Suspect Lover

by Stephanie Doyle

  She sat up and the sheet slid from her body. Instinctively his hand covered her exposed breast. “We haven’t used one from the beginning.”

  He had to pull his hand away, let her softness go. As his fingers brushed her, he found her nipple was hard, too. “That was before when we were trying to start a family.”

  “You don’t want that anymore,” she said, her head low, her voice tight.

  “You do?” he asked, stunned.

  “I…”

  He watched her open her mouth as she searched for words, but eventually she had no answer. He didn’t blame her. “You don’t have to say anything. I understand.”

  She stared at him, but in the darkened room he couldn’t make out her expression.

  “What do you think you understand?”

  “I’m an ex-con, for one.”

  “I don’t care about that,” she replied instantly.

  “You should,” he said and thought he saw her body jerk. “Not that you need to worry about the unprotected sex. I know the stories about prison. Hell a lot of them are true. But nothing ever…I mean, that wasn’t a problem for me. Mostly because of the reputation I established as a son of a bitch. I didn’t do drugs, didn’t use needles. Anyway, I was tested when I got out. For everything. Just because I had to know I was clean.”

  She rested a hand on his face. “I know you. You would never put me at risk.”

  “It goes beyond that, Caroline. My past won’t be something I’ll be able to hide anymore. It will affect my work, how people deal with me. It will permeate everything. It’s why I worked so hard to leave it behind. That stain will follow me. You’ll be married to an ex-con. Your child’s father will be an ex-con. It never goes away.”

  “That stain is there only if you let it be. I don’t see it.”

  He wished he suffered from her naïveté. “Caroline, I’m not getting you pregnant. At least not now, with things so uncertain.”

  She rolled away from him and lay flat on her back, the sheet pulled up to her neck.

  He’d upset her, but he also knew that his argument was sound. Getting her pregnant before all of this was resolved was not an option. Leaving a child while he went off to jail definitely was not going to happen. If they made it, if they could find a way, then maybe. But only when he was certain she understood what it meant to be with a man who had a past.

  “Why did you pick me?” Caroline asked after a moment.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “From the other applicants. Why did you pick me? And don’t tell me it was because of my career being suited to being alone a lot. You weren’t thinking about that when you started. Surely you were looking for a type.”

  A type, yes, absolutely. A robot like him. Beautiful, serene, unemotional, unintrusive. Unloving. Not Caroline. He hadn’t been looking for her. “I was.”

  “Part of the package had to be a certain age range,” she continued clearly heading toward some conclusion. “You told me you wanted children. In fact, I’m pretty sure your only motivation for going to the agency in the first place was because you wanted a child. Because of the deal you had with your partners. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  He wouldn’t lie to her. Not at this point. “You’re not. I wanted a child. Someone I could leave my company to.”

  “Okay, so I’m thirty-five. My biological clock is ticking. Why would you pick me?”

  There was a tension in her voice that he didn’t understand. “You’re upset because I want to put off getting you pregnant until this over. We’re not talking years, Caroline.”

  “I know.” She touched him again, her hand closing over his arm. “I just feel like we’re running out of time. For so many things. But that’s not why I asked you why you picked me. You were a man trying to find someone to have a child with. You should have picked someone younger. I know that about you, Dominic. Your choice should have been rational. Logical. So why did you pick me?”

  “Your smile.” The answer sprung to his lips so quickly. It made him feel foolish. He smiled unconsciously, tucking his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling. “Not much of a rational decision, is it?”

  “No.”

  Since he’d opted for honesty, there was no point in stopping. “It was the first thing I saw in the picture they sent me. I thought that smile was for me. When you looked into the camera, I thought you were smiling straight at me. When you answered my first e-mail, I knew I wanted to meet you. I didn’t care about your age or whether or not you could have children. When we spoke on the phone, I got hard. Rationality went out the window.”

  She moved again and this time her hand didn’t touch his arm. Instead, it slid down his belly until she was holding the erection he’d been trying to hide from her. He closed his eyes and groaned, thinking of the condoms he didn’t have.

  “Caroline,” he breathed, ready to reach for her hand to pull it away.

  “You don’t have to get me pregnant,” she said as she kissed his chest, then dipped her tongue into his belly button. She lifted her head. “In fact, I’m pretty sure it will be impossible this way. But at least you’ll get to feel my smile. Up close and personal.”

  And he did. First her smile. Then her tongue. Then her mouth. And then there was nothing but the pleasure.

  “How much farther?” She felt his gaze on her and cringed. “Fun fact about me. I don’t like long car rides. Even when I’m driving.”

  He chuckled softly. “Eight, ten more hours.”

  Caroline pushed down harder on the gas pedal. The landscape in front of her was barren and brown everywhere she looked. Endless and unchanging. It disturbed her because as hard as she stared, she couldn’t see what was coming over the next small rise. Couldn’t see anything but the space around her.

  She needed to drive through it, get past it, so that she could see something else.

  Like her future.

