked at her, sitting there so serenely. They had made a lot of progress in the trust department. “I love you, Jenny.”

  She smiled.

  “Now come over here. I’ll be good.”

  She shook her head, but she was still smiling.

  He sighed. “So, you gave your notice at Coastal?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “They seemed a little upset, but it’s in my contract.”

  “Did they want you to stay longer?”

  “I think so. Mr. Owen called me in later and offered me a raise.”

  “Wow.”

  “I turned him down graciously.”

  “What did you tell them today?”

  “That I needed a day off. It’s the first time I’ve ever missed work, but personal days are in my contract, too.” Her eyes clouded. “Mr. Owen was really pretty nice when I gave him my resignation, but Mr. Rainey wasn’t happy.”

  “Of course not. You’re their best designer.”

  “Maybe. I think they just want me there to keep making security traps, not to design new programs.”

  “I wish I could see that secret program.”

  “I thought about copying it all to a flash drive and bringing it to you. A terabyte one would hold it.”

  “It’s too risky.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. Lately they’ve been making us open our bags when we le
ave at night.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. It’s just since we’ve had security breaches.” She raised her chin, her gray eyes solemn. “Harvey, I thought of a way you could see the program. Mike, too, if he wants to. You could even show it to that man you met from the CIA.”

  “Really?” He tried to turn toward her, but it was too painful, and he lay back on the pillow. “How?”

  “You could get online on your computer here, or at the police station, and go into Coastal’s framework during business hours. If we agreed on a time, I could be at work there, looking at the program. I can show you a trick that will let you access what I’m working on.”

  Harvey stared at her keenly. “This is actually possible?”

  “Yes. It’s the partners’ nightmare that someone will do that.”

  “I’ve wondered. It would be dangerous for you, though.”

  “Or for you. They’d see the tracer afterward.”

  “Similar to a tracer on a phone call?”

  “Yes.”

  Harvey swallowed. “You mentioned the security breaches before, but I didn’t realize they could follow it back. How specific is it?”

  “They’re pretty good.”

  “And you put tracers in all your security protocol?”

  “Yes, we do on everything at Coastal now.”

  Harvey’s brain was overloading. “So…” He looked over at her. “What about on the personnel records? Do they have tracers?”

  “Of course. Everything.”

  “So they knew it was me who hacked into your personnel file?”

  Jennifer breathed in sharply. “The background check you did on me.”

  “May sixth, the day I asked you to lunch. Did they know it was me?”

  She considered for a moment. “They never told me, if they did. I didn’t see it myself. Tom Henderson would be the one to report it. But they had me go in a few days later and strengthen the security. There had been another breach. Some hacker—” She broke off, staring at him.

  Harvey closed his eyes. “I looked at Tom Henderson’s personnel file and e-mail that Friday night, after you told me what he’d said to Jane. I went and questioned him, and something didn’t seem right. He asked my name, and all of a sudden he got real cocky. Would he have known that first breach came from the police station?”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “Not me personally? Because I questioned him the day after I did the background check, and just hours after my car blew up.”

  She flopped back on the pillow. “If they tried, they could pinpoint the computer it came from.”

  “It was my computer, the same one you put the flagging program on. After I questioned Henderson, I went back to the station and broke into his records at Coastal. After that, they made you tighten security. And someone put another bomb on my new Explorer.”

  She rolled over on her stomach and looked hard at him, resting her chin on her hands, elbows on the bed. Her hair collapsed around her on the quilt. “You think Tom Henderson hired the Nasons to kill you?”

  “Not Henderson. He’s just the messenger. He told the bosses I’d looked at their files the day after Nick Dunham’s car was found.”

  “So, you think Mr. Owen, Mr. Rainey, and Mr. Channing wanted to kill you?”

  “Maybe. Someone at Coastal, anyway, if they thought I was really after their secret program, or that I suspected they’d killed Nick Dunham.”

  “But the only thing you got the first time was the main menu on company records, then personnel, then my file, right?”

  He tried to remember. “That’s right. Your contract, too. And then Tom’s personnel file and his e-mail.” He lay staring up at his bedroom ceiling, going over it in his mind. How could he have been stupid enough not to realize they would know? He looked at her. “You’re saying I could actually download that program?”

  “Well, they keep all the programs on their cloud account, which we minions can’t access, and on flash drives for us to use when we work on it. When they get ready to send a program to the client, they used to transfer it to CD’s. Now they do some of them all electronically, but they usually give either a disk or a flash drive with the backup.”

  “So, unless you could get one of those end product flash drives. . .I don’t think we have time to wait for that, and besides, I wouldn’t let you take the risk.”

