The P.U.R.E. (20 page)

My eyelids flickered shut. “Mmm, yes.”

Those were the last intelligible words either of us said.

A new form of madness raged and built in intensity.

Jon increased his tempo, driving inside me as deep as he could go, as deep as I could take him. My heart raced beneath his. Only our ragged breathing and the soft sweet thumps of our bodies colliding filled the otherwise silent office.

Our coupling grew frantic and ferocious, an unstoppable need to achieve release. With each driving movement, he inched me farther into the center of the desk. A deep rumble in his throat escaped as he levered himself upright. Strong hands gripped my hips and pulled me back to the edge, pinning me in one spot. He was rough and dirty and fast. Primitive sounds I hadn’t heard him utter before spewed from his lips.

We weren’t making love—not anymore. We were saying, “Fuck you, Anderson Blakely! Fuck you, Bob!” and I loved every second of it.

“Oh!” My cries grew louder and syncopated with each of Jon’s thrusts until, with a final drawn out scream, I found the Promised Land.

“Gayle, shh.” He placed two fingers over my mouth before smothering his own cries with a kiss.

Like a feather falling to the earth, I floated until I rejoined my sated body, languid under the warm weight of Jon’s, where he’d draped himself on top of me. Neither of us moved for a few precious seconds as our galloping hearts slowed to normal. He nuzzled my neck, kissing his way to my lips.

“How do you do that?” I asked when he allowed me a breath.

“Do what?” He flung a hand out to the side, fishing around for something.

“Make me feel so … so …” I ended with a gurgly growl.

A low chuckle bounced his body against mine, a delicious closeness I didn’t want to end.

I turned my head to see what he’d been reaching for and sucked in a quick breath.

He held the camera out to the side, its lens pointed at us, and said, “Smile.” A bright flash blinded me as he snapped one final picture.

27

Jon and I resumed our search after I deleted the last photo. I had given him a pass on the photo of little Jon, though he had seemed more than willing. We left our used condom and some Kleenex in the trash. The cleaning people would dispose of our guilty souvenirs.

The ease with which we were able to find information in Bob’s office still nagged at me.

Key in hand, I made my way back to Jeff’s space and slipped inside. I would be back in his office in less than twelve hours, but my buoyant sense of hope began to take on water. Sitting in Jeff’s chair, I pulled open various drawers, searching for nothing in particular.

I idly flipped through the pages in his briefcase under his desk. Jeff took meticulous notes, filling all available nooks and crannies with client activities and to-dos. I turned to the date of Kenneth’s death. In the eight o’clock slot, he’d written ‘Rocky’s’. At eleven o’clock, he’d written ‘White Rock Lake’. In two notations, he’d linked himself to the conspiracy we were trying to expose and possibly to a murder. My hopes for the next morning’s meeting coughed its final air bubble and sank. What was Jeff’s involvement?

I moved backwards from that date. Jeff met with or telephoned Bob almost every evening, but the conversation details were full of abbreviations I couldn’t decipher.

Under Bob’s name, in the address section, Jeff had penciled in what I guessed to be a login and password. I typed them into Jeff’s computer. The main page welcomed me,
Bob Turner
, to the company’s network. Why would Jeff have that kind of access to Bob’s private information?

I launched his email, moved to the outbox and clicked on all his sent emails from the past two months, forwarding them to myself. I repeated the routine with the emails in his inbox. Checking his trash folder, I realized he never deleted those emails, so I forwarded all of those to myself as well. With one last action, I eliminated all evidence I’d emailed anything and logged off.

Moving on to Jeff’s credenza, I found nothing relevant. His planner crooked its finger for a second look. A flashlight and a handful of stolen minutes, however, wouldn’t be enough to interpret his tiny and copious shorthand scribblings. I returned to the copy machine.

Standing at the copier, I worked out the sheets from the planner. The binder didn’t yield its pages without a fight. During our tussle, a piece of orange paper slipped out—a flyer for pet sitting and plant watering services offered by the woman who lived in the apartment two doors from mine. She and I often chatted in the parking lot and at the mailboxes. She’d left one on my windshield too—the night Doug did his damage.

