For The Love Of Laurel (15 page)

Finally, Laurel picked up the conversation. “Also, the article I showed you isn’t correct.”

Junior’s head came up quickly. “What?” he said, with his mouth full of chicken.

“The facts are wrong.” Her tone was casual, and she didn’t look at him, concentrating on her food instead.

Junior put down his fork. “How could they be? And where did you get that idea?”

“Need to know basis,” Laurel said. She heard Dylan stifle a laugh and realized she was beginning to sound like him.
Dear God.

Chaber didn’t bother to stifle his. “Lighten up, Laurel. I thought we were going to have a pleasant dinner. I didn’t know I’d be subjected to the third degree. Here are the facts as I know them. Discrepancy in the books, independent investigation of same at Chaber’s behest. Everything found to be in order. The Markham’s house burned down, murder suspected but never proven. Was it intentional? No motive. Therefore, a crime of opportunity. Someone looking to rob a house, finds a window open, robs house, covers crime with arson.”

“Seems like you have it all wrapped up in a neat package,” Dylan said.

“It
is
a neat package. You’re looking for things that aren’t there.” He put his hand over Laurel’s, which rested on the table. “Laurel, you grew up with us. Your father worked for the company for years. Do you think he would have if he suspected something illegal? I don’t think so. He was an honorable man.”

Laurel moved her hand, and Chaber pulled his back. She realized Junior knew only what he’d been told, no doubt by his father. She could relate. She’d always believed
her
father too. But unlike Junior, she could no longer consider him an honorable man.

On the drive back to the motel, Dylan said, “I’m thinking this was a wasted trip. Did you learn any more than you already knew?”

“Not much,” Laurel admitted. “I’m not even sure what I was hoping to learn. Maybe that my father was innocent of a horrific crime. Instead, I just seem to have more questions.”

Her phone buzzed. It was Detective Carson.

“Ms. Avidon, can you drop by the station? I have something I’d like you to see.”

She agreed and told Dylan to turn around.

Once again, Carson met them and escorted them to his office. When they were seated, he said, “After you left, I did some research. You look familiar, but I didn’t want to mention it unnecessarily. As I told you, this case has always bothered me. Once my shift was over, I went to the local newspaper office and went through some microfilm. I think I now know what happened to the Markham’s baby. It took some doing to get this photo blown up, but it was worth the effort. It’s a picture taken during the Markham’s wedding day that the paper used in its social section.” He handed it to Laurel.

She froze. Her mind didn’t want to process what she saw. Shakily, she handed it to Dylan.

“Good God,” he whispered.

Taking the picture back, Laurel looked at it again. “This could be me. I look just like Regina Markham. Did my father get her pregnant?”

There was total silence in the room.

Carson handed her another piece of paper. It was the birth announcement of Delilah Regina Markham on April 27, 1986. After staring at it for a full minute, she gave it to Dylan.

“Regina had to be three months pregnant when she got married. Maybe she had an affair with my father, but I can’t imagine him being the marrying kind, so to save face, she married Robert and he agreed to raise me as his own. But that wasn’t good enough for my father. He wasn’t in love with my mother, but he wasn’t about to let another man raise his daughter. So he killed them both and took me. That’s why they never found Delilah’s bones.” She could hear the shock in her tone.

It all made sense now. All she could think about was the address of the coded email, m78r01d20, which she had memorized when Josh asked her for it. Turn it around and it was 02d10r87m. 02/10/87. The day the Markhams were murdered. A date Gerald considered important. Why that date and not the dates of others he’d killed over the years? The initials in the email address said why. The initials of Delilah Regina Markham. Her.

She glared at Dylan. “Have you known all this time?” she said angrily.

Dylan shook his head. “No. I swear. I had no idea.”

“Why did he kill both Mr. Markham and my mother? Why would he kill her then take me? Revenge for choosing Markham instead of him? Maybe he did love her but the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. There are too many scenarios to know which is right, but one thing I do know for sure is that I am Gerald’s daughter and not Robert’s.”

“How can you be certain?” Carson said.

“Because if I wasn’t, he’d have killed me too.”

Chapter 21

It had only been a week since Laurel’s discovery, though it seemed like years.
Maybe that’s because deep inside I’ve always known something wasn’t right.

