The P.U.R.E. (22 page)

As we ate cheap burgers and fries, Tony and Don revealed with mind-numbing clarity the basis of their friendship—an unapologetic zeal for video gaming. For nearly half an hour, the two men prattled about their latest online fantasy game before I finally snapped.

“Don, do you do any type of forensic fraud auditing?” I asked when I could get a word in edgewise.

“You mean like trying to recover erased computer files or find deleted emails, that sort of thing?”

“Well, yeah, that, and also maybe hacking into password-secured data files?”

He smiled and straightened in his chair. I’d obviously tapped into his forte. “Oh, hell yeah, those are the best jobs to get.”

Even Tony perked up. “How’d you get into that group, Don?”

“I have a minor in computer programming and took extra classes in auditing information systems. Anderson-Blakely recruited me directly into the division from Stanford.” Pride oozed from his every pore. Tony gaped like he’d had no idea of Don’s pedigree.

After I’d allowed him enough basking time, I asked, “How hard is it to crack a password?”

“Depends. If we’re going in after the person’s gone, the process can take a while. If the target still works for the company, we can put a keystroke capture program on their machine, and the next time they login, ta-da! We’re in.”

“A keystroke program?” Tony saved me the trouble of asking.

“Yeah, it runs undetected in the background, capturing key strokes with contextual references to help us find what we’re looking for quickly.”

“How do you get the program onto their machine without them knowing?” I asked.

“If the client can ‘push’ programs and updates to machines on its network, usually in the wee hours like Anderson-Blakely’s, we load it into the push queue. The next time he logs in to the network, the program automatically installs itself.”

“Did Anderson-Blakely put keystroke programs on our machines?” I giggled and batted my eyelashes. “I wouldn’t want them to be able to follow me to some of the websites I visit, and no need to tell me I shouldn’t go there.” I brought out the big guns and gave Don a saucy double wink.

“What, like Facespace or Tweeter?” Don winked back at me.

I cast a coquettish sidelong glance. “I ain’t sayin’, but … maybe …”

“Gayle, Gayle, Gayle, you’re probably already on our ‘monitor’ list if you’ve been up to that sort of mischief.” He winked again. “Now my curiosity’s piqued.”

Oh, I’ll just bet
. I wondered if I’d find new friend requests waiting for me the next time I logged in to my favorite social networking sites.

Tony leaned in. “Who’s on the monitor list, and what types of stuff are you seeing?”

Don leaned in too.

So did I.

“You did not hear this from me,” Don said.

Tony and I both nodded furiously.

“Do you guys know Dominic Montelvaldi?” We shook our heads. “He’s like this close to getting the ax because he’s been visiting porn sites—and not just the random ones you sometimes get in your email and accidentally click. Almost everyone’s logged a few of those. I’m talking about website after website.”

I gasped for dramatic effect. Tony smirked, but he couldn’t hide the worry in his eyes. I wondered what websites he’d been visiting.

“Who else?” I asked.

“Hardinger’s got a program that captures the number of times you hit sites with certain key words on them. If you rack up too many of them, then bam, you’re on the list. He also adds people if HR requests an Internet usage report.”

“Really? Are either Tony or I on the list? How about some of my other co-workers—Scarlett Siler, Doug Martin or Jon Cripps?” I pushed the envelope to the extreme by including Doug. I assumed he was familiar with Doug and Jon’s fight and possibly my sordid story too, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t sense any harm in asking in case he hadn’t.

“What are you willing to offer in return to find out, Gayle?” His lids lowered, his version of bedroom eyes I supposed.

I was in greater danger of yawning than succumbing to his masculine lures.
Time to scrape off the excessive frosting, Gayle
. “I’ll give you a hundred extra life points. You won’t find a better offer.” I chuckled and winked at him, my bribe one any gamer would appreciate.

He laughed at my joke. “Two hundred extra life points, and I’ll talk.”

“Sold!” I extended my hand for a shake, happy to give my eye muscles a rest from the exhaustive workout.

“You, Gayle Lindley, are …” He paused. I bit my lip with anxious anticipation. “Prime suspect numero tres but only since about three or four days ago.”

“Numero tres? Why aren’t I numero uno or numero dos?” I asked in mock offense. Third put me higher than expected, to be honest.

“Who’s numero uno?” Tony asked.

“The top target would be …” He paused, looked around, leaned in and whispered, “Marilyn Driver.”

“No way!” Tony gasped.

“Way.” Don affected an air of smug confidence.

“Who’s number two?” I asked.

“Numero dos is Bob Turner.”

“Wow, that’s three people from the Aphrodite project. Am I on the list too?” Only Tony would actually
want
to be on the list.

Don rolled his eyes. “Dude, no, and you don’t wanna be.” I hoped Don rubbed off on Tony.

The two of them carried on debating the merits of being considered an employee of interest versus remaining in obscurity, but I gleaned nothing else useful. Marilyn’s and Bob’s positions as the top two surveillance targets caught me off guard, for opposite reasons.

I relinquished my spot as the attention whore of the group and trailed behind Tony and Don on our