Edge of the Heat 3

by Lisa Ladew

  “So, maybe Norman got rid of your birth record in the hospital files. I’ll check death records.”

  Vivian sat and waited. She was amazed at what this man could do with a computer and an Internet connection. For a moment she wondered if what he was doing was legal.

  “Hmmm, no Jane Doe death records on your birthdate. I’ll go out a few days.”

  A few moments later, “Nothing.”

  He spun around and rubbed his hands together, with a big grin on his face. She laughed. “You seem happy that you’ve found nothing.”

  “I am. Because this means the records have been deleted. And if we can figure out who deleted them and how, we’ve got our first connection. It could have been Norman, but I don’t think it was. I bet he paid someone to do it. This is advanced stuff here and nothing I’ve found on Norman indicates he would know how to do it.”

  Hawk spun back around and went to work. She didn’t hear from him again for over an hour. She was in the kitchen, thinking about what to make them for lunch when he let out a whoop in the other room. She ran back in.

  “What, what?”

  “I found it! I haven’t found an actual record of your births yet, but I bet I’ve found your mom.” He read from the screen. “Jane Doe, died from hemorrhage during labor, September 13th, 1983.”

  He read off the description given of her in the chart. “5 foot, 6 inches tall. 142 pounds. Long, curly brown hair, blue eyes. Approximately 16 years old.”

  Vivian felt like she’d been punched in the stomach at the last part of that. 16 years old?

  “My mother was 16?”

  “That’s how old she looked apparently.”

  “How can you be sure this is my mother?” Vivian asked.

  “Well, I can’t,” Hawk answered, stretching backwards. “But I’m searching any deleted records in the correct time period because I am assuming that Oberlin had them deleted for some reason. There’s something about this that he doesn’t want anyone to know. And since I actually found a deleted entry, I think it’s a fair connection to make. Why else would anyone delete any of these entries, unless a mistake was made during data entry? From what I can tell, all the records from 1900 to 1985 or so were inputted into their digital database sometime in the year 2000. If they had made a mistake, they would have re-input the information somewhere else. I already searched. This entry is nowhere else. And it wasn’t corrected during data entry, it was deleted later. I can tell because of this.”

  He pointed to the screen and Vivian saw this: i./

  “I period slash? What is that?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. Just some random characters that were put in the first cell in the row, otherwise the computer wouldn’t let the information be deleted. It’s a failsafe to avoid accidental deletions.”

  Vivian frowned. “How can you even read information that has been deleted?”

  “There’s several different ways, although none of them work all of the time. In this case, I assumed they made one backup when the initial data entry was done, and I was right. I was able to access the backup file and read what was originally put in there.”

  “Wow.” Vivian was impressed. Hawk knew what he was doing.

  Hawk smiled at her again and bent back over his keyboard. “Now to try to figure out when it was changed, and with what access, and how.” He squinted at the screen and practically whispered, “I’m on the hunt for a hacker.”

  Vivian backed out of the room and went back to thinking about lunch. She had complete faith that Hawk would figure it out.

  As she chopped and prepared she thought about her mother. She did some quick math and figured Senator Oberlin would have had to have been at least 40 in 1983, so what was he doing with a 16 year old? She shuddered. God she hated the thought that he was her father.

  She prepared two plates of BLT sandwiches with strawberries on the side. When she took them back in to Hawk he was frowning at the screen. She slid a sandwich down next to him and sat down on the couch to eat hers, waiting to hear from him what was upsetting him.

  “Well, I haven’t found anything else. This guy covered his tracks really well. We actually were quite lucky he didn’t think of the backup copy or we would have been out of luck.

  “Darn. Now what?”

  Hawk grabbed a half a sandwich, smelled it, and took a bite that wiped out half of it. I should have made him two, Vivian thought.

  “Well, the way I see it, we have to figure out two things. Who your mom was, so we can do an investigation about what exactly happened to her. I’m going to check into missing person reports shortly. And we have to find out who the hacker is, so what else we can connect him to and find him and arrest him. My brain is fried right now though. I might need to take a walk or something.”

