Blind Dates Can Be Murder (33 page)

“We’re having double cheeseburgers and French fries,” Mrs. Watkins said as she went back inside. “Danny’s favorite.”

Jo was wishing she had taken a pass. She glanced at Danny’s face and saw that he was smiling at her.

“What?”

“I know what you’re thinking. Fat. Calories. Starch.”

“I just don’t understand how someone who eats like you do stays in such good shape.”

Danny shrugged.

“Metabolism. Basketball.”

“You realize, don’t you, that you’ll be pretty inactive for a while. Maybe you should rethink your eating until your foot is better.”

“Maybe once I get my cast on and move back home I will,” he said. “Right now, no way would I pass up my mom’s wonderful cooking.”

Jo pinched Danny on the leg and then sat on the chair next to him.

“You are so spoiled,” she teased.

“Spoiled?” he replied. “I prefer to think of it as much-deserved pampering.”

Their eyes met and held. For a moment, the memory of Saturday’s kiss flashed back into Jo’s mind. She looked at Danny’s mouth and wondered if she kissed him again if it would feel the same.

Or even better.

He kept his eyes on her, and slowly he leaned toward her. After a long hesitation, she leaned into him as well.

“You still thinking of me as a brother?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” she replied softly. “Maybe I need to check.”

Their lips were almost touching when Mrs. Watkins called out from inside.

“Danny?” she cried. “What happened to the remote control? It looks like a truck drove over it!”

Jo and Danny pulled apart, the moment interrupted.

“I gotta move back home real soon,” he muttered under his breath.

Jo just sat and smiled, her cheeks blushing furiously.

Using the bus was going to get old. Chuck wanted to steal a car, but he wasn’t that stupid. He wasn’t about to get busted his first day out.

He filed on board, making one transfer so that he ended up less than a mile from the apartment where he and Lettie lived before he was incarcerated. According to Mickey, Lettie didn’t live there anymore, though Chuck wasn’t sure if he believed it or not. It was worth a try.

No one answered his knock, but as he walked away, he saw an old woman out back, hanging clothes on a line. Standing at the wire fence, he called to her.

“I’m looking for Lettie Smith,” he said, lacing his fingers through the wire. “She live here?”

The woman shook her head, ashes flying from the cigarette in her mouth as she did.

“Just me,” she replied. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “And my husband and my grown son and our Dobermans.”

Smiling, Chuck headed down the street toward what he had always considered “stripper’s row.” He wanted the element of surprise with Mickey, so he slipped into Swingers through the back door and walked straight to Mickey’s office. Though business was obviously hopping out front, things in the back were relatively quiet and dark.

Chuck pushed open Mickey’s office door, surprised to find that it was empty. He felt sure Mickey would be back soon, so he decided to sit and wait. First, however, he slipped from the office into the nearby stock room and helped himself to a big bottle of Scotch. He opened it, took a swig, and then brought it with him back to Mickey’s office.

He wasn’t going to get drunk. He just needed a few sips to clear his head. Chuck sat in a chair in a corner in the dark and listened as the music pounded through the walls. Occasionally, he could hear voices in the hall outside, but no one came in.

Finally, a different voice cut through the noise, and Chuck put down the bottle and stood, certain it was the man he was waiting for. Sure enough, a moment later Mickey entered his office and flipped on the light.

“Long time no see,” Chuck said, hands on his hips, his face and posture that of a man who had just done three years of very hard time.

Chewie enjoyed his double cheeseburger more than anyone. As they ate, Danny complained about his helplessness in the midst of a difficult situation.

“I wish there was something I could do for you,” he said.

Jo had been hoping he would say that.

“I have a job you can do, if you want it,” she told him. “It’ll feel like busy work, but it may pay off in the end. You can even do it sitting down.”

“Super. What is it?”

“I brought all of the reader mail I’ve received in the last year. I thought we could go through the letters and flag any of them that ask about dye stains. I want to see if Frank Malone had ever written to me.”

“Go through the mail. Sure.”