  She thought about what she told him, how there were times she didn’t want to love him, and then she wondered if she truly had any control over that. He hadn’t returned the words, hadn’t whispered a hint about what he felt for her. Instead, he told her he didn’t want to get her pregnant. Always with him it was one step forward, then one step back.

  But she knew he felt something for her. Something strong. It was in his voice when he talked about her picture. It was there when they touched.

  A connection.

  At least the sex made her feel less insane about turning her back on her life to follow an ex-con on his quest to expose a killer. That kind of connection didn’t just happen between two people. It made the risk worth it. Of course, she wondered if Bonnie thought the same way about Clyde.

  Caroline knew nothing had been resolved last night. The sex had been intense and amazing, but in the end it was just sex. There had to be more between them if their marriage was to succeed. But she could admit that she was more anxious than ever to get back to where this started and finish it.

  “And the plan when we get there?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. I think I should try to contact Serena.”

  “You think she might be involved?”

  “No. Not with Denny’s death. But someone had to have access to my computer to manipulate the financial statements. She would have seen something. Maybe heard chatter among other people in the office. I don’t know. Serena says little but she hears everything. If there is a chance Steven didn’t have his hand in this, maybe she can help us. I can trust her.” After a beat he added. “I think.”

  Very reassuring, but she bit her lip. She liked that there was a plan. They would contact Serena first and find out what she knew. Then try to find where Denny might have hidden his super-key program. Once they had the pieces in place, they could go to Nora and the police.

  It could be over. It would be over.

  And then Caroline was probably going to have to decide if she was ready to get married.

  Again.

  Chapter 16

  �
�Damn it!” Mark cursed. “Not again. How could this happen twice?”

  Mark and Nora stood in the middle of Denny’s office and looked around for the tornado that had ripped through the place.

  “You seem to be under the impression that yellow tape with the words Crime Scene on it is enough to keep a murderer out. You might want to rethink that idea.”

  “Don’t mess with me, shortcake. I’m already pissed off.”

  Nora shut her mouth. The day hadn’t been going well for them, but on the plus side he’d let her ride along with him. And he hadn’t threatened to call her boss in the last hour. Well, once when she’d given him grief over stopping for a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t call, though, and he didn’t buy the cigarettes. Win-win.

  On the downside, when they’d shown up at Serena’s apartment to ask her a few questions it was evident that she had packed up and cleared out. There wasn’t a single personal item except for some secondhand furniture. The apartment manager had bitched about having to pay someone to haul away the couch, bed and dresser, but since Serena had left no forwarding address he was satisfied the security deposit would cover it.

  Nora hadn’t felt the need to point out that the secretary’s disappearing act was awfully suspicious. Nor did she mention that a woman living as frugally as Serena seemed to would not forfeit a security deposit without a good reason.

  Irritated by the secretary’s absence, and probably just to annoy Nora, Mark offered up a theory that Serena could have run to protect Dominic. If Dominic contacted her and offered her enough money to get out of Dodge, there’s no reason to think she wouldn’t go. After all she’d been his loyal secretary for ten years.

  Nora told Mark his theory was lame.

  That hadn’t helped his mood.

  Their next stop was to check Denny’s residence again, since this time they knew what they were looking for. The crime scene seal had been broken and every room in the spacious penthouse condo had been trashed. It was chaos on top of chaos.

  Bookshelves overturned. Kitchen plates smashed on the tile floor. Every desk and dresser drawer open. Clothes strewn about. Files, notes on programming and CDs cracked in half and scattered on the floor.

  In fact, his house looked a lot like his office currently did.

  A smashed coffee mug, an overturned computer chair, text books, magazines and yellow legal pads littering every surface. Nora recalled that Denny wasn’t the neatest guy, but this was a little extreme.

  “My guess is that someone left this place in a little bit of snit when he didn’t find what he was looking for,” Mark concluded. “Just like the condo.”

  He reached down and picked up some of the stacks of pads and magazines.

  “What gave it away for you? Because that plastic fork sticking out of the flat-screen monitor was my first clue.” Nora put down the laptop she’d brought with her and picked up the overturned chair and set it back on its wheels.

  “You ever give that wise mouth of yours a break?”

  She sat on the chair and pushed off with her legs to roll herself closer to the workstation. “Only when I’m sleeping. Or kissing.”

  Immediately, his eyes were drawn to her mouth. Just like she knew they would be. “I hate you,” he muttered.

  “No, you don’t. But let’s put that aside for now. Obviously someone was in here. And as you deftly concluded, good money says that he didn’t find it. No reason to destroy mugs and a monitor if you have what you’re looking for.”

  “So get to it,” he said.

  “Get to what?” she asked staring at the mess. “You need to call your crime scene people and have them look for prints here once they’re done with the condo.”

  “Prints aren’t going to do me a lot of good if I can’t find out who they belong to. I need the thing this person is after. Which means I need you to act geek and figure out where our boy might have hidden it.”

