Greg Iles - Third Degree

Warren wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was staring at the computer on the coffee table as though seeing it for the first time. She felt a sudden compulsion to distract him but saw no way to do so. She knew that look. Warren could be maddeningly stupid when it came to human relations, but when it came to quantitative matters, he could be as smart as a treeful of owls, as her grandfather used to say. She could almost smell the rush of his neurotransmitters kicking into overdrive.

He started to laugh, sending a chill through her.

“What is it? What’s funny?”

He perched on the Eames ottoman and reached for the trackpad. “All this time I’ve been searching for data. I’ve ignored the actual programs.”

A worm of fear squirmed in Laurel’s belly. Warren was already clicking away, this time with his sights set squarely on her true vulnerability. It took him less than five minutes to nail her. She knew the exact moment, because he smiled like the Cheshire cat, then looked up and spoke with almost obscene satisfaction.

“Hello, misselizabeth2006. How are we today?”

Adrenaline blasted through Laurel’s system like a hit of pure cocaine, but she looked back at him like a deaf woman who couldn’t read lips.

“Don’t even try,” Warren said. “You’re not Meryl Streep, okay? You’re not even Tori Spelling. I want your password.”

“I don’t have the password for that account.”

“Jesus! Would you stop it already? What’s the point of denying anything now?”

“I got that account when I first got my computer. It was free. I used it once or twice, then never again.”

“Uh-huh. So it’s just a coincidence that I found that love letter in your copy of Pride and Prejudice, and that your Hotmail alias is Miss Elizabeth, as in Elizabeth Bennet ?”

That Warren would know even a single character from an Austen novel stunned Laurel.

“You can thank Keira Knightley for that one,” he said.

When Laurel didn’t respond, he squeezed his fists into his eye sockets in some sort of brutal massage, then began stabbing the Sony’s keyboard again. “Let’s just check out your little story, shall we?”

An almost irresistible compulsion to flee gripped Laurel. Only the memory of Warren firing the pistol at her head kept her on the sofa. The revolver now lay inches from her laptop-and from Warren’s right hand.

“O-kay,” he said, like a desk clerk locating a hotel reservation. “Here’s the Microsoft file where old e-mail is stored for Hotmail accounts. Your file totals exactly 226 megabytes of data.” He looked up again, his eyes glowing with triumph. “That sounds like about five hundred e-mails to me. With a few candid snapshots thrown in, maybe. Are we going to see some of your personal porn this time?”

Not without my password, Laurel thought, but her confidence was wavering. Warren was driving her ever deeper into a corner-

“This file was last accessed two days ago,” Warren said. “At eleven forty a.m. So, you read your love notes while in your classroom at Country Day? Is that why I donated money to get Wi-Fi out there? What were your poor students doing then, Miss Elizabeth ? That sounds like negligence to me.”

Laurel stared determinedly at the floor. The entire dynamic between them had changed, but she could not acknowledge this.

“I guess I’ll have to figure out your password on my own,” Warren said cheerily.

The keyboard started clicking again.

Laurel hugged herself and tried to think of a way to stop him, but nothing came to her. With the screen facing away from her, she couldn’t be sure what he was doing. But he would almost certainly begin with her birthday, then the kids’ birthdays, then her Social Security number. Then he’d move on to various inversions of those numerals. Warren had always excelled at puzzles, so this kind of thing was very much to his taste. Yet after several abortive attempts to log into her account, he got up, hurried over to his study, and quickly returned holding her copy of Pride and Prejudice.

“I should have started with this,” he said. “I guess we’ll try Darcy first? Any thoughts?”

Retrieving this book had been a brilliant intuitive leap, but it didn’t worry Laurel as much as Warren probably thought it did. Even with a copy of Pride and Prejudice to work from, it would take hundreds of hours to ever hit on FitzztiF, the password to her account. She’d created it by playing with the first half of Mr. Darcy’s Christian name: Fitzwilliam. It was an almost childish choice, but the odds against Warren trying that particular sequence of letters were astronomical.

“I wish I had a PET scanner that could read the folds of your traitorous little brain,” he said with sudden bitterness.

She pretended to ignore him, but she was rejoicing inside. Trying to guess someone’s password was about as much fun-and as difficult-as trying to open a safe by random turns of the dial.

“I know why you’re doing this,” he said over the screen. “Stonewalling, I mean. It’s because he doesn’t want you. The letter was definite about that. He used you and then he dumped you.”

She gave Warren nothing.

“If he’d wanted to run away with you, you’d be gone, wouldn’t you? You’re just afraid to jump ship without a lifeboat waiting to catch you. You’re gutless. That’s the ugly bottom of all this. I don’t know what the hell I ever saw in you.”

She knew she shouldn’t take the bait, but she couldn’t let this pass. “If that’s how you feel, why would you care if I’m seeing someone?”

“Because I’m stuck with you,” he said, still not looking up from the screen. “I take my marriage vows seriously. And I take our children’s well-being seriously. I happen to have the fortitude to stick it out and try, even with a slut who hasn’t got the nerve to bail out without a golden parachute.”

“Me?” she whispered. “ I’m a coward? I’m gutless? What about you ?”

The righteous indignation in her voice got his attention. He peered over the top of the screen. “What are you talking about?”

“You know. That night on Highway 24. On the way home from the Criterium race in McComb.”

Warren had gone still. His face was pale but for the dark circles around his eyes. He remembered, all right. They stared at each other over her computer, each recalling the night that had opened a chasm between them, one that had not been bridged since. Almost a year ago now, after one of the few bike races Laurel had traveled to watch. Warren had taken third place, which most riders would have been happy to win, but because it was only a regional race, he had dumped the diminutive trophy in a garbage can and demanded that they leave for home immediately.

They’d covered about half of the sixty-mile drive when it happened. Flames exploded out of the darkness far ahead, as though from an impacting meteor. As they drew closer, Laurel made out the silhouette of a burning pickup truck on the right shoulder, its nose wedged tight against a massive oak tree. More chilling, she saw a prone form on the asphalt, and it seemed to be moving. She kept waiting for Warren to hit the brakes, but he never did, and before she knew it, they were hurtling past the flaming wreck, the acrid stench of burning gasoline flooding through the AC vents like a ghostly accusation.

“Stop!” she’d cried, grabbing his arm, but he’d continued on, his jaw set tight. The argument that followed had altered her view of her husband forever. While she pleaded for him to turn back and use his medical skills to save the victim she had seen on the road (much less those who might be trapped inside the truck), Warren had calmly described the risks of such an act for him. Wasn’t there a Good Samaritan law on the books in Mississippi? Laurel shouted. Wouldn’t make a bit of difference, Warren told her, not once the personal-injury lawyers got into it. She’d been sobbing by then.