Secure Location (16 page)

She got promoted a couple times and was already a manager when she met Cruz. His mother had introduced them. When they were dating, she’d tell him stories of the crazy things that happened at work. He’d roll his eyes and say pithy things about people who had more money than common sense. During their marriage, she got promoted to director. Cruz had been proud of her. And she’d known that he bragged about her at work. After Cruz and Sam Vernelli became partners, Sam would tease her, tell her that he hoped she never fell off her pedestal.

She’d tried. But pedestals were not always steady and when Cruz started talking about babies, the ground started to shake. She’d been quiet at first, then tried to gently remind him of all the reasons that things were perfect just the way they were. But when he’d started talking about parochial schools, club soccer and advanced calculus, all the things their children would have and do, the shaking advanced to full-blown quaking and the pedestal became very unstable.

Missy had never done any of those things.

Because of her.

She couldn’t tell Cruz the truth. Didn’t want him to realize that he’d been a fool to put her on the pedestal. Instead, she’d let him think that the pedestal had bored her, that it either wasn’t high enough, low enough or some combination thereof. Left him confused, angry, and unable to sort through the mess.

And now she’d led him straight into another bit of craziness. He should run like hell because the pedestal was about to topple over and crush him.

She glanced away from the television that she was watching but not seeing. She got up and peeked in at Jana, who had gotten up shortly after Cruz had talked to Detective Myers, eaten a few bites of her macaroni, and then fallen asleep again in Meg’s bed just minutes after Greta had arrived. She was still sleeping soundly, her pretty little face all relaxed and peaceful.

Peace. Meg could hardly remember the feeling.

She partially closed the connecting door and turned to Greta, who was watching her. “Would you like some coffee or anything?”

The woman shook her head. “No, thank you. Harry and I just finished dinner when your husband, I mean ex-husband, called.”

It took Meg a moment to realize that
Harry
was Harold Myers. “You and Detective Myers?” she asked, before she could censor herself.

The woman’s face turned pink. “We’ve been living together for a year. There’s no reporting relationship between the two of us but we still try to be discreet.”

It seemed an unlikely pairing but then again, what room did she have to talk? Cruz had come from a sometimes loud, highly charged family. They talked rough, they hugged hard and they counted on each other. Her family had been quiet and emotionless, even in the wake of Missy’s death. They didn’t talk about what happened. The one time she had been brave enough to broach the subject, her father had told her that she should have been more careful and her mother had said that it was best to try to forget it.

She stopped trying to talk about it and stopped hoping to count on anyone else. She sure as heck didn’t want anyone counting on her.

She kept a safe zone around her and the only one that had ever breached it was Cruz. In his bold, in-your-face way, he’d managed to get past all the imaginary alligators and scale the palace walls.

They’d been a team. A cohesive unit.

They’d loved and laughed and in the quiet nights when she awoke and she could hear Cruz breathing next to her, she’d been overwhelmed at the love she felt for him.

Yet she’d continued to keep her secret.

Maybe because she really liked the pedestal. Maybe because she was afraid of disappointing him. Maybe because she’d gotten used to never talking about it and now it just seemed too damn late.

She heard two sharp raps on the door. “Meg, it’s Cruz.”

Greta opened the door. He came in with Detective Myers on his heels. They didn’t have her laptop.

“Well?” she asked, impatient to have the details.

Cruz gave her a tired smile. “There was a program on your laptop. Basically, it was recording and transmitting every keystroke, every website you went to, all the activity.”

She felt nauseous and terribly violated. “Transmitting it where?”

“We’re working on that,” Myers said. “Every computer has an address, sort of like a house number. But whoever installed this was smart. When our technical guys try to trace the address, it’s bouncing them all over the place. Russia. China. India. The guy was good at covering his tracks. Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’re not going to have much success.”

“Why?” she demanded. This was getting old. She wanted answers.

“Two things. First of all, the malware was pretty sophisticated. The technical guys knew what they were looking for and they had trouble finding it on the machine. Two, he has to assume that once he sent the pictures, we’d eventually find our way to your laptop. By now, he’s probably covering his cyber-tracks. Your information is probably being routed through some old lady’s desktop in Indonesia and she’s as innocent of the crime as you are.”