“Not that it’ll prove anything,” she said. “Just that if he was desperate enough for my expertise to kidnap my date, he must have sent one letter at least. Maybe it would have other clues as to what was going on with him.”

“Good thinking.”

Jo brought her plate into the kitchen, thanked Mrs. Watkins for the lovely lunch, and went out to the car. She grabbed three large loose-leaf binders and carried them around the side of the house to the backyard. Looking at the scene in front of her, Jo realized that while she was gone, Chewie had repositioned himself next to Danny. Danny’s eyes were closed, and with one lazy hand he was gently scratching Chewie’s back.

Jo’s heart swelled with some feeling she couldn’t identify. Was it fondness? Was it love? She was still trying to decide when Danny opened his eyes and spotted her there.

“Wow,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. “That’s a lot of letters.”

She carried over the notebooks and set them next to his chair.

“This is just the beginning,” she replied, smiling. “I’ve got twelve more notebooks just like these in the car.”

Lettie sat at the computer, overwhelmed with what she had found. Viveca’s file about procedures included every single thing Lettie needed to know in order to get to the data except the passwords. The system was complex, with a hierarchy of security measures that should have been adequate to protect the data. There was only one flaw: Hidden deep on the hard drive, Lettie found a file called pwrds.doc. When she opened it, she realized it listed all of the necessary passwords for full access to the system.

Stupid girl.

Lettie printed out the procedures and then followed her own first order of business, which was to pull up the profile and photo of Lettie Smith and delete it. Because she had the passwords, it wasn’t hard to do as long as she followed the step-by-step instructions Viveca had typed out.

Just before Lettie deleted the profile, she forced herself to look at her photo, the one Danny had taken. As she took in the giant glasses, the ugly hair, and the pale skin, she thought about Marie’s words on the answering machine:
She’d be a knockout
.

“No way,” Lettie whispered, clicking the button that would remove her from the system.

Once that was finished, she gathered her nerve, took a small flash drive from her purse, and slid it into the hard drive under the desk. She found the profile of Jo Tulip and transferred it over—an action that took only a fraction of a second and caused a mere blip on the screen.

Just to make sure it had copied over correctly, Lettie opened the file from the flash drive and skimmed through it. Sure enough, it was filled with all kinds of data, including what skimmers called the “good stuff”: full name, place of birth, birth date. Lettie scrolled down a little further and caught her breath. Not only did the record hold Jo’s credit card number, in full, without Xs, it also had her social security number—the holy grail of data stealing.

Lettie closed the file and then sat there, a wild idea racing through her brain.

She needed money; Mickey paid a lot extra for this kind of data. Finally, she swallowed every bit of scruples and principles she possessed and decided to plunge ahead.

This was no time to draw the line.

Quickly, Lettie began going through all of the client files—every single customer of Dates&Mates—and copying them over until the flash drive was full. Unbelievable.

Except for answering the phone, Lettie was there alone, free to do what she needed to do. She pulled out the flash drive, put it in her purse, and took out another. Then she repeated the procedure, copying over the rest of the client files and then adding the personnel files as well. That was a little scarier, because she wouldn’t have been able to explain herself if anyone had caught her. But no one did. At one point, Tasha breezed through, but she was talking with another employee at the time and barely acknowledged Lettie.

When all of the files had been copied over, Lettie put the second flash drive into her purse and zipped it shut. Once her purse was tucked away in the desk drawer, she allowed herself to relax.

That had probably been the simplest, most profitable data-stealing I’ve ever done
, she thought guiltily,
all thanks to the pregnant lady who had been hit by a car
.

Just the thought of it made Lettie sick.

Mickey nearly jumped out of his skin. He grabbed at his chest, not even kidding around, and for a second Chuck was afraid the guy was going to drop dead of a heart attack. But then he caught his breath and used his hands to support himself as he made his way to his office chair. He fell into the chair and closed his eyes.

“What are you trying to do, Chuck? Kill me?”

“You look half dead anyway,” Chuck replied, shaking his head. “What’s wrong with you?”

Mickey was a like a shell of his former self—pale, sweaty, thin. For a minute Chuck almost felt guilty for putting the squeeze on him.