Hidden Falls (42 page)

Across the table, Nicole responded to the encouraging sounds by wiggling and leaning forward.

Dani clicked for a list of Wi-Fi networks. She could guess from the name, Faithworks, which one was Lauren’s. She allowed herself a half-inch shake of the head when she saw the network was unsecure. Why did people leave themselves so vulnerable and then complain about being hacked?

It took another twenty minutes before Dani was reasonably certain that the computer was not in danger of imminent death. Quinn was going to need a new one soon. Dani would steer him toward a Mac if for no other reason than she preferred fiddling with them, and Quinn was sure to keep coming to her with his questions.

“Okay, I think my work here is finished,” Dani said.

“Wait!” Nicole’s urgent tone made Dani look up. “Didn’t Ethan tell you we’re looking for some information?”

“He mentioned it.”

“I can snoop around for half the night,” Nicole said, “but I have a feeling you know Quinn’s computer pretty well. You know how he stores information. Just think how much faster it would be if you helped us.”

Dani looked from Ethan’s brown eyes to Nicole’s green eyes. She was in this far. She might as well find out what they had in mind. “What are you looking for?”

“Try to reconstruct where he has spent his time online in the last thirty days.” Nicole licked her lips. “Credit card activity, bank accounts, deleted e-mails.”

She’s done this before,
Dani thought.

“That’s a lot of personal information.”

“In my experience as an investigative reporter, that’s where the clues are.”

“Does Cooper know you’re doing this?”

Nicole huffed her breath out. “Do you really think he’d turn his head if he did?”

Never.

Dani knew the password to Quinn’s Internet browser, and unless he had heeded her recent warnings, his e-mail password wasn’t much different. People would be surprised at how many passwords Dani had in her head—or could figure out—because they’d made no effort to keep them secret when Dani needed access to an account to troubleshoot. Most people seemed to think of a password as a necessary nuisance for getting onto sites they used frequently, rather than considering what would raise a barrier to someone else trying to get on those same sites. If Ethan and Nicole thought long enough, they would come up with Quinn’s password. Dani saved them a couple of days—during which time Quinn probably would come home anyway—and scanned the list of sites Quinn had visited in the last few weeks.

“Nothing here,” she said. “Just the usual stuff.”

“What does that mean?” Nicole said. “What’s his usual stuff?”

“Book orders, the place he likes to buy his shirts from, teacher resources, history sites.”

“Can’t you be more specific? Broad categories won’t give me anything to chase down. And you didn’t mention anything financial.”

“Hacking into his bank account is over the line.”

“You don’t have to look,” Nicole said. “Just get me in. I’ll look.”

Dani wasn’t going to let two people who hadn’t seen Quinn in ten years look at his bank records. “
If
I get in,” she said, knowing that she would, “I am getting right back out if I don’t see anything suspicious.”

“Who’s to say what’s suspicious?” Nicole started to roll herself around the table.

Dani closed the browser window. “Either you trust me or the deal is off.”

“Why can’t you trust me enough to believe I want to help Quinn?” Nicole parked herself next to Dani and stared at the background on Quinn’s screen.

“Why can’t you keep your nose out of Quinn’s private business?” Dani turned her head and glared at Nicole, who apparently didn’t understand the concept of asking nicely for favors.

“I want to find Quinn.” Nicole spoke through a clenched jaw and gritted teeth. “After five days, during which no one has seen him or heard from him, you can’t possibly be a hundred percent sure that he’s all right.”

“And you can’t be sure anything is wrong.” Dani leaned in near Nicole’s face, daring her not to pull back.

“Ladies!” Ethan was on his feet now. “Let’s all keep our cool.”

“Shut up.” Nicole and Dani spoke in unexpected unison, though neither turned to look at Ethan.

He came around the table and pulled Nicole’s chair back about two feet. “Nobody is going to help Quinn this way.”

Dani leaned back in her chair and eyed Nicole. “Here’s my final offer. I will look at his bank account, which is way out of my comfort zone. In exchange, you have to admit that I know him better than you do right now and trust my judgment about whether anything looks unusual. And I’m not looking back any more than thirty days.”

