Pitch Black (5 page)

As he stepped closer, Sam had to tilt her head back. He was tall, easily topping her five-eight by several inches. Broad shoulders seemed to fill all the empty space between one side of the door frame and the other. With blondish-brown hair and a friendly gleam in the pale green eyes, she’d have expected a natural smile on his nicely shaped lips. But there was none. His expression remained polite but entirely neutral.

Absolutely the only thing that said he wasn’t one hundred percent professional was the way his stare lingered for half a beat too long on her mouth. Which instantly made her want to lick her lips, even while she mentally cursed herself for the reaction.

“You are Miss Dalton? Samantha Dalton?”

“Mrs. Dalton,” she clarified, strictly from habit. Technically, she was no longer a Mrs. Dalton, not since her Mr. Dalton had found a Miss Slut-face to shack up with instead.
Sam and Ashley. So much better
. But she’d found the moniker useful in dealing with the occasional cyber stalker, and it fell off her lips as a matter of course these days.

“You are the Sam Dalton from the Sam the Spaminator Web site?”

Still feeling awkward about answering the door in sweats and slippers, she nodded hard. Her glasses slipped past the tip of her nose as she did so. Sam caught them as they bounced off, smudging the lenses with her tight fingers.

Reminding herself that she didn’t care what the hot guy with the sexy jaw and rock-hard body thought of her looks, she asked, “Do you need me to sign for something?”

He waved the leather wallet he’d been holding, which she hadn’t even noticed. It contained a badge. Sam immediately tensed.

“I’m Special Agent Lambert of the FBI. This is Special Agent Stokes. May we come in?”

She hadn’t even seen the woman. Sam nodded at her, saw the same emotionless expression, then let herself process the situation.

It didn’t take long. “Did you say FBI?” she snapped.

“Yes. We’d like to talk to you.”

God, not again.
“Look, I tell people how to avoid scams; I’m not running one myself.” She thrust a frustrated hand through her hair, her fingers tangling in the loose ponytail, knocking several long, blond strands down around her face. “I’m not a hacker and my site and book are not secret instruction manuals for criminals looking for new ways to steal people’s money.”

She’d heard it all since she’d started her blog, and since she’d published her book,
Don’t Get Tangled in the Web.
Some legal types seemed to think she was helping the criminals more than hurting them. “Don’t you cyber crimes geeks have enough to do without harassing me?”

The man’s shoulders unstiffened a fraction, but his partner didn’t look at all amused.

“You’re not in any trouble, ma’am,” he said. “We’re actually here to ask for your assistance. We’re researching a crime, and have reason to think you were in contact with one of the people involved. We’re hoping you can help us figure out what happened.”

She hesitated. When she wanted contact with the outside world, she sought it out herself. Sometimes. She did not invite it in when it showed up unannounced at her door.

Nor did she seek out good-looking men. There had been a few who’d sought her out lately, including her own divorce attorney, who had made it clear that whenever she was ready to get back into the dating game, he wanted to be first in line.

Sure. Like any woman wanted to go out with the man who’d seen her at the lowest point in her life. She had to hand it to him, though: Rick Young, the attorney in question, hadn’t given up, even though she’d kept saying no.

“Mrs. Dalton?”

Sam sighed, already knowing this agent would not take no for an answer. Stepping back, she gestured the pair in. “Fine.” She’d give them five minutes; then it was back to her column. And maybe a dinner break with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s—who had, until this very minute, been the only males inside her apartment in months.

But before they’d taken a half dozen steps inside, the female agent glanced out Sam’s living room window, peering at the street one story below. “Oh, no, he is
not
!”

Realizing what was happening, Sam suppressed a smile. Seemed the local police hadn’t gotten the memo that they should ignore illegally parked, unmarked cars driven by FBI agents.

“Go,” the male agent said. He spoke to his partner’s retreating back. She had already stalked out the door, obviously planning to talk her way out of a ticket.

“Yeah, good luck with that one,” Sam muttered, having had more than a few herself. She didn’t think God himself could talk his way out of a parking ticket once Baltimore’s finest had him in his sights. Cal Ripken, maybe. But nobody else.

