On the Run with His Bodyguard, page 17
She could have mentioned it. Was writing on a spiral-bound tablet he hadn’t seen before.
“Every single one of the fraudulent activities, including the many random changes made to inventory databases, either took place when the office was open or on Sunday mornings.” He said the words aloud, felt energy coursing through him, but didn’t know how to translate the information. “We need to call Glen again,” he said.
McKenna tossed him the phone. He saw the opened camera app. Noticed a rabbit munching on a leaf in the corner of camera seven, minimized and pressed the numbers.
* * *
He’d put the phone on speaker. As soon as McKenna heard Joe talking about timelines adding up in accordance with him, but not in the way one would think, she put down her drawing pad and headed over to the table, uneasy without the cameras in front of her after a day of studying them intently.
Hundreds of thousands of hunters with Joe in their sights gave her a bad feeling.
Possible cops on the road with a BOLO bearing Joe’s likeness was even worse.
And she felt the weight of them all more deeply, more personally, than any other danger in any other job she’d ever taken.
“Take out all times when the offices were open,” he was saying to Glen. “Then take out the incidences that happened at night during scheduled maintenance hours. And what are you left with?”
“Sunday mornings.”
“Right.” Joe was nodding as though that explained everything.
“I don’t get the significance.” Glen voiced McKenna’s own confusion.
“Unless there’s an important function that I need to attend, a golf outing or breakfast where important business is set to take place, I am always home on Sunday mornings,” he said. “It’s sacred time.”
Eyes wide, McKenna stared at him. He hadn’t said religious or church time, but sacred time. She wanted more.
“Can you prove it? Phone calls? Home security system?”
Her heart started to pound as she continued to watch Joe, who was mostly studying his computer but was also shaking his head.
“That’s just it,” he said. “Sacred time is off time. No electronics. Obviously, my security cameras would be on, but I wouldn’t be on them. I don’t come and go from eight until eleven thirty on Sunday mornings.”
“That’s why you never had an alibi in court.”
“The prosecutors gave my attorney a list of possible timelines. They all included hours in which I could have made the changes to the reports myself. They didn’t know about the virus, the program rewrite. It was assumed I changed reports to reflect those anomalies that we now know were created by the techie stuff. But with this more specific information, with times nailed down...there’s a definite pattern.”
Nervous energy flowed through her. She could feel his excitement. She just couldn’t find a good cause for it.
“Being home alone, without an alibi, doesn’t help you, Joe,” she blurted, tense from a day of calm in the midst of the bigger storm brewing around them.
If they didn’t get him exonerated soon, the tornado was going to find them...
“It points to someone framing me,” he said, looking at her for a second and then back at the phone. “There were other times the office was closed, Saturdays, Saturday nights, Sunday nights, but no, all the out-of-office incidents happened on Sunday mornings. A time when I would be home without electronics, meaning I’d have no alibi.”
She sort of got it, but...
“It’s the time I was sure to be most vulnerable.”
He was so certain he was on to something big. She wanted it for him—wanted him to find the key that unlocked his invisible cell.
But...
“So, who knew?” Glen’s question, his thinking tone, gave her hope.
“Only one person in the world would know that,” he said, and her chest tightened. He was on to something. “My father,” he said.
And then, hardly taking a breath, he continued, “I have no idea how any of this happened, how my father would ever gain access to anyone at Bellair or why he’d bother. It makes no sense to me. Not yet. But this is big,” he said, sounding as though he’d bet his life on the fact. “My mother created sacred time. It was the one thing that never changed in my life. The one thing she fought for in our lives. No matter what my dad had going with us, no matter where we were, Sunday mornings from eight until eleven thirty were sacred. Off time, she said. No TV. No phone. No computers or games or cars. It was time for quiet, for peace, for rest. After she...died...sacred time was the one thing I fought my dad about. I didn’t care what he did to me, I was observing sacred time...”
It was a stretch. A big one. But she did see that someone knowing that—someone who wanted to frame Joe for something—would see Sunday mornings as an opportune time.
“Someone could have just noticed your pattern of not being available on Sunday mornings,” she pointed out when Glen said nothing, silently hoping that her boss would at least consider Joe’s information possibly valid. Joe was so sure he was right. He’d come so alive, become so vital...a man who was making her feel more energetic just sitting with him.
A man whose hope was so fragile.
“I never told anyone I wasn’t available. To the contrary, when something important came up, I accepted invitations. Yet none of the fraud happened at those times—when I would have had alibis. Only the Sundays when I was home. I already checked my schedule,” he said. “Add that to the fact that someone knew what was inside my sealed record. It could be unrelated, I know. Could be someone in law enforcement eager to be someone in the #wheresjoenow game, but what if it isn’t? There are two things now that seem to be coming into play that only my father would have known.”