Meg shook her head. “I hate computers.”

Cruz nodded. “Me, too.”

She mostly used her laptop for personal reasons. Online shopping, reading the
Wall Street Journal,
perusing new recipes. What had someone hoped to gain by tracking that kind of activity? “How did this program get on my computer?”

Cruz ran a hand through his long hair. His face was very serious. “That much we know. You didn’t open some random email and install this. Somebody who had access to your laptop downloaded the software.”

She didn’t know if that was supposed to make her feel better or worse that she hadn’t been fooled by some slick cyber-creep. “How long?” she asked. “How long has this been going on?”

“For almost six months,” Myers said.

She mentally reviewed the termination dates of Hawkins, Looney and Blakely. Six months ago they’d all still been working at the hotel. Oscar Warren had also been there. She looked at Cruz’s face and knew that he’d already gone through the same exercise.

“Where do you normally keep your laptop?” Detective Myers asked.

She shrugged. “At home, usually. I bring it to work occasionally.”

“When it’s at work, do you have it with you? Do you take it to meetings?”

“No. I leave it in my office. I’ll use it during my lunch hour. Sometimes I’ll stop at a coffee shop on my way home and jump on the public Wi-Fi. I don’t see how this could have happened, I have a password on it.”

“There are programs that can break a password in seconds. Child’s play for somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

“Charlotte would have had access,” Cruz said. “Because of his relationship with her, Hawkins probably did, too. You said that you’d come back to the office and he’d be hanging around.”

She nodded.

“And Looney was in Maintenance and Blakely in Security. Both with access to a master key that could have been used to unlock the office when both you and Charlotte were away.”

Her head was spinning. “Yes.”

“Oscar Warren?” he asked.

She shook her head. “We didn’t give keys to any of the people from A Hand Up.”

“Slater would have had a key,” Cruz stated.

“What?” Meg asked.

“I’ve been focusing my attention on these four white men. One because of his jail record and three because their employment was terminated within the last year. But maybe it’s a white guy with a whole other agenda. I don’t want to be stupid and overlook somebody.”

Cruz had never been stupid. “It’s not Scott,” she said.

“Nobody gets a free pass, Meg. Nobody.”

She
needed the free pass. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “It was nice to meet you,” she said, looking at Greta. “Thank you for coming to stay with me.”

“Do you want me to get Jana?” Cruz asked.

Meg didn’t want to disturb the little girl. She shook her head. “She can sleep with me.”

Five minutes later, she heard the doors and knew that Detective Myers and Greta had left. Seconds later, Cruz was standing at her door. “Sleeping?” he asked quietly.

She could pretend. “No,” she said.

He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The lights were all off, with the exception of one dim light from the bathroom. His shape was visible but she couldn’t see the expression on his face. She could feel warmth roll off his big body.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she lied. “I’m sorry about this, Cruz. Sorry that you got dragged into it and that it touched Jana. I never meant for that to happen.”

“It’s not your fault, Meg.”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. What if it really was her fault? What if it had something to do with what had happened to Missy?

They sat there in the dark for a long moment. Finally, Cruz shifted. “Is there anything you haven’t told me, Meg?” he asked, his voice soft.

She swallowed hard. “Of course not,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But just a few minutes ago, right before Myers and Greta left, you had the strangest look on your face. Like you were thinking of something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Look, Cruz, I’m really tired.” She rolled over, giving him her back.

And she didn’t start to cry until he’d left the room.

Chapter Fourteen

Early Monday morning, Cruz got Jana dressed and fed her breakfast in the hotel restaurant. She was barely finished with her pancakes when Elsa came to pick her up. It was a tearful reunion, on Elsa’s part. Jana was all smiles and gave Cruz a big kiss. He watched them drive away and then did something that he’d never expected to do—not in a hundred years. He initiated a background check on Meg.

He dialed and Sam answered on the fourth ring. “Vernelli,” he said, his voice rough.

