Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

And yet that explanation hurt him more. It implied premeditation. It implied that Sandra knew she was leaving, and had wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t be able to find her.

Jason lifted a weary hand. He shielded his eyes, and for a moment, the flood of emotion that choked his throat surprised him.

He had not married Sandra for love. He was not a man who had that kind of expectation out of life. And yet, for a while… For a while, it had been very nice to feel like part of a family. It had been nice to feel normal.

He had screwed up in February. The hotel room, the dinner, the champagne… He never should’ve done what he’d done in February.

Jason cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes. He pushed his own exhaustion away, and gazing down at his sleeping child, forced himself back to the matters at hand.

Sandra was not as technologically gifted as he was. He assumed that if she had been the one to purge the account, she’d done it through purging the cache file, meaning the information was all still on the hard drive, just the directory identifying the location of each data point had been removed. And, by utilizing any number of simple forensic programs, he could restore most of the deleted information.

Time was the issue. It would take at least an hour to run such a program, and then hours more to comb through the re-created data until he found what he was looking for. He didn’t have hours. Jason glanced at his watch. He had thirty minutes. Crap.

He rubbed his face again with tired hands, and took a deep breath.

All right, time for plan B.

His memory stick had reached capacity. He disengaged it, returned to the system menu, and perused the contents menu. He had removed both too much and too little. He selected half a dozen more files to delete, glancing at his watch again and feeling the urgency.

Originally, he had hoped to capture what he could, then run an official purge program. Now, however, he couldn’t bring himself to trash the hard drive, not when it might contain clues regarding Sandra’s final hours. Which created an interesting dilemma. The computer potentially held the power both to find his wife and to put him in jail forever.

He thought about it. Then he knew what to do.

He would return the old family computer from the basement to the kitchen table, uploading it with all the current software programs from the new computer. He could transfer over basic files from his memory stick, enough garbage to give the old computer the appearance of an active one.

A good evidence tech would figure it out, eventually. That there were date gaps in the computer’s memory. Perhaps even Sergeant D.D. and Detective Miller would catch the switch. He didn’t think so, however. Most people noticed a person’s monitor, and maybe a person’s keyboard, but they didn’t notice the computer itself, the functional tower that was generally propped under a desk or kitchen table. If anything, perhaps they’d noted that he owned a Dell, in which case his brand loyalty was about to be rewarded.

So the old computer would become his current computer, buying him some precious time.

Which left him with the issue of what to do with his current computer. Couldn’t put it in his house, which was probably destined to be searched a few more times. Equally risky to stash it in his vehicle, for the same reason. Which left him one option. To leave the computer right here, set up just as it was, a computer on a desk, in a room full of computers on desks. He would even connect it to the network, making it a fully functional, completely indistinguishable Boston Daily computer. Hide in plain sight, as it were.

Even if the police thought to search the Boston Daily offices, he sincerely doubted they could obtain a warrant to seize computers from a major news outlet. Why, the breach in confidentiality alone… Besides, in the modern world of “hoteling,” Jason didn’t have an official work space. Meaning there wasn’t a single computer or office space the police could definitively list in a warrant as being his. Technically speaking, all the computers were used by him, and no judge in this day and age was going to let the police carry away every single computer belonging to the Boston Daily. That just wasn’t going to happen.

At least he hoped not.

Jason pushed away from the desk. He crumpled up the duffel bag and stuffed it in the back of a metal filing cabinet. Then he picked up his sleeping daughter and, very gently carried her back out to the car.

Five forty-five A.M. Sun would be coming up soon, he thought. He wondered if Sandra could see it.

I’m working on a letter. In order to graduate from my treatment program, I need to write a letter to the victim, in which I take responsibility for my actions and express my remorse. This letter is never sent; wouldn’t be fair to the victim, we’re told. Dredging up bad business and all that. But we have to write it.

So far, I have two words: Dear Rachel.

Rachel is an alias, of course-no confidentiality in group therapy, remember? So basically, after six weeks of work, I have two words, one of which is a lie.

Tonight, however, I think I can make some progress on my Dear Rachel letter. Tonight, I’m learning what it feels like to be a victim.

I wanted to run. Thought about it. Tried it out in my head. Couldn’t see how it could be done. Running away involves some serious logistics in this post-9/11 world where Big Brother is always watching. Can’t catch a plane or train without a license, and I don’t have a car. What am I supposed to do, walk my way across Massachusetts state lines?

Truth is, I don’t have the cash or the wheels for a hard-core disappearing act. I’ve been paying for polygraphs and support group, not to mention the hundred a week I send straight to Jerry. He calls it restitution. I call it insurance that he doesn’t track me to South Boston and break every goddamn bone in my miserable body.

So the bank account is a little low on exit funds.

What can I do? After support group, I headed home.

Colleen knocked on my door just thirty minutes later.

“Can I come in?” my parole officer asks, very polite, very firm. Her red hair is spiked tonight, but it doesn’t distract from the serious look on her face.

“Sure,” I say, and hold the door wide open. Colleen has visited once before, in the very beginning when she was confirming my address. It’s been two years now, but not much has changed. I’m not exactly big on interior decorating.

She walks down the cramped hallway to the back of the house, where my thrifty landlord, Mrs. Houlihan, has converted a sitting room and screened-in porch into a five-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment. I pay eight hundred bucks a month for use of this magnificent space. In return, Mrs. H. can make the property tax payments on the home she’s owned for fifty-odd years, and doesn’t want to lose just because some yuppies finally discovered the neighborhood and sent property values sky high.

Truth is, I kind of like Mrs. H., even if she did hang lace over every damn window, as well as place crocheted doilies on all pieces of upholstered furniture (which she pins into place, as I know because I get pricked by the pins at least every other day). For starters, Mrs. H. knows I’m a registered sex offender, and she still lets me stay, even though her own kids yelled at her for it (I heard them from my apartment; it’s not like the house is that big). For another, I catch her in my room all the time.

“Forgot something,” she barks at me, playing to her age. Mrs. H. is eighty years old and built like a garden gnome. There is nothing fragile, absentminded, or remotely forgetful about her. She’s checking up on me, of course, and we both know it. But we don’t talk about it, and I like that, too.