  Vivian nodded. She sat and let the situation run through her brain, idly thinking about it. She grabbed her tablet and typed i./ into Google. The search engine didn’t recognize it. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger, thinking but not thinking.

  She typed in iperiod/, i period slash. Nothing that made sense.

  Hawk finished his sandwich in three more bites and went back to work. The strawberries disappeared just as quickly.

  “The police department’s database is different, he told her over his shoulder. They’ve been computerized since the 1970s, but on Wang computers, which they actually still use for certain functions, even though the company that made them doesn’t even exist anymore. I can get in there and search but the interface is so different than modern databases I don’t know how much luck I’ll have.”

  He was quiet for several more minutes. Vivian lay her head back on the couch and closed her eyes, letting her mind run freely. It was the way that she had always thought about difficult things and it worked well for her.

  In several moments he spoke again. “Well, there aren’t any missing person reports in Westwood Harbor during that entire year that I can find that match who we are looking for.”

  “What about runaways?” Vivian said idly.

  “Runaways! Good thinking.” The keyboard sang out his search.

  Suddenly, Hawk sucked in his breath. Vivian sat straight up and looked at him. He bolted to his feet, sending his chair backwards.

  “I found her! I’ve got a name! Christie Callahan! Vivian we did it!” He ran to Vivian and pulled her to a standing position, grabbing both her hands and pulling her around in a little circle. To Vivian, the whole act seemed in slow motion. She could feel the roughened callousness of his large hands against her skin. She lost herself in it, trying to memorize every sensation. Tonight, when she thought of him, she’d think of this moment.

  “We did it! We found her!” His smile split his face practically in two.

  Hawk’s exuberant display startled Vivian. She had never seen him act anything like this. She wouldn’t call him surly, but he was always more reserved, quiet even. It turned him from a big, brawny bear of a man to a sweet, innocent boy. She laughed and whirled around with him. When he stopped and stared in her eyes, for just a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. Her breath caught in her throat at the thought. But the moment fled.

  Instead, he dropped her hands and started talking a mile a minute, pacing back and forth in front of her. About who Callahan was and how now that they had a name they could find and interview her family. About how this could be the biggest break they’d ever had. About how this might be the piece of evidence that broke everything wide open. If he could put all of this together and plug the pieces in that connected Norman to the Senator, Norman could be convicted, the Senator could be convicted, justice would be served, and Hawk could clear his name and they could go home.

  Vivian sat back down and watched him with a smile on her face. She loved seeing him excited. She loved being his confidante. She loved - his phone rang.

  Hawk looked at it pressed the pick up button. “Craig, you aren’t going to believe this, man. I’ve got some amazing news!”

  H
awk stopped talking, his face screwed up in confusion. “Ok, you go ahead then.”

  Vivian watched the excitement slip off his face to be replaced by first anger, then confusion, then anger again. Craig was talking loud enough that she could make out a little bit of what he was saying. Something about Hawk’s truck being searched by the DEA and a prisoner dying.

  Craig stopped talking. Hawk made some notations on his notepad. “Ok, I’m going to see if I can get a look at the results of that warrant when it’s filed. What’s your plan now?”

  Hawk listened a bit more and then said, “Sounds good. Ready for my news yet?” He listened, then went on. “We’ve got a name on Vivian and Emma’s mother. Christie Callahan. This should take precedence I think. See if you can find her.”

  Hawk explained the rest of the story to Craig and hung up, his enthusiasm gone.

  He turned to Vivian. “Well, we’ve had a lot of setbacks today, but it doesn’t matter. You know what I need? A really big white board. If we go buy one can I hang it up on one of your walls?”

  “Of course.”

  They took the car to the town and he filled her in on the details that Craig had shared. But she only listened with half an ear. What she was really thinking about was that one moment when it seemed he might lean his face down and kiss her. That moment that she wanted with all her being.