“It’s almost eight o’clock your time, partner,” Cruz said. “Get your sorry self out of bed.”

Sam sighed. “Claire and I took the red-eye back from Omaha. She wanted to spring the news about the baby to her parents in person.”

Cruz had only met the Fontaines once, at Sam and Claire’s wedding. They’d been nice enough but rather reserved. “How’d that go?”

“Better than either of us might have expected.”

That was no doubt a good thing because if the Fontaines had given Claire even a moment of grief, Sam would have told them to stuff it and he’d have whisked his new bride away from Nebraska and back to Chicago. “How’s Claire feeling?”

“As long as I embrace my role of saltine cracker-bearing slave, it’s all good,” Sam said. “What’s going on with you? How’s Meg?” he asked, his tone careful.

Cruz understood the caution. Sam had lived through the death spiral that Cruz had started when Meg had suddenly announced she was leaving. “Meg’s okay. I mean, she looks great, she’s doing really well in her job, she...” Cruz couldn’t finish. He sucked in a breath. This was his best friend. “She’s in trouble, Sam. And I’m not sure she’s telling me the truth.”

There was silence on the other end.

Cruz barged on. “I need your help. I want to know everything about Margaret Mae Gunderson Montoya that there is to know. I’m not sure what’s important and what’s not, so don’t leave anything out.”

“Consider it done. I’ll be in touch.”

Cruz disconnected the call. When he’d talked to Myers the night before, the man had told him that the blood on Meg’s desk had been analyzed. The good news was that it wasn’t human. It was canine. But not from just one dog. Three dogs. The bastard had killed three dogs. They figured he’d somehow managed to collect the blood and then he’d smeared it across Meg’s desk.

They were dealing with somebody who had a screw loose. Technologically sharp, yet bent. It was a scary combination. He hoped the guy didn’t build bombs in his basement.

Cruz punched an address into his GPS that he’d gotten from Tom Looney’s employment application. The man had worked at a factory before he’d been hired on at the hotel. He’d listed his supervisor as H. Looney. It wasn’t that common of a last name and Cruz was betting on the fact that H. Looney was some kind of relation.

Who hopefully knew just where Tom Looney could be found.

When he arrived at the small shop and asked for H. Looney, the woman at the front desk pushed a button and the overhead page went out. “Haney to the front. Haney to the front.”

In less than a minute, a fifty-year-old man who was wiping his hands on a grease rag poked his head around the door. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m Detective Cruz Montoya. I’m looking for Tom Looney. I know he used to work here.”

The man nodded. “He’s my nephew. He worked here for a couple years after he lost his job at the prison.”

There hadn’t been anything on his application about working at a prison. “What did he do at the prison?”

“Maintenance supervisor. I guess it was budget cuts. He’d worked there a couple years.”

Maybe. Or maybe he’d screwed up there, too, and didn’t want anybody checking those references. “I stopped by his house yesterday. The woman living there didn’t seem to know where he was.”

The man smiled. “Donnetta. Now that’s a hard nut to crack. She’s Bertie’s sister. Tom’s mother,” he added. “I’m his uncle on his daddy’s side.”

“Where’s your nephew now?”

“Doing maintenance work at the food plant south of town, on I-37. It’s a good job.” Haney Looney reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a worn billfold. He opened it and thumbed through a stack of business cards, pulling one out from near the bottom. “Here. He gave this to me just a couple weeks ago.”

Cruz took the card. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I’m going to pay your nephew a visit. I don’t really expect you to keep this conversation to yourself. I understand how family works. But understand this. If he suddenly goes AWOL, I’m not going to reflect positively upon that.”

“I’m not going to call him. He’s a man. Or at least he says he is. He can answer his own damn questions.” The man turned and left the room.

It took Cruz thirty minutes to get to the food plant and another fifteen to work his way past the guards at the various entrances. The place was tied up tighter than Fort Knox. A sign of the times for sure. No manufacturer in their right mind wanted to make it easy for someone to get inside, tamper with some product and make a couple hundred people sick before the company could get the product off the shelves.