The P.U.R.E. (13 page)

Bob laughed. “What Dalrymple shares?”

Their voices faded as they turned the corner.

I turned to Jon, my jaw slack. “Were they talking about shredding the Aphrodite files? I can’t believe they think they’d get away with that.”

Jon moved from beneath the table and brushed off his pants as he stood. “Not only those files, but it sounds like others too. I’m guessing they plan on pinning the destruction on you or me.”

“Well, at least Bob isn’t going to be signing off.” The whole shredding business gave me the shakes.

Jon offered me a hand as I followed him out from underneath the table.

“Kenneth’s murder seems to have altered their original plans.” Jon peered down the hallway in both directions.

“Let’s give Doug a little lead time to get out of here. Then I need to go back to fifty-two. I left my purse in my cubicle. It doesn’t sound like Doug’ll destroy any project files until after the referencer does his thing tomorrow. So … we’ve got a little time to figure this out.”

• • •

Fifty-two was dark when we stepped off the elevator.

I touched my finger to my lips. “You should hang back out of sight. If Doug came to check on my progress with the referencer’s aid, I don’t want him to know you were here.”

“Are you sure? What if he’s still here and tries to bother you? That might have been his plan all along—to get you alone.”

I lowered my voice as we neared the final turn that would lead to the cubicle I had been using. “He could have done that long before you showed up. I don’t think he will since Bob’s little talk, but don’t hang back
too
far. If I raise my voice, or you see him try to touch me, make a noise so he realizes we’re not alone. Stay out of sight if you can.”

“Something feels really off about this.” Jon stayed put and leaned against the wall.

When I rounded the corner, I caught my breath. Doug stood in my cubicle, his back to me. I approached in stealth mode and watched as he held my wallet. The possibility he had “borrowed” my apartment key seemed entirely probable.

He jerked slightly, as if startled, and turned, giving me a smile—not the slightest bit nonplussed at being caught red-handed.

“What the hell are you doing going through my stuff?” I kept my voice low because I wanted to know what his game was and didn’t want Jon to scare him off—not yet.

“I thought you left your purse behind by accident. I was only trying to find your address so I could get it back to you.” He held up my driver’s license. “Number eighteen-A, Shadypark Lane, eh? I’m familiar with that apartment complex. I think I have a friend who lives near you. Maybe we’ll run into each other.” His veiled threat mocked me.

I extended my palm and glared at him. “You needn’t trouble yourself with the challenge of being a decent guy.”

He smirked and tossed my wallet and license over his shoulder. The wallet landed with a loud thud on the desktop, and my license fluttered to the floor. “Just trying to be a good citizen.”

I heaved a sigh as he moved to leave, his eyes fixed on the hall ahead of him. He bumped me hard on the shoulder as he passed.

I retrieved and re-secured my license and returned the wallet to my purse but didn’t hear him double back to stand behind me.

“Why didn’t you return any of my text messages, Gayle?” He was far too close as he rasped in my ear.

Despite my willing it not to, my heart raced. “I didn’t get any texts from you.” I kept my back to him.

“Oh, yeah, you did. You even saved them. I took the liberty of erasing them all. Can’t let HR get the wrong idea now, can we?”

He laughed and reached up to tuck a stray lock of my hair behind my ear. I tilted my head away and drew my arm forward.

I jabbed my elbow back toward his stomach just as I had in Aphrodite’s file room. He must have anticipated my move, however, and grabbed me by both elbows, closing the gap between our bodies.

“Come on, Gayle. Don’t you know you turn me on even more when you fight with me? I’ll bet you’re a wildcat in bed.”

Hot breath fanned the back of my neck, the rank smell of garlic and tequila assaulting my nose. I refused to give in to my fear, but I’d had enough of him and was ready for Jon to step in and bail me out.

“Let me go!” I raised my voice to a near shout and tried again. “Doug Martin, get your fucking hands off of me!”

“Oh, baby, you’re so hot. I like you feisty. Do you talk dirty when you’re being fucked?” He removed one of his hands from my elbow and grabbed my breast.

I sucked in air, spun around and slapped him as hard as I could across the face. The force knocked his head sideways. Before he could recover, I drove my knee into his crotch and shoved him away. He toppled over, moaning on the floor and holding himself.