Laurel didn’t believe Dylan hadn’t known all along, and she had barely spoken to him during the trip home, or to Mari when she picked them up at the airport. She hadn’t acknowledged Dylan’s exit from the car to his once-again apartment, and had gone directly to her room without a glance at Mari.

Now, more than ever, she needed to decode the email. Because of the address, every time she thought about it, she had the idea it was from her father to Dylan. That could mean only one thing: Gerald was alive somewhere, and Dylan knew it.

She was weary of the subterfuge, the lies, the drama—it had to end. It seemed as though she had spent the past seven days doing nothing but looking up codes, but she knew it was useless. It wasn’t your average Sunday paper cryptogram.

As she drove to the office the next morning, she remembered Sue’s new boyfriend. He dealt with codes. Maybe he could help her. She dialed the office. The phone rang twice, and Sue answered.

“Sue, when are you planning to see Jim again?”

For a moment, there was no answer.

“Why?” Sue finally said.

Laurel laughed self-consciously. “Sorry, that sounded strange. I just wondered if he might be taking you to lunch again soon. I’d like to ask for his help with a code.”

“Oh.” Laurel could hear relief in her tone. “We’re going to lunch today. Is that soon enough?” she teased.

“Perfect, if he has the time when you get back.”

The hours seemed to drag interminably, but at last Jim Tanner sat at Laurel’s computer. She had printed out the email, which he now studied.

“Who is this to and from?” he said to Laurel.

“I’ve found out some things recently that cause me to believe it is from my father, whom I thought had died, but maybe not. It’s to my chauffeur.”

“Your chauffeur?” He turned from the screen and raised an eyebrow. “Does he do anything else? Anything that might cause him to encrypt his emails.”

“Would DEA agent do?” She heard Sue gasp.

Jim smiled. “That’s more like it. I won’t ask how you got this.”

“Good.”

“The equal sign at the end tells me it’s probably Base64 encoded, and since it’s government, it’s probably encrypted with AES 256.”

“Which is?”

“Advanced Encryption Standard. The government uses it to protect its greatest secrets, but it’s available to anyone. If I’m going to decrypt this message, I need to download a couple things and write some code on your computer.”

“Go ahead.” Laurel pulled up a chair next to him and watched as his hands flew over the keys typing what looked to her like gibberish.

After it was done, Jim said, “Okay, encryption and decryption require two things, the message and the key or passphrase.”

“You’ve lost me, I’m afraid. You mean a password?”

Laurel and Sue looked at each other and shook their heads.

“In order to decrypt a code, the sender and receiver have to agree on a passphrase to decrypt the cipher. A passphrase is like a password, only there is more than one word, so it’s more difficult for someone unauthorized to figure out.”

“Okay. What you are saying is that, even with this message right in front of us, without knowing what they agreed on, we can’t decipher it.”

“That’s right. So we have to see if we can figure out what they used.”

“I’ll make coffee,” Sue said.

Laurel leaned closer to Jim, watching him work. She had no idea what he was doing.

Sue brought the coffee and some cups. “What if it isn’t AES?” she said.

“I try something else.”

For a couple of minutes, the only sound in the room was the sipping of coffee. Jim stared at the encrypted message. She looked at it as well.

z1Y2UuTk5OSJPXIMsDv11KR2vYT6HBWNxgIId==

Finally, he turned to her. “I’m afraid I can’t help you without the passphrase.”

She concentrated for a few moments. “I don’t know if this means anything or not, but I’ve been thinking about this as I sat here. The sender is [email protected]. I don’t know what the MRD is, but I believe the numbers are a date.” She decided not to get into what she knew the letters and numbers stood for. “The numbers, turned around, represent a date I’ve run across several times in my father’s papers, which is why I said I think the email is from him. Either that, or from someone else who thought the date is important.”

“For the moment, let’s assume it is your father. What comes to your mind? Something he may have told you not to forget, or anything that stands out?”

Laurel thought about it as she slowly pushed her bracelet around her wrist and then shook her head. “It’s impossible. He was so busy all the time, we didn’t actually have much time to have a close relationship. I don’t recall him ever telling me anything to remember.” Absently, she turned her bracelet. She realized what she was doing and stopped.