“I’ll get the team delving into every person on our list, looking for any connection to Bellair Software and your father...”
“Thank you.” Joe nodded, his expression alight and yet calm, too.
Raising her curiosity about the man he’d been. The man he would be again. Not the wealthy background, not the lifestyle, but the man.
And her whole body tingled, thinking about how much better she was going to get to know him...that night.
* * *
He wanted to romance her with wine and a warm, gooey chocolate dessert. To undress her and soak in a tub that would massage them with spray nozzles.
To take her to eat at the Top of the Mountain. And dancing in the Buttes.
Or on a dinner cruise out to Catalina Island off the coast of California.
Just for starters.
Instead, Joe made spaghetti, his mother’s recipe, and poured his beer into a glass instead of drinking it out of the bottle while she sipped on ice water, keeping constant watch on the camera app on her phone.
He’d gone over to turn on some good romantic mood music; the sound system had state-of-the-art speakers built in throughout the rig that could be turned on or off separately, as needed. But without the ability to stream, he had nothing to play.
For the first time in months, he felt like he was on the upswing.
Was in the mood for ambience. For the niceties he’d worked so hard to provide.
McKenna’s brow was creased. Not with an all-out frown, but with the way she was watching her phone...
“You seem uneasy. Have you noticed something going on? Something suspicious?”
Shaking her head, she looked over at him and...smiled. An actual, natural, very real expression of...goodness.
It took his air, and his ability to swallow with it.
Desperate to maintain decorum, to not just grab her hand and pull her back to his bed, he glanced around the table. Alighted on her spiral notebook.
“What’s this?” he asked, pulling it forward. When she shrugged and didn’t argue, he opened it, expecting to see lined notepaper.
Curious as to what she’d write...notes about the job, he’d imagined.
Instead, the pages were originally blank and thicker than regular lined paper.
She’d been drawing. Views from outside the rig.
All done with minute precision.
And a soft beauty.
“Wow. These are great,” he told her, totally impressed.
“They’re how I commit to memory the area I’m protecting,” she told him. “When I have to spend long hours sitting and watching. So my mind doesn’t wander. So I don’t get bored. And so I’ll notice if even the smallest thing changes.”
Like she stared at the camera images, now that she could keep them on full-time.
Reminding him that no matter how much of a breakthrough he felt he’d had that day, the danger still lurked, every bit as fueled as it had been, in the world all around them.
“Hopefully Glen will have some answers by morning,” she said then, obviously thinking on the same wavelength as him. Not too difficult to figure out, with them discussing the fact that she was there because one of almost a million people could be lurking right outside their door at any moment.
Or a police officer could pull up to the door, demand access and be on the take.
With the amount of money involved in his case, the amounts the prosecution had thrown about that he’d made on his stock sale, his bonus proceeds, someone could be willing to buy a corrupt cop for the bigger payout.
Or worse, as Sierra’s Web pushed more into the case, the real culprit could be desperate enough to stay anonymous that they’d pay a dirty cop to kill him.
There were people out there who’d be willing to justify the killing of a bad guy who’d been set free without paying for his crime...
“Sierra’s Web experts are the best,” she said then. “You know their story, right?”
He shook his head, picking up his fork again. No matter what the morrow brought, he had the now.
With her.
“The seven partners, they were friends in college,” she told him, her eyes glowing with...fondness? Admiration?
Was it wrong to want her to look at him that way?
“That’s nice,” he said, more to please her than anything else. He’d had friends in college, too, Julius Bellair being one of them. But that hadn’t won him his job at the company.
The right skills, work ethic and dedication had done that.
McKenna shook her head, sobered. “They met in a communications class. Had been put together as a team on a project but grew personally close. There’d been an eighth member. Her name was Sierra...”
He sobered then, too. Tuning in. “She didn’t make it to a scheduled meet after a school break and they reported her missing, but no one took them seriously, saying she’d probably just changed plans. Her father wasn’t worried. When she didn’t show up by start of class, they went to a professor of theirs and told her their concerns. Long story short, the seven of them ended up working with the police, each bringing their own perspectives to the case. It was those seven different views of Sierra, the seven different interactions, that helped the police solve the case.”
Joe’s fork stopped on the way to his mouth. He’d had no idea... “So they found her. Obviously, she’s part of the firm...” Even as he was saying the words, the truth hit him. There were only seven partners.
“They were too late.” He guessed.
“She’d already been dead before they’d been due to meet. There was nothing they could have done at that point. But the important thing was that because of them, and their refusal to stop looking for answers until they found them, they solved her murder. They brought Sierra justice.”
He sipped his beer. Feeling suddenly as though he had something more than just money on his case. Something more powerful.
Fanciful, and yet...
“They’re going to bring you that same energy, Joe. That same refusal to quit until they find the answers they seek. That’s just how we are.”
