Stephanie Doyle - Suspect Lover

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.

“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.”