“Except this.” She held her arm up. “He gave it to me when I graduated from college. It has an inscription inside, and he said he hoped I would wear it every day and never forget what the inscription said. I use it like people use worry beads. Most of the time I don’t even realize I’m moving it around my wrist, because I usually do it when I’m deep in thought. Could that be it?”

“It’s worth a try. What’s the inscription?”

“It says
For the Love of Laurel, June 7, 2009
. And once, the recipient of the email told me he asked my father why he did what he did and he answered, ‘For the love of Laurel’.”

“May I see it? If it’s the passphrase, I have to put it in with all the caps, punctuation, and so forth, exactly right.”

Her heart racing, she took it off and handed it to him.

He had already copied and pasted the encrypted email into a box in the AES software. Now he typed For the Love of Laurel, June 7, 2009.

The decryption came up, and even though Laurel half-expected it, she nearly fainted.

HOW IS SHE? I’LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN YOU CAN TELL HER I’M ALIVE.

Chapter 22

Laurel knocked on Dylan’s door. After a few seconds, he opened it. His brow was sweaty. He had a towel around his neck and wore white gym shorts. Her gaze went from his muscled torso to his well-shaped legs. She wished he didn’t look so damned sexy.

Get it together, Avidon
.

“Forgive my appearance. I wasn’t expecting company.”

She entered the apartment. “I should have called first, but I’m not thinking straight at the moment.”

“What’s wrong?” He went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water, which he chugged down. By the time he finished, a piece of paper had been slapped onto the counter. He glanced at it.

HOW IS SHE? I’LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN YOU CAN TELL HER I’M ALIVE.

She put her hands on her hips. “Well?”

“Well what?”

Instead of looking embarrassed, he seemed sure of himself. Did nothing faze him?

“When did you plan to tell me?”

“I told you before, when he said I could. Not on my timetable, but his.”

“Why? I could have understood his being out of the country, or incognito, or whatever. He did that a lot. Why this whole death scenario? Didn’t it ever occur to him what it would do to me?”

“Of course it did, but you were safer not knowing and that made him safer.”

She crossed her arms. “Did he think I’d go around blabbing to everybody that he wasn’t really dead?”

“All it takes is one innocent slip that can’t be taken back. We all do it all the time. That’s why surprise parties are so difficult. We try so hard to keep the secret, but before we know it, our treacherous subconscious causes us to let the cat out of the bag.”

“That’s baloney. Guys like you have secrets you never divulge, even under torture.”

Dylan tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t. “You watch too many spy movies. The right drug, the right incentive, the right amount of unimaginable pain can make anyone talk.”

“Where is he?”

“Colombia.”

“What’s he doing there? And so help me, if you say it’s on a need to know basis, I’ll . . .” She stopped. What would she do?

He leaned against the counter. “You’ll what? It seems like almost every time we’re in the same room, you are either trying to best me at Tae Kwon Do or making idle threats.”

“What’s he doing there?” She glared at him, not about to let him wiggle out of answering.

Dylan sighed. “Sit.” He plopped onto a chair at the kitchen table and waited until she was seated before answering. “He’s doing just what you suspect.”

“What is it that makes him so valuable? You’re much younger and I know you speak the language, unless you were only pretending to read on the plane.”

“I’m fairly fluent, but not like your father. He sounds like a native when he speaks Spanish.”

“What difference does that make? He doesn’t look Hispanic.”

Dylan shrugged. “It’s gotten him by, so far.”

She studied him for a few moments. “Do you wish it was you down there?”

“As opposed to here? I don’t know. I’ve been sent to a lot of places, some okay, some not so good. I do my job wherever I am.”

“Is your job like his?”

“You mean am I an asset? No.”

“But in your line of work have you ever had to kill someone?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Has Daddy killed the four men he was sent to kill?”

He looked apologetic as he gazed at her. “Need to know,” he mouthed, and then aloud, “I’m sorry.”

“Right. When he finishes his mission, will he be able to come home?”

“That isn’t up to me. Out of curiosity, how did you decrypt his message?”

She stood and walked to the door, and then turned to smirk at him. “Need to know,” she said and left the apartment to the sound of his laughter.