Stephanie Doyle - Suspect Lover

“What you’re thinking is ridiculous, Detective. Serena just told me that you actually suspect Dominic.”

“Until I can talk to the man…yep.”

Steven ran his hand through his hair and looked over Mark’s shoulder to the open door. “What’s he doing in there?” he said, indicating the officer standing in Dominic’s office.

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

The elevator dinged again and this time another cop got off and made his way toward Mark.

“You got it?”

“Yes, sir.” The officer handed over a folded piece of paper.

“You got a cigarette?”

“You quit, sir.”

“Everybody is a freakin’ Goody Two-shoes.”

“What’s that?” Steven asked.

“A warrant to search.”

“What do you hope to find? Denny’s car was pushed off a cliff. I doubt you’ll find a murder weapon here.”

“Just a second,” the pixie interrupted. “If Haskell’s car went over a cliff, how can you be sure it’s murder? Maybe it was a hit and run?”

Mark looked at her. His instincts, which he considered to be flawless, were screaming at him. Warning. Warning. But since there was nothing he could really do about it, he decided to play it out. “It wasn’t. There was another car on the road. And the skid marks of the second vehicle lead us to believe it was deliberate.”

“So tell me again what you’re looking for,” Steven said.

“I sure would like to get a look at Santos’s computer. I imagine there’s a lot of stuff on it.”

Steven laughed harshly. “You think a warrant is going to help? You’re not going to be able to get past his security.”

“Surely somebody has to know his password.”

“Serena does but only sometimes. If he needs her to access something for him when he’s off-site. But he always changes it right after that.”

Mark cursed. He’d just sent the woman home. He turned to the officer with the warrant. “You know anything about computers?”

“I know they turn off and on,” he answered. “I’m going to check in with the station and see if we got anywhere with the prints we took.”

“The only thing I know about computers is they break when I touch one,” Mark said humorlessly.

“I can help.”

Mark and Steven looked at the agent.

“My special talent, remember? I’m guessing this is Santos’s office?” She strode through the door and sat at the desk. The PC was left on; just the monitor had been turned off. When she pressed a button on its side the log-in and password box came up on the screen.

“So what do you do now? Guess?” Mark asked suspiciously leaning over her to watch her work.

“Guessing isn’t my talent,” she informed him. She hit a series of keys until the password screen was replaced by a blue screen with text covering most of it. She continued to navigate the menus using function keys and typing in commands. Five minutes later, she was once again looking at the password box. This time, she hit the Escape key and suddenly she was in.

The screen background was solid blue with the icons neatly arranged down the right side.

“What do you want to look at?” she asked Mark.

“I can’t believe you got through it,” Steven muttered.

“A flaw in the operating system. We just discovered it recently.” she told him. “You all need to think about moving away from standard password protection. Do you know where Haskell saved his programs? On the network?”

Steven shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. I never paid much attention to his work. My job is the money.”

“Hey,” Mark stopped her. “I’m running this little show, remember. And I don’t care so much about Haskell’s programs as I do about what Santos was working on.”

She rolled her eyes. “Obviously, the two have to be linked.”

“There’s nothing obvious about it,” he sneered. “I want the last thing Santos might have been working on. Can you do that?”

“Sure.” The pixie computer whiz FBI agent picked up the mouse and started to navigate through a series of windows as quickly as she breathed.

It was almost dizzying. Mark looked away from it and focused his attention on the last partner standing. “Why don’t you tell me again what he said to you on the phone.”

Steven groaned “We’ve been over this already.”

“You’re the one who thinks he couldn’t have done it. One more time won’t hurt anyone.”

“The police called me. They said they found my home number listed first on Denny’s cell phone. It was in the glove compartment and survived the fire.”

“Do you know why?”

“He might have been planning to call me for some reason. I don’t know. It’s weird. He never called when he wanted to talk to someone. E-mail was his only form of communication. At least with me. How long he’d had my number, who knows?”

“Okay, okay,” Mark said calming the man down. He didn’t want him on the defensive. Defensive people rarely gave detailed answers.

“Anyway they called me, told me what happened. They told me that the crime scene was suspicious. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I called Dominic at home and Caroline answered. She said he’d gone into the office.”

“What time was that, when you called her?”

“Early. I think the police called me just after four in the morning. This would have been about four-thirty.”

“And is that normal? For Santos to be at the office at four-thirty in the morning?”

Steven sighed. “He’s a workaholic so it’s not totally out of the question but something she said led me to believe that he’d been at the office all night. Again, not completely off the wall. It wouldn’t have been the first all-nighter he pulled.”

“Then you called here,” Mark prodded gently.

“Yes. I called his direct extension and he answered. He started to say something, but I told him about Denny and he stopped.”

“What was he trying to say?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really listening. I was about to tell him that Denny was dead. It was hard enough to process that information let alone share it.”

“How did he respond?”

“He hung up the phone. I tried to call him back but he wouldn’t pick up. I figured he was in shock. I know I was. Hell, I still am. Why would anyone kill Denny?”

Mark assumed the question was rhetorical, but he asked him anyway. “Why do you think?”

“I have no idea. He was a misfit. A computer geek. He spent the largest portion his life staring into a monitor. His interactions with people were few and far between. I can’t imagine he ever got close enough to anyone to make an enemy.”

“Do you know what he was working on?”

“I told you, I didn’t follow his work. Although he was busy with a project, something he said was huge, but then he told us he was dropping it. Nobody knew what it was. Dominic was going to talk to him about it.”

“Two days ago, you said.” Mark remembered what he’d told him previously. Mark remembered everything, it’s what made him a good detective. “Two days ago, Dominic talked to Denny about the project he was working on. That night Denny is murdered. You tell your partner the next morning and he vanishes. You didn’t wonder where he was yesterday?”

Steven paused. “I guess I figured he went home. To be with his wife. I didn’t come into the office until later.”

“I have what you’re looking for,” the agent announced.

Both Mark and Steven looked over her shoulder to the monitor.

“That last thing he did was open this.” She clicked on an icon and a picture of a woman Mark knew to be Santos’s wife filled the screen.

“Ahhh, isn’t that sweet,” Mark cooed sarcastically. In truth it revealed a lot. The man was obviously smitten with her. A smitten man might not want to run too far. “Please tell me you can find the second-to-last thing he did.”