Stephanie Doyle - Suspect Lover

“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 kind 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.”

“The next step meaning finding where Denny hid his program?” Caroline assumed.

Dominic nodded. “Our best chance is the office. Denny changed how he handled his backups. He got frustrated with the memory sticks because he was always losing them. Instead he set up a special mapped drive on the network that only he had access to. If I could get my hands on the network backup cartridge, it’s likely that Nora would be able to find and access his drive.”

Caroline reached out to grab his hand. She squeezed it and waited until he turned his hand and squeezed hers back. “This is it. Let’s go.”

He drove as carefully as a man who knew the entire police department was looking for him should. Eventually they made it to his office and he parked across the street from the lobby entrance.

“Wait here” he said automatically.

“No,” she said clutching his arm before he could leave the car. “You can’t go in. There will be security guards inside, not to mention cameras.”

“I hired those guards.”

“Then you know that you recruited quality people. People who wouldn’t hesitate to call the police given what they think they know about you.”

He sighed and shut the door. “There might be a way in through the garage.”

“There’s a way in through the front door. You just can’t go through it. I can.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why? I’m not a suspect. I can tell them that I returned to town and that I suddenly decided I want a picture of us that you left in your office.”

The idea seemed ridiculous.

“I’ll cry when I tell them,” Caroline added. “Men never know what to do with a sobbing woman.”

Great. He was turning his wife into a con artist. Unfortunately, she was right, and a few tears might work. “Okay. Let me draw you a map of where we keep the server. The backup cartridge that’s in there will work.” Dominic reached behind him for a brown fast-food bag that had been tossed in the backseat, and Caroline found a pen in the glove compartment.

He indicated the floor, showed her the elevators and stair wells, and directed her through two turns, then put an X over the room where the network server was stored. “You’ll see a large black tower. It’s the only computer in the room. There’s a small blue button that will eject the cartridge. Get it and come back.”

She nodded confidently and opened the passenger door. This time, he stopped her with a hand on her arm. He couldn’t say everything he wanted to say, not here in a car right before she was about to break into his office on his behalf. Instead, he leaned forward and kissed her. “Be careful.”

She nodded again and scurried across the street and toward the building.

“Okay, now I’m giving up,” Mark groaned. “We’ve been at this for hours.”

Nora looked over her shoulder at him. He was sitting in one chair with his feet up on another that he’d taken from the office next door. He was halfway through a recent edition of Computer Science and a Snickers bar. Yeah, these past few hours had been really rough on him.

“Do you want to find the program or not?”

“I’m thinking I would have better luck finding Santos at this point. Are you sure you haven’t missed it?”

“I haven’t missed it. There’s nothing of any significance on anything I checked.” It made her think, though. There was nothing of any significance at all. Not only couldn’t she find the “magic” program, all the standard encryption work he would have been doing wasn’t there, either. If Denny wasn’t saving any of his work on memory sticks, then it was a good bet that he was saving it somewhere else. She was about to suggest another course of action when a knock on Denny’s open door got their attention.