Nicole pressed her lips together. “Fine. Thank you.”

The arrangement wasn’t anywhere close to what Nicole wanted, but Dani was more interested in protecting Quinn’s privacy than satisfying Nicole’s curiosity.

Dani logged onto the bank’s website and tried slight variations of core password elements she knew Quinn had used in the past on various accounts. She watched the clock at the top of the computer screen, knowing she had limited time before the site would lock her out.

“I’m in,” she said finally.

Nicole started to roll forward.

“You come any closer, I’ll shut this down.” Dani held a finger over the computer’s power button.

“Sorry,” Nicole muttered. “Reflex.”

Dani’s eyes widened at what she saw.

“What?” Nicole said.

Dani turned slowly toward Nicole. “If we can believe these transactions, he’s in St. Louis.”

4:27 p.m.

After Ethan and Nicole left, Jack turned off the ringer on his desk phone. Voice mail could pick up for the afternoon.

Jack recognized some of the names on Nicole’s list. He’d been passing time crawling around in the old files for months now. Though he didn’t recall anything noteworthy in the folders he’d flipped through so far, Jack printed the list Nicole had e-mailed from her iPad and labeled three columns so he could track which files he found, which names were missing, and whether there were any documents that matched Nicole’s specification: wills, birth and death certificates, transfers of property. He was sure that at some point in the history of the law practice, the files were in alphabetical order. But the files Nicole asked about were old and, through the decades, were moved further and further out of the way of active work. Jack had discerned little order to the way they were stored other than where they seemed to fit the available space in a box or drawer.

Nicole’s list included nearly forty names. So far Jack had uncovered twenty-three folders. One held the incorporation documents for a business that no longer existed, and a handful of others were straightforward real estate purchases of homes that most likely had changed owners several times since. These Jack set aside.

The rest were thicker folders reflecting clients who must have used the services of Morris and Morris, and their predecessor, on a regular basis. Two of these Jack recognized as ancestors of clients he had inherited with the practice. He read both files carefully, along with several more. Jack expected to find wills, and he did, but nothing more complicated than spouses leaving their worldly goods to each other, and no worldly goods out of the ordinary.

The piles on his desk grew as Jack sorted files and made check marks on the printed list. Before he was finished he would double-check the names for whom he found no files.

Jack reached for another tattered file, this collection of documents in an expanding file with a narrow cord wrapped around a clasp to fasten it closed. When Jack touched the cord, it crumbled in his hands. Lacking sufficient clear space on the surface of the desk to lay out the elements of the file, Jack carried the brittle case to the space he called the
conference room
even though so far he hadn’t held a conference within its walls. The table and six musty chairs were relics of Morris and Morris. When it came to the least public space of the suite, Jack had lost the budget war for remodeling dollars to his wife’s agenda for the new powder room. He slid the papers out of the expanding jacket. Even as dated as they were, he could quickly recognize the types of documents and sorted them swiftly.

And then one seemed to stick to his fingers. Jack scanned the first page then flipped to the next one. And the next.

This could be it.

Jack pried off the old blue legal backing paper and carried the pages to his desk, where the printer on his credenza also functioned as a scanner. He certainly wasn’t going to give Nicole Sandquist the original. The scanner rattled into service, and Jack began placing the fragile pages on the glass one at a time until he had an electronic version of the entire document.

Next he picked up the phone and dialed his home number.

“Gianna,” Jack said when his wife answered, “I think it’s better if you don’t wait dinner for me.”

“Jack, you might as well come home at least long enough to eat.”

He steeled himself against her protests. “I had a walk-in client this afternoon with a time-sensitive matter. I’ll make a sandwich later.”

“How late will you be?”

Jack fingered the thick document. “I’m not sure.”

“All right. Brooke is right here. She wants to talk to you.”

Jack glanced at the photograph of his three children that sat on his desk. The faces of Colin and Eva were obscured by the corner of a stack of folders, but Brooke’s face smiled out at him from under the clutter.

“Hi, Dad.”

Brooke’s lilting voice cheered him even on the phone.

“Hi, sweetheart. Sorry I’ll miss dinner.”

“Just don’t forget about tomorrow.”