  “You’d have to tap into the framework when someone was using the program,” she said. “I would never have it all in the system at once. At least, that’s the theory. But if we agreed ahead of time, maybe I could load it all into my computer for a short period of time, and then take it off again.” She frowned. “Of course, it’s all one network at Coastal. If they were watching me, which they might be, seeing as how the cop that’s bothering them has been buying me flowers and squiring me all over town…”

  “Way too dangerous,” Harvey said. “Besides, now that you’ve resigned, they’ll be really suspicious.”

  She nodded. “I’m supposedly finished with the special project. I shouldn’t have had it yesterday, really. If I asked for it again, they might think it was a little too-too.”

  Yes, Harvey thought, and if they caught you, you’d end up like Nick.

  She was quiet for a minute, and he reached over and touched her hand. “I love you. No matter what.”

  “Do you really think my bosses are spies?”

  “No. Right now, I think they’re greedy capitalists who saw a chance to make a bundle by selling sensitive material to a foreign state.”

  “And you also think they had Nick killed.”

  He sighed. “Baby, I don’t know what other explanation there could be. You saw the evidence that Nick was working on that program. If they suspected he knew too much about it…well, like I said, it would be too dangerous for you to start poking around that program again. Are you planning to go to work tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I have to finish out my two weeks.”

  He nodded. “Just stay away from that program, okay, gorgeous? I’m in no condition to kick down doors and rescue maidens in distress.”

  She laughed, and just hearing it lifted his spirits. “You’d better have a nap now,” she said.

  “I think I’d better update Mike on all this.”

  She went to the dresser for his cell phone. He started to reach for the phone, but a pain caught him.

  “You do it,” he said.

  She started to sit down on the edge of the bed near him. He inched over a little, wincing, so she’d have enough room to sit. She selected Mike’s number, then held the phone up to his ear. Mike answered.

  “Hi, Mike. It’s Harvey.”

  “Doc Turner let you go home?”

  “Yeah. Listen, Jennifer just gave me some information that could be related to the case we’re wrapping up. Could you possibly come over to my place today?”

  “I could be there by two.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Jennifer hung up for him and took the phone back to the dresser. She sat down close to him again, and he resisted the temptation to play with her hair.

  “Harvey, is this something we can pray about?”

  Inside him, something that had been out of joint for a long time fell into place. This was a preview of what life would be like with Jennifer. He hoped he lived a long time, and that he would be allowed to spend it in close proximity to her.

  “Absolutely,” he breathed.

  A few minutes later, Beth knocked on the door jamb and looked in. “Lunch is served. Do you want it in here, Harvey, or do you want to try to come to the kitchen?”

  “I think I need to get up and move around a little.” With Jennifer’s help, he was able to sit up. Standing was the worst. Beth brought a straight chair in for him to hold on to, and he clenched his teeth and stood up. He went slowly to the kitchen, with his left arm across Jennifer’s shoulders. Before sitting down, he sneaked a kiss just in front of her ear, when Beth’s back was turned.
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br />   Eddie showed up just after Beth asked the blessing, and she jumped up and set another place for him. They had Mrs. Jenkins’ homemade soup, and Beth had managed to find the ingredients for biscuits.

  “You need groceries, Harvey,” she told him.

  “We could go to the store,” Jennifer said.

  Harvey “Yeah, that’s good. Eddie’s going to help me get a shower.”

  “Be back by two,” he said as they prepared to leave after lunch. While the girls were gone, he told Eddie the latest developments in the Dunham case.

  He didn’t stay in the shower long, because he was afraid the adhesive would start to peel, but it felt good, and he washed off the residue of paste where the electrodes had been. When he got out, Eddie helped him dress and gave him a dose of ibuprofen.

  “Get some rest while you can,” Eddie said. He opened the bed, and Harvey crumpled into it. Eddie left him with just the sheet over his legs, and went into the living room. Harvey heard the newspaper rustling for a while, then fell asleep.

  Chapter 25

  Mike sat backward on the straight chair, with his arms crossed on the back of it. He listened closely as Harvey, lying back on his pillow, outlined the concerns he had about Coastal Technology. Jennifer was still a little in awe of the captain, and sat next to Eddie, on the far side of the bed.

  Harvey asked, “So, what do you think of a software company that makes programs so secret their employees don’t know what they do, and so secure I can’t crack into them?”

  “Pentagon contract,” said Mike.

  “That’s what Jennifer thought, until they brought a fellow in to translate the instructions into Arabic and Farsi.”

  Mike whistled. “Could be big. And the data we’ve been getting on this Massal character you asked about doesn’t make me sleep any better. Tell me more about the company, Miss Wainthrop.”

  “Please call me Jennifer. Coastal Technology is about ten years old. I’ve been there more than two years. Almost three. There are about two dozen employees. I think two of the partners, Rainey and Channing, were friends who decided to go into business together. Mr. Owen is older. I wouldn’t be surprised if they brought him in for a more stable image, or to spot them some capital.”