I flipped to that date in Jeff’s book. He’d documented a telephone conversation with a series of abbreviations and acronyms. With context, I was able to decode his notation as ‘Bob Turner: Aphrodite staff assistant Gayle Lindley reports sexual harassment/independence violation vv
whatever that was
Leslie Turner; HR meeting with Gayle Lindley at 2 p.m. Thursday; may have evidence; staff assistant Jon Cripps boyfriend.’

On the calendar for the same evening, he’d noted my address, car color, make, model and license plate, cell phone and home phone numbers. He’d also jotted down Jon’s address, car and phone information. Perhaps he and Doug had seen me leave with Jon, followed us to Jon’s apartment and doubled back. Imagining him as Doug’s lookout, however, stretched the boundaries of credibility.

I flipped back to the addresses section of his planner, looked under the L’s, and found, ‘GLindley, abqnm003’. Damned if they weren’t my login and password. Under the M’s I found ‘DMartin, Gayle69’.
Nice
. He was even more deranged than I thought. Reversing to the C’s yielded ‘JCripps, 727jlghC’, a textbook password with an indecipherable combination of letters and symbols that made zero sense.
Smarty pants.

Why did Jeff have all our login information? How did he get it?

With no time to ponder those questions, I needed to get my copies, put the book back and wrap it up.

I ran the pages for the past three months and his address log through the copy machine, a tedious process because they were double-sided and didn’t fit in the feeder. Jon came looking for me by the time I made the last one.

“What did you find?” He checked out the pages as they emerged from the machine.

“Some interesting calendar notations and contact information. There’s so much here and in such tiny writing, I decided to make copies. I’ll read them after we leave.”

“Are you almost done in Jeff’s office?”

“Yeah. But … I think Jeff Hardinger had something to do with trashing my apartment.”

“You’re kidding. Why would he do something like that?”

“I’m not sure, but I have a hunch Jeff is creating a way out for himself. He’s finding ways to throw Bob and Doug under the bus, and he has an inordinate amount of sensitive IT information. I find that very curious.”

“You know he’s the head of the IT auditing division, don’t you?” Jon stashed the copies in an empty folder he grabbed from one of the supply shelves.

“No, I didn’t,
but that makes a lot of sense now.”
Note to self: read up on who is in charge of what around here.
“Okay, all done. Let’s go back.”

We walked down the hall, slowly at first. I picked up the pace, so did he. I started jogging, and so did he. By the time we reached Hardinger’s office, we were racing and laughing and didn’t realize until too late that we weren’t alone. The cleaning crews had arrived. So much for not being seen. I hoped none of them had close ties to Anderson-Blakely’s upper management.

Jon and I slipped inside Jeff’s office and returned the planner.

“I’m glad they didn’t come thirty minutes earlier,” I said, nudging Jon.

A crooked grin bordering indecent crept across his face.

We exited the suite with our pirate’s booty and called for the elevator. The one I stood in front of had stopped on fifty-four.

“Someone’s here,” I said. The cleaning people used the freight elevator, so they weren’t the passengers.

Jon peered up at the indicator. “Probably someone in HR. Wonder if they’re arriving or leaving?”

“We’ll soon find out.” I had a frightening thought as the light moved up to fifty-five and the elevator dinged. “What if someone is coming to this floor from fifty-four? Get out of sight!”

We pressed up against the wall in the darkened corner, opposite the direction a familiar tenant would turn to go to the electronic keypad. The door opened, and Jeff Hardinger stepped out. He moved purposefully to the keypad, entered his code and opened the door.

“Shit! Gayle, are you trying to kill me?” Jon whispered as soon as the door latched shut behind Jeff. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He caught Jeff’s empty elevator before it could leave and held the doors open for me.

“We should go find out what he’s up to.”

“Are you crazy? We’ve cut it too close too many times.”

“We’re on the brink of discovering something big! I just know it!”

“How about this as a compromise? We’ll go down to the lobby and hang out for a while to see if he comes right back down. He might have just forgotten something for all we know.”

“What if he doesn’t leave soon? We come back up here?”

Jon had already punched the lobby button and moved inside while tugging me onto the elevator with him. A man cleared his throat as he approached the door from inside the suite, giving me the final push to leave.

I jumped on, and Jon hit the door close button. We pressed our backs to the wall and held our breaths that the doors would close before Jeff could thrust a hand inside and stop them. His aggravated exclamation at missing the elevator, and the soft thud of the doors shutting ushered in our common sighs of relief.