  As much as she wanted to be insulted, the truth was it wasn’t that hard for her to think like Denny would have in this particular situation. She’d worked on enough programs, programs that she’d poured her creative heart and soul into, to know how important backing up everything was. And knowing Denny like she did, there was probably more than one duplicate file-one off-site, in case of catastrophe and the building caught fire, and one he could easily access to restore the program in case he botched up something and wanted to start over.

  She opened a drawer attached to the workstation and found about thirty flash drives tangled inside. The drawer beneath it contained a stack of CDs. Some in cases, some loose. Others had been tossed on the floor. Stepped on.

  That didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t the person looking for his work taken everything? If Denny was going to back something up, make a hard copy, it would have most likely been on a flash drive. Easier to carry, easier to hide. But a CD was still possible.

  Destroying the disks didn’t make sense unless the killer had already gone through each one as well as the flash drives and found nothing special on any of them. That’s a lot of time spent at a marked crime scene. “You have gloves right?”

  “Yeah. In the car.”

  “You should get them. Whoever was in here definitely would have handled the CDs and memory sticks. I don’t want to mess up any prints. I have to assume these have all been checked, but I’ve no choice but to go through them again.”

  Mark picked up one of the sticks by the attached band that could be used to wear the device around a wrist. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

  “Not really. I’ll recognize Denny’s style. How he used to think. I should be able to read any of his programs. If something strikes me as beyond the norm, I’ll know.”

  Mark saw the opened drawers filled to the top and groaned. “This is going to take forever.”

  “That’s probably what the person who trashed this room thought. But I’ve got something he didn’t have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Patience,” she answered smugly.

  Mark left and came back with a kit that had a couple of pairs of thin plastic gloves. He called in the crime scene to headquarters and let them know that when the team was done with the condo, they had a new location to process. As Nora began to feed each of the CDs into her disk drive, her frustration grew exponentially.

  “Okay, forget it. There’s no way I’m going to be able to go through all of these.”

  “What happened to patience?”

  “Patience split twenty CDs and ten memory sticks ago.”

  “Just keep looking.”

  Nora was about to ask what he was doing in the meantime and saw that he was stacking the magazines and text books and reading whatever was on the legal pads apparently without much success. She could have told him it was a waste of time. Denny had his own language. There was no way he would have left anything decipherable on paper.

  When one of the piles he’d created toppled over he cursed, but then reached for something on the floor. “That’s interesting.”

  “What?” Nora asked as she popped out a CD and put a new one in.

  “Glamour.”

  She glanced at the magazine in his hand. “Fifty ways to improve your sex life. That’s on page 162, if you’re interested.”

  “It’s not the article,” he sneered. Although he immediately started flipping pages. “It’s the magazine that I’m interested in.”

  “Having a fall fashion crisis?”

  Mark ignored her and pointed to the fallen magazines scattered on the floor. “They’re all computer geek magazines. What’s a guy like Haskell doing with a chick magazine?”

  “There’s a half-naked woman on the cover. Maybe he was interested in the pictures.”

  “Trust me, if he was going to buy a magazine to look at pretty girls, there are better ones to choose from. No, this is a magazine for a woman. You think he had a girlfriend?”

  “Doubtful. You had to know Denny. He wasn’t into people. Just computers. If he was having any kin
d of sex, it was online.”

  “I’ll make sure they’re careful with this one when checking for prints. You find anything yet?”

  “Nope.”

  Each attempt netted her more of the same. More files. More programs. As she scanned each one looking for something unique she felt Mark hovering over her shoulder. Then she heard him breathing.

  “I have a new theory,” she announced. “The person who stabbed the monitor had a partner who liked to lean over her shoulder and piss her off. Finally, she snapped. Only what you don’t realize is that before she shoved the plastic fork into the monitor, she shoved it up her partner’s…”

  Hands raised in surrender he took several large steps back. “I get it, I get it,” he said. “No pestering.”

  “Go kill some time. A man can always make use of fifty ways to improve his love life.”

  Dominic watched Caroline in the phone booth across the street for what felt like days although he knew it was only minutes. It had taken them almost an hour to find another pay phone that worked since he didn’t want to risk a trace on his cell now that he was back in San Jose. The section of town they were in wasn’t the best, but beyond the threat of junkies and muggers was the worry of a patrol car that might wonder what a BMW was doing in the neighborhood.

  Rain that had picked up since they reached the city limits started to fall harder until his vision of Caroline was almost completely obscured. He was about to go after her, not taking the chance of even remotely letting her out his sight, when he saw her dash across the empty street toward him.

  “She’s not there,” she said as soon as she closed the passenger door behind her. “Or she’s not answering. Not on any of the numbers you gave me. And no answering service on the home phone, which seems odd.”

  Where the hell was Serena? He’d given Caroline her direct line at the office, the cell phone he’d provided for business needs and finally her home phone. They’d tried earlier this morning as soon as they reached the city limits, again around noon and now after the office was closed. “I wanted to know more before we took the next step.”