“I take it you’ve got some firsthand experience?” the agent said.

“You have no idea. I’m on a first-name basis with the local beat cop. He waves at me and smiles as he tickets me when I forget to move my car on trash days.”

A twinkle of amusement flashed in his green eyes. The stranger suddenly looked less intimidating and more appealing than before. Younger than she’d first thought, too—he was probably only around thirty, close to her age.

Well, the age she would be for another few days. Then she moved beyond the actual three-zero and proceeded directly into her thirties.
Do not pass go; do not try to pretend you’re just a day or two beyond twenty-nine.

“Almost makes me wish I could watch. I don’t think she’ll like being told no.” His mouth relaxed into a slow smile, a friendly one that invited her to reciprocate.

Though her heart skipped a single beat in her chest and her pulse did a little flip, Sam’s lips remained tight by sheer force of will. The way she had been feeling about men these days, she wished he’d paste a frown on his mouth. She couldn’t handle an attraction to anyone right now. She’d been burned so badly her hair probably still smelled smoky.

“What is it I can do for you, Agent Lambert?” she asked, her tone curt.

He took her cue, his form stiffening again under his perfectly tailored suit, which looked more appropriate for a Wall Street executive than an FBI agent. “I’d like to show you some correspondence.”

He glanced around the room, seeking a place to sit. Her sofa, a flowery monstrosity her mother had insisted on giving her when Sam had moved out of her ex’s house, was covered with files and industry magazines. Well, mostly industry magazines. There were a few issues of
People
and
Entertainment Weekly
thrown in there, too. Not to mention a small pile of unfolded, clean laundry, freshly dumped from the dryer.

Two empty Diet Coke cans stood in the middle of their own permanent rings on the coffee table. A crumpled Snickers wrapper protruded from the opening of one can, looking like a castaway’s note stuck into a poor man’s substitute for a bottle, and on the TV, DVD sleeves for
The Notebook
and
Beaches
taunted her about her sadly sappy Netflix movie list.

Her picture should be on Wikipedia as an illustration of a pathetic thirty-something divorcée.

If not for her desk, she’d probably look like a slovenly hausfrau. Oh, the desk was a wreck, too, but at least it looked like it was used. Very used. On it were three mountains of paper, in varying heights—one critical, one urgent, and one just important. The just-important one was about one-quarter the size of the others. There was no pile called Take Your Time.

Clearing her throat, she headed toward the kitchen. “Let’s talk in here. I could do with some coffee. You?”

“Sure, thanks.” He followed her, remaining silent while she put the pot on.

Joining him at her small table, Sam tried to force herself to relax. After all, she used to like law enforcement types. Her late father had been a state trooper, and the closest thing she had to a father now was an old family friend who was a judge. It was only recently, since her work had been targeted by some supposed experts who wanted to kick the amateur off their playing field, that she’d begun to question the intelligence of those in any legal profession.

The parking tickets didn’t help, either.

“What’s this all about?”

He opened a folder, spreading what looked like e-mail printouts on her kitchen table. “Did you write these?”

Sam glanced at the pages, seeing her e-mail address on the top of them. “I exchange e-mails with people all the time,” she murmured doubtfully. “This looks like a typical response to someone asking for Web advice.”

Lifting one of the pages, Sam quickly read the original message, and her own response. A smile suddenly widened her lips. “Oh, yeah, I know this kid—what a sweetheart. He’s written to me several times. He even got his parents to bring him to a signing I did last summer.”

“A signing for your Internet scam book?”

She leveled a steady gaze at the man. “My book on how to avoid Internet scams.”

“That’s what I meant.”

Sure it was.

“How long have you been corresponding with him?”

“Probably about a year.” Suddenly remembering what Special Agent Lambert had said when he’d first arrived, Sam met his stare directly. “Wait, you said crime. Is he all right? Nothing’s happened to him, has it?”

Alec noticed right away that Samantha Dalton’s immediate response was to assume young Ryan Smith was a victim, and she sounded worried. Considering she’d met him only once and had a strictly e-mail relationship with the boy, he filed the detail away, because it said a lot about her. So did her clothes. Her apartment. Her job. Her lifestyle.