We. She’d changed from they to we.
Because she was a part of them. She had her calling in life. Her place. Her family.
And he was lucky enough to have her sitting at dinner, alone with him, eating his spaghetti.
If all he got was that one dinner, he’d be forever thankful for it.
Chapter 19
McKenna waited for Joe to finish in the bathroom and close himself into the back of the rig before heading to the shower. Normally she would have waited until early morning, since she was sleeping in her clothes, but no way she going to Joe’s bed without fresh-smelling skin.
They both knew what was coming. He’d barely been able to contain himself after the dinner dishes were done. Sitting, jumping up to adjust a shade, or open the refrigerator only to close it again, and returning to his seat.
He’d lasted about fifteen minutes and then excused himself to shower and head to bed.
She didn’t question his early retirement. He was beyond ready.
She was beyond the point of trying to rationalize or question. They’d established rules meant to protect them from residual emotional attachment. And she was so on fire, she knew she’d regret not experiencing everything Joe had to give her.
Her nipples tingled as she washed them, the water sluicing over her body massaging already-sensitized nerve endings. She’d never known a desire so all consuming, so compelling, that it took her over—body and mind...
“McKenna!”
Startled, with her head under the water, she slipped in the small tub, grabbed hold of the washcloth bar and shivered, mouth open as Joe opened the glass door and shoved a towel in at her.
“Glen called,” she heard as she shut off the water. She’d left her phone on the sink, which was right outside his bedroom door.
“We have to get out—now.”
She felt the whirr as the bedroom slide moved inward, and she catapulted into action. By the time she’d hurriedly dried off and pulled clean clothes on over her still-damp body, Joe, in a clean pair of tan shorts and a brown shirt, was already outside.
“You don’t ever leave the rig without me checking things first,” she bit out, completely out of sync, as she scrambled to get from sensual woman to bodyguard in a matter of seconds.
“Glen said leave now,” he relayed, his near whisper filled with urgency. “I’m figuring it’s less of a risk for me to get the car hooked up than it is to wait around for someone to get here.”
She handled the hookups. He got the car’s front tires ramped. By the time they’d climbed back into the rig, the slides were in place.
“Leave the kitchen stuff,” Joe said as he climbed behind the wheel of the rig.
Doing as he said, she buckled herself into the captain’s chair beside him. “Tell me exactly what Glen said.”
He was pulling out, using only the rig’s less bright driving lights until they’d reached the end of the access road and were turning on to the entry ramp for the highway. As he switched on the headlights and sped up, he said, “Someone noticed tracking activity pinging off the cell towers, and subsequently the numbers, used by Sierra’s Web. And then traced those to numbers called...”
Going cold with dread—a little bit of wet hair fallout—she guessed, “They’ve got my number.”
“I’ve already destroyed the phone—Glen’s orders. They’re pretty sure the tracking got only as far as the cell tower we were pinging off, not our exact location.”
Keeping a watch for anything and everything, including police cars, McKenna felt sick. Her entire body tensed as she thought over facts, tried to figure out a plan.
If they were stopped by a dirty cop, she had no way to alert anyone.
No emergency contact method.
She had a gun. Her knife.
Her training.
The cop would have all three as well.
They couldn’t live on the road as they’d done the first couple of days they’d been together. With possibly billions of peoples on the hashtage now, that would be too much risk.
Another obscure park somewhere?
Could they get lucky enough to find a place, in a hurry, that offered the same privacy as the one they’d just left? What were the chances of finding a site buried in trees at the end of a road?
She knew the answer even as she silently asked it. Slim at best.
With both hands on the wheel, Joe sat up straight, staring at the road ahead. He hadn’t said a word since he’d entered the closest highway ramp, which would lead them to a major east-west highway.
Grasping for the best plan, even a good plan, in the twenty minutes she had before they reached the expressway, she suddenly just knew.
With a calm that was more her style, she told Joe to turn left before he reached the major highway. Perhaps they’d have less chance of someone coming to their aid if they were attacked on a dark two-lane country highway through the desert, but they’d also have that many fewer eyes on them.
“This road connects with one other and will lead us east, and then in about an hour and a half we’ll be heading south,” she said, all business. “We’re keeping to side roads and should reach our destination not long after midnight. The route is often traveled by RV vacationers who want a more scenic route and less traffic to deal with, so our passing shouldn’t raise curiosity. Plus, no semis.”
She was half thinking out loud. Half giving him the explanation he deserved.
“Where’s our destination?”
Right. She’d failed to mention that part. “Shelter Valley.”
His glance toward her was quick, turning sharply back to the road. “The town where your father lives?” She could see his frown from the lights on the dash.
“And my brothers, actually, too. They’ve got land at the edge of town. We can camp out there, at least until we have time to assimilate.”