  Chapter 20

  When they returned, Vivian helped Hawk hang the whiteboard on the long wall of the living room, but instead of using it he mumbled something about “checking something” and darted back to the computer. Curious, Vivian followed.

  Hawk stared at the screen and clicked away with his mouse, obviously deep in thought. Vivian sat down and picked up her tablet to read.

  “I just want to see if I can find any more instances of that I period slash. Maybe it does mean something. Maybe the hacker marked his jobs with it.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Arrogance. Or just stupidness. It happens a lot more often than you’d think. Usually arrogance.”

  Vivian shook her head. That would be a pretty stupid thing to do.

  45 minutes later he pushed his chair back again. Slowly he turned to her with a huge grin on his face for the second time that day. This one was different though. It didn’t look like a happy grin to her, but more predatory. Like he was a lion closing in on a gazelle. It excited her and scared her at the same time.

  “I period slash is not in any of the other city databases that I can find, except for the police incident database. And it’s in there nineteen times.”

  Vivian put her tablet down and thought about this. “Does that mean-?”

  Hawk cut her off. “Yes, it is almost guaranteed that this is what we are looking for. I am positive that we are breathing down Oberlin’s neck right now.”

  Hawk pushed out of the chair and strode back to the whiteboard. He wrote 1983 in the upper left hand corner and, beneath it, Christie Callahan - died in childbirth, and beneath that, Senator Oberlin’s children.

  He looked at Vivian. “Now we fill in all the deleted information we can find, and see how it fits together.”

  Hawk worked intently for the rest of the afternoon. Vivian made them lasagna and brought it to him. He shoved fork-fulls in his mouth while still clicking and typing with the other hand. With each date and deleted investigation or incident he put another piece of Senator Oberlin and Norman Foster’s last 5 years of mayhem together. Every time he put a piece of information up he starred it with either a red star or a blue star. Red meant they already had information on this and he needed to pull their files. Blue meant he’d never heard of it or connected it with Foster or Oberlin before and Craig needed to investigate.

  When he had all nineteen instances on the board, he turned back to his computer. “Now, to see if we can put a face to this hacker.” He typed i./ into a text bar and the screen filled with characters. To Vivian, it looked like some sort of a high-speed search program.

  After a few moments the searching stopped. “Nothing,” Hawk said.

  “What are you hoping to find?”

  “I’m searching the Internet and 826 public databases, looking for iperiodslash. If this is something this hacker uses in public, maybe we can put a username or a picture to the phrase. And then we can find him. Maybe some variation will work.”

  He typed in i period /, and then i period slash with no results.

  Vivian spoke up. “What about eye. E-y-e. Or dot. D-o-t.”

  Hawk shot her a smile that made Vivian’s insides quiver. “Good thinking. You should have been a detective,” he told her.

  “Science is about solving puzzles too. In fact we work a lot like this.” She sounded a little breathless to herself. Spending all day near him was taking its toll on her. She felt like she was holding herself back from her true feelings constantly. She couldn’t kiss him, sit on his lap, tell him how gorgeous he was, or run her fingers through his hair. She couldn’t bite his lower lip or his ear … or his chest muscles.

  Exhaustion piled high on Vivian’s shoulders suddenly. She needed to take a little break from being in his presence.

  “I’m going to go lay down for a few minutes. I don’t think I slept well last night.” He shot her a concerned look as she stood up.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yep, fine, I just need a little rest.” Vivian practically ran down the hallway to her room. She didn’t lock the door this time, but did close it. She lay on the bed and let her mind run back over the day. Hawk’s manly smell, the feel of his hands when he touched her, the warmth in his eyes when he smiled at her. Vivian felt her entire body grow warm, and between her legs began to throb. Vivian shifted positions, trying to deny it. But it wouldn’t go away. Her mind filled with images of Hawk and her body responded. Her body wanted nothing more than to run down the hall and jump on Hawk and insist he take her. But her mind overrode her body. She could insist all she wanted, but that didn’t mean he would want the same thing.

  Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, Vivian screamed inside her head and writhed on the bed in frustration. She couldn’t believe how much this man turned her on, how ready her body was for him, even though he obviously didn’t want her back that way. She looked at the lock on the door, her mind working. She contemplated locking it and taking care of herself. She didn’t have any tools, but she had her hand. It was better that way anyway, she could be completely silent. She was afraid if she didn’t she wouldn’t be able to be around him for the rest of the evening without jumping on him. Her cheeks flamed red and hot at the thought of masturbating with Hawk 15 feet away. Her mind told her, Don’t lock the door, maybe he’ll walk in on you, and join you. An erotic image flashed through her mind. Hawk, bare-chested, jeans unbuttoned, eyes fiery, walking toward her with that predatory grin on his lips. Vivian whimpered and her hands went to the button of her jeans.

  Outside her door, a loud clattering noise rang though the small house. Hawk roared her name. “Vivian!”

  Vivian leaped out of bed, her heart hammering, her cheeks on fire. She smoothed her hair and jerked the door open, wondering if the house was burning down. Hawk, running her way, skidded into her, and grabbed her upper arms to keep her from falling. She could taste his excitement. Their bodies were so close she could feel the heat coming off of him.

  “You did it again Vivian! I found him! Eyedotslash, all spelled out. I even found a website that might be his. I can have Craig serve a warrant to the host and we can get an address for him!”

  Vivian gaped at him. It all seemed to good to be true. But she couldn’t hardly think about it because he was so close, and touching her. She stared into his eyes. His smile faltered as he stared back. She saw his eyes go to her lips. She leaned in just a little bit and lowered her lashes, her body betraying what her mind said to do. Hawk’s head came forward slowly and his lips met hers. A shock of sensation shot through her body, whipsawing her hips forward. The throbbing between her legs intensified. She whimpered again into his mouth and
leaned into his body, trying to press every inch of herself against him. She wondered for a second if this was a dream. But it couldn’t be. She dreamed of him every night and it was never this good. This solid. This real.

  Hawk’s mouth touched hers gently at first, the warm, wet sensation thrilling her. His tongue slid into her mouth and when she met it with her own, every nerve in her body cried out for more. She snaked her arms around his waist and pressed her body to his with more force, unashamedly grinding her pelvis against his. His skin practically seared her through their clothes. She sought the heat, wanting to be consumed in it.

  He pulled back and looked in her eyes. She whimpered again and tried to catch his escaping lips with her own, her entire being crying out for more. He took her face in his hands gently, and brought his lips to hers again, with more intensity. Greedily, she welcomed him.

  Hips pressed against his, she felt his hard length growing and pressing against her. She dropped a hand down to his butt, rock hard in his jeans. The other hand she slipped forward and grasped his cock through his pants. He moaned slightly into her mouth, the sound spurring her on. She fumbled for the button on his jeans.

  Suddenly he stopped. He pulled his head back and grasped her by the upper arms, pushing her body away from his. “Vivian.” His voice sounded strangled and gruff. And commanding. He was telling her no.

  He turned around and stormed out of the house through the front door, leaving Vivian wilted and confused behind him.

  Chapter 21

  Hawk pushed out the door and strode into the yard, the evening damp cooling his skin. What had he done? He had kissed Vivian? What was he thinking?

  A little voice pushed through his consciousness, She kissed you back, a lot. He thought for a second. She did kiss him back, hard. The thought made his still-standing erection pulse. And there was that. She had done a lot more than kiss him - did she want him?

  Suddenly understanding coursed through him. She did want him. He remembered glances and looks and kind words, and in the last few days, soft touches on his arm or back when she brought him a plate of food. He shook his head and laughed at himself. God he was an idiot. The stupidest kind of idiot. So blinded by his own past and his own hangups and the fear of his own feelings that he had completely missed that she had feelings too.