Jack mentally rustled through recent domestic conversations to find the one that related to tomorrow and his youngest child.

“The puppy trainer,” he said.

“Right. I have to go right after school, and you promised to take me.”

“I remember.”

“And I need to practice face painting before Saturday. Can I practice on you?”

Jack was glad Brooke wasn’t there to see his face grimace at the thought of little balloons or ponies adorning his cheeks.

“It’s washable, right?”

“Don’t be silly, Dad. Of course it’s washable. It’s not a tattoo.”

“Well, then, maybe one little practice spot.”

They said good-bye, and Jack reached behind him and extracted a fresh yellow legal pad from the credenza and took a new pen from a drawer. He printed the scanned document—he wouldn’t mark up the original—and leaned back in his leather chair.

Before Jack finished the first paragraph, he was making notes.

By the end of the first page, he saw through the legalese to the relevant details.

By the top of the third page, Jack knew this wasn’t a routine old will that had been executed long ago and lost its relevance. Otherwise Nicole Sandquist wouldn’t be looking for it.

6:31 p.m.

Ethan rubbed the back of Nicole’s neck. “You’ve been hunched over that laptop for two hours.”

“There must be something here.” Nicole rubbed one eye and continued clicking keys. “Dani had a lot of gall telling us Quinn’s in St. Louis and choosing that moment to decide she wasn’t going to snoop anymore.”

“We’re lucky she did that much.”

Nicole closed her eyes for a moment, giving herself over to the sensation of Ethan’s hands digging into her shoulders. He used to do this when they studied together. Nicole always offered to reciprocate, but she doubted her small hands could approach the results Ethan’s widespread fingers accomplished. His thumbs pressed into the muscles running out of the sides of her neck and down into her back. Increasing pressure told her that he’d discovered the resistance points in her tensed back.

Ethan was right about Dani’s general attitude toward gleaning information from Quinn’s computer, but Nicole remained aggravated. One bank transaction had him paying for gas at a St. Louis station, so he must have rented a car. If Dani had been willing to find his credit card account, they might have tracked down where the car came from. In a second debit transaction, Quinn paid for a meal at a St. Louis location of a national chain restaurant. Judging from the amount, he hadn’t eaten alone.

“His wallet could have been stolen,” Ethan said.

“I’d be more likely to think that if Quinn weren’t missing.” Nicole’s gut told her Quinn and his cards were together—even if it was against his will. A stolen card would have been used more recklessly and widely than two transactions in five days.

Nicole had already telephoned all the major St. Louis hotels and ascertained he hadn’t registered at any of them—at least not under the name Ted Quinn. She’d even tried giving a physical description to the desk clerks, but it was too generic. Quinn had no visible distinguishing marks, no limp, no twitch, nothing that would set him apart from hundreds of people who walked through a hotel lobby in the course of a day.

But why only two transactions in five days? The rest must be on Quinn’s credit card.

“We have to go to St. Louis.” Nicole wriggled out from under Ethan’s mesmerizing touch. It was only two hours away. She knew the city. She’d be able to track Quinn—or his cards—starting with the gas station and restaurant.

“Or,” Ethan said, “it might be more logical to go to Cooper Elliott.”

“Don’t you think he would already be looking at Quinn’s accounts?”

“He’d have to have a warrant or something, wouldn’t he?” Ethan asked.

Probably. Nicole wasn’t an attorney, but since Quinn had gone missing the same night his car was found wrecked—and he hadn’t been driving—there might be enough suspicion of foul play to persuade a judge in Birch Bend. Maybe Cooper had held back information from Nicole—even from Sylvia. If the mayor knew Quinn was in St. Louis, would she have withheld that information even from Lauren?

“How can we find out if Cooper knows about this?” Nicole reached for her crutches. She had to stand up and stretch her spine.

“Tell him what you know,” Ethan said. “Basic exchange of information.”

“You’re adorable,” she said, “but it’s too late for that.” They’d have to start with explaining how they got into Quinn’s house, the decision to take the computer, Lauren’s knowledge, Dani’s reluctant complicity. But if they went to St. Louis themselves and found Quinn, no one would care how they accomplished it.