While he writhed, I snatched my purse and scanned for the files he’d carried out of Bob’s office. They weren’t in my cubicle, so I ran to the one in front of mine.

Nothing.

Off to the next one Doug normally used before racing to the other side of the divider. In the cubicle Jon had used to help me with the referencer’s aid, I found what I sought.

Footsteps had me whirling.

Jon!

Doug’s face loomed mere inches from mine. My fingers searched behind me for something to use as a weapon. All I found was a ruler. I didn’t think measuring his nastiness would be much of a defense.

Where the hell is Jon?

“You little bitch. I’ll take those files.” He yanked them from my arms and trapped me against the desk’s side return.

I arched back until my shoulders touched the cubicle divider wall. My purse fell to the floor and spilled its contents. The movement distracted me long enough for Doug to thrust his face right up next to mine.

“Too bad I don’t have the time to tame you tonight, but next time I will. And oh, Gayle baby, it’s gonna be—”

An unseen force yanked him backward and slammed him against the wall. Jon pinned Doug and punched him repeatedly, never uttering a word himself.

Doug dropped the files to the floor after the first few blows. Blood flowed from his nose and lips, and soon he stood only because Jon held him up. Jon continued to rain punches until Doug no longer even tried to defend himself.

Though I had enjoyed the show up to that point, especially Doug’s squeals of pain, Jon needed to stop.

“Jon! That’s enough! You’re going to kill him!”

I seized his right forearm and tugged until he froze. His left fist was poised for another blow while he held Doug up with his right. Despite his cold, dispassionate appearance, he was anything but. My own hand trembled on his arm where I held him.

Jon turned, gazed first at me, his eyes still wild with fury, and at the ruler I wielded as if it were the mightiest of weapons. I watched the last glimmers of his rage wink out.

He released his grip.

Doug crumpled to the floor, already forgotten like yesterday’s trash.

Who is this person in front of me, and where’d he learn to fight like that?

I should have been horrified by the excessive violence. I wasn’t. In fact, I was a little aroused by it. By Jon. I imagined him pushing me up against the same wall, ripping my clothes off, and taking me right there, with Doug at our feet.

While I contemplated my sick erotic fantasy, Jon ran to the cubicle Doug had cornered me in. He barked out something, snapping me back to reality. We needed to get the hell out of there, and fast, before Doug regained his senses and called security. I didn’t want to think much beyond that.

“I need to check his pockets to make sure he didn’t take anything from my purse!” Grimacing, I reached in and found a set of car keys and his wallet. I opened the wallet and made a mental note of the address on his driver’s license. He had seventy-five dollars cash, a few credit cards and a picture of a woman holding a baby. Tucked in one pocket was what appeared to be a proverbial little black book. I slipped it in my pocket for some light bathroom reading. Mixed in with the money, I found a folded up scrap of paper with my address written on one side. On the flip side, he’d written a five-digit number—probably the code to fifty-five.

“Son of a bitch,” I said as I gawked at his bloody face. With a black magic marker I found in a nearby desk, I wrote ‘Loser’ on his forehead. The pen was mightier than the sword—ruler in my case.

“Gayle! Catch!” Jon threw my reassembled purse to me. He snatched up the two files Doug dropped, and I tossed Doug’s wallet in his lap.

“We’re going in my car!” he announced as we approached his Porsche, parked next to my Honda.

“What about my car?”

“We’ll get it later.”

I didn’t argue because Doug knew my address, and I assumed he would come looking for the files and me. We were soon free of the garage and downtown Dallas, heading north on Central Expressway.

“Do you think Doug’ll be okay?”

Jon heaved a loud sigh. “Don’t worry about that jackass.” He glanced at me as he finished speaking, back at the road, and to me again. “Are
you
okay, Gayle?”

“Oh, I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me, just pissed me off more than anything. I’m angry I let him bully me, but Jon, I’m so sorry I dragged you into my problem.”

“Don’t be. I’m not. I’m glad I was there because I knew he was up to no good. I knew it.”

“Do you think he’ll try to get us fired?”

“Me, maybe. Probably not you. How would he explain it? You’ve already initiated a harassment claim. I don’t think they’d dare dismiss you without at least doing an investigation. If Doug’s smart, he’ll keep his big fat mouth shut and make up some lame story about the bruises he’ll have tomorrow.”