Once we’d been spit out into the lobby, I pulled Jon into the women’s restroom with me.

“This is the ladies’ room!”

Peeking out the door, I had a direct view of the empty guard’s desk and after-hours log. “So?”

“I shouldn’t be in here.”

“We just had sex on Bob’s desk, and now you’re squeamish about being in the ladies’ room? I don’t care if you’re in here, and I’m the only woman present. What are the odds of another woman coming in? It’s nearly ten o’clock.”

The verbal ink of my last sentence hadn’t even dried when a woman in a suit strode with purpose toward us.

I shoved Jon into the closest stall. “Hide!”

The woman gave me a friendly nod as she took the stall next to Jon’s. I moved to the door to monitor the guard’s desk just in time to see Jeff sign out. He looked at his watch and wrote in the log. I wished I had signed us out first with a fake time. Jeff headed toward the garage entrance, carrying his briefcase.

I spun around to examine the spaces below the doors of the two occupied stalls. Only one pair of feet touched the floor. Jon must have pulled his feet up. I scratched lightly on his door and cleared my throat.

He cracked it open, peered out, and race-walked through the restroom door and into the lobby. I chased closely behind him. He grumbled about his horrific ordeal the entire way to the front desk—the big baby.

The guard hummed to a tune on his MP3 player and gave us a slight nod of acknowledgement as I signed us out. Thankfully, my sign-in was on a prior page to the one Jeff had used.

A Range Rover turned onto the street, heading away from us just after we arrived at Jon’s car.

“That’s Jeff! Let’s follow him!” I said.

“Alright, but only for a little while.”

“Oh, and you need to stay out of sight. He knows you drive a black Porsche and your license number, not to mention your address and phone numbers,” I stated nonchalantly.

“What?”

“Yeah, you and your personal details were in his planner. But before you feel too special, so was I and a lot of other people. I also know your Anderson-Blakely logon password, ‘727jlg something something’, though it’s probably deactivated by now.”

“That really was my password. IT head or not, how did Jeff have it?”

“Don’t know. He had mine, Bob’s, Doug’s and several others. Needless to say, I’m changing mine as soon as I get home, not that it will make a difference.”

Jon followed Jeff’s Range Rover from two cars back as we travelled north on the tollway. The SUV wound its way through several neighborhood streets in Addison before finally pulling into the garage of a luxurious home. Jon parked down the street as I jotted down the address.

“Nice crib,” I said as I put my pen and paper away.

“Are you ready to call it a night, Nancy Drew?”

“I suppose.” I tried to hide my disappointment at such a pedestrian conclusion to our tail.

“This has possibly been the longest and weirdest day of my life,” Jon said, running a hand through his hair.

“How’re you holding up?”

Poor guy. He’d lost his job, gotten into a fight for me … again … done the amateur sleuth thing with me … again … and nearly been caught … again. At least he’d gotten a good ‘screw you, Anderson-Blakely’ out of it as well as a few more blows to Doug and his ego.

“I feel … fan-fuckintastic! I can’t remember the last time I had such fun!” He burst out laughing.

He laughed even harder, probably at my look of disbelief. Yes, he was weird, but he burrowed a little further into my heart nonetheless.

28

Jon and I stayed up until nearly midnight reading Bob’s emails and Jeff’s planner pages. We barely made a dent in them before one of us gave the other a look or a touch. For the first time, no one interrupted or threatened to interrupt us when we made love.

When I readied to leave my apartment for work the next morning, Jon still slept in my bed. One arm lay crooked across his body, fingers splayed over the ribs beneath them. His dark hair, normally side parted, curtained over his brows and grazed eyelashes that fanned out over his cheeks. His bare chest and abdomen moved up and down in a gentle, slumbering rhythm. The sheet covered but couldn’t hide the outline of an impressive morning erection.

Dear God in heaven
. The man reduced me to a raging collection of hormones and primitive urges. I realized he had also secured a tight enough grip on my emotions to do some serious damage, intentional or otherwise. He seemed like a pretty low risk guy, other than the secrecy and maybe the one nasty incident where he nearly beat a man to death over me. Besotted Fool Gayle wasn’t worried nearly so much as Career Girl Gayle.