But, Jesus, none of that meshed with the visual picture of the woman who’d opened the door to him ten minutes ago.

He’d been prepared for a vigilante computer nerd. Not the brown-eyed, golden-haired beauty with lush lips and a fragile throat. He’d seen fewer curves on a figure eight, despite the shapeless, washed-out sweats she had on. Though she wore no makeup and her hair was a mess, she’d been striking enough to suck every thought out of his head for a long, breathless moment.

Yet she lived like she’d never had a date and didn’t much care. Which didn’t jibe with that Mrs. Dalton thing she’d carefully pointed out. Or the bare ring finger on her left hand.

Yeah, he’d looked.

All in all, the woman presented an interesting puzzle, one his brain was already trying to take apart and fit back together.

“Agent Lambert?”

“When is the last time you heard from him?”

She met his stare, and he could see the silent debate going on behind those dark eyes. He’d seen it before. Everyone in law enforcement had. Sometimes wanting to know the truth was outweighed by the desire to put off unhappy news for a while. When she shifted her gaze, choosing to delay the inevitable, Alec added another piece to the puzzle: She’d known loss.

She tapped the tip of her index finger on the top page. “This message. About a week and a half ago.”

Alec had memorized the victim’s final e-mail to Sam the Spaminator. “He asked about an e-mail offer a friend of his received?”

“Typical Nigerian four-one-nine scam. I wrote back and sent him links to tons of articles about it, including recent ones I’d written.”

The thing had landed in his own in-box dozens of times, so he knew exactly what she meant, but he let her expound.

“It’s amazing how many people still fall for this thing. Losses in the hundreds of millions, all because Joe Naive thinks he’s going to get rich if he just puts out a little more money for bribes or taxes or legal fees or security. Until the money’s all gone and the ‘finance minister’ or ‘bank manager’ or ‘estate executor’ is gone with it.”

Her tone had gone from conversational to hard, verging on bitter. The tautness in her form told him even more about her—like exposing fraud online might be a personal crusade, rather than a professional one. She was emotionally affected by the issue, not a bit detached.

He had a feeling she was going to take Ryan Smith’s murder very hard.

“Did he forward you the actual e-mail?”

She shook her head, pushing back a few long strands of silky hair. “No. He told me about it and I responded.” A tiny furrow appeared on her brow, and she added, “Oh, I just remembered: He also asked about certified checks. Whether the scheme ever included them.”

Alec leaned forward, leafing quickly through the copies of the e-mails. “Where?”

Frowning in concentration, she said, “It was . . . wait, actually I think it was in an instant message.”

That surprised him. “Strangers can IM you?”

“He was a bright kid with a lot of potential, so when he figured out my ID, I was impressed enough to chat with him on occasion.”

The investigative team already had Ryan Smith’s computer and would find the history, but going to the source was quicker. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

As she closed her eyes to concentrate, Alec couldn’t help noticing the long sweep of the woman’s lashes brushing against her high cheekbones. He shifted in his chair, uncomfortably aware of his attraction to her. To a potential witness. Which was not only a no-no, but in his case, possibly a career killer.

Not that attraction had been the problem in Atlanta. Sympathy and misplaced trust had been his downfall there. But the lesson was the same: No mixing it up with witnesses.

“I’d responded to his e-mail”—she glanced at the printed version, checking the time—“at around five. I told him it was a scam and I was shocked he didn’t know about it.” She nibbled her bottom lip. “I told him he wasn’t much of a fan if he hadn’t noticed I’d written a whole chapter about it in my book. Then I suggested he print out the articles I linked to, roll them up, and smack his buddy in the head with them for even considering going along.”

She managed a weak smile. Alec couldn’t bring himself to return it. Judging by what he knew of the boys, he suspected there was nothing Ryan wouldn’t have done to try to stop his friend. Yet, in the end, he’d gone with him to his death.

Tragic. So damned tragic. “And the instant messages?”

“I had run down to the corner market in case the storm snowed me in, and I didn’t log off. When I came back, I saw he had IM’d me a couple of times.”