“What about what Doug and Bob said … about shredding the files?”

“Well, they can’t now, can they? You’ve got them in your hot little hands, right?” He chuckled softly.

“Thank goodness.”

He passed the exit for both our apartment buildings. “Where are we going?”

“To my sister’s house. She’s out of town but gave me her key so I can bring in her mail and water her plants. We’ll go there, have a look at those files, then figure out a plan and a story.”

“Okay.” I had absolutely no idea what our plan or story might be.

18

Jon’s older sister, Jenny, lived in a modest single-family home in Coppell, a Dallas suburb near the airport—convenient for a flight attendant.

“The bathroom’s down the hall, last door on the left,” Jon said. “I’ll see what Jenny’s got to eat or drink.”

“All praise to the porcelain gods!” I dashed down the hall. A trompe l’oeil mural of a Tuscan landscape adorned the wall opposite the toilet. Modesty compelled me to shift my knees a few degrees to avoid the farmer who ogled my watering of his field.

On my way back to the kitchen, I paused to scrutinize the family photos on the walls and a sofa table. Several showcased the entire Cripps clan—Jenny, Jon, their younger brother, Jason, and their parents. Jenny and Jon resembled each other and their Florentine mother. Jason bore more of a resemblance to their father, though he too had his mother’s Mediterranean coloring. Jenny posed with a fair-haired man in skiing clothes at the Santa Fe ski resort. The man’s smiling face appeared in far too many photos alone or with Jenny to be anyone other than a boyfriend. Jon hadn’t mentioned a brother-in-law, and I found no wedding pictures.

Jon handed me a glass of iced water as he joined me. He pointed at a photo, “That’s Jenny’s fiancé, Scott. They’ve been engaged for about five years with no wedding date in sight.” He laughed. “We Cripps don’t like to rush into anything and believe in ridiculously long engagements.”

“Oh, yeah? So if you guys hadn’t called off your engagement, when do you suppose you’d have gotten around to marrying Thalia?”

“Never.”

I studied his expression to determine if he was serious. “What kind of answer is that? Why’d you bother asking her in the first place?”

“It wasn’t always never. We got engaged to get our mothers off our backs. They’ve been best friends since they were girls in Italy, and their families immigrated together. They always
assumed
Thalia and I would marry. We did the dating part okay, but as soon as we started our senior year in college, the pressure to marry intensified. My mother’s idea was we’d get engaged near the beginning of the spring semester so we could be married shortly after graduation.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t feel right, I guess. We went to different schools and rarely spent any time together, but neither of us seemed to mind. We were always sort of on-again, off-again. I realize now I didn’t love her, not like I … well, not like I should have.”

“What did your mother say when you told her you two broke up? I’ll bet she was pretty upset, huh?”

“I haven’t told her yet. I haven’t told Jenny, either, though I will when she’s back in town. Thalia and I agreed to keep our split on the down low until Thanksgiving.”

“Wow. Is Jenny in a similar situation, a semi-arranged marriage with the son of family friend? This is so old school, I gotta tell you.”

He chuckled and picked up a photo of the couple, handing it to me. “Not old school. This is them together. They don’t seem to be in any hurry.”

“They don’t live together either?”

“Shame on you for suggesting they live in sin.” He winked. “They’re not in a hurry to do that either,” He put the photo back on the sofa table. “They are, however, driving Mom crazy.”

“I don’t understand the point of getting engaged then. Are they even in love?”

“I think they love each other, yeah, but in love? Tough one for anyone but them to answer.”

“Sounds to me like they’ve formed a habit neither is willing to break.”

“You could be right. Like me, Jenny probably needs some external incentive to either break it off or plow forward.”

“Maybe.” I wanted to ask more but knew all of it was none of my business, and he’d probably already told me more than he was comfortable with. I guessed Thalia’s seeing another man was Jon’s “incentive”. Poor guy.

The next photo made my heart go pitter pat. I picked up one of three children, one of whom was obviously Jon. “Aw, how cute! How old?” I loved kids, pictures of kids, kid things. He took it, smiled and handed it back. “Jason was one. So I was seven and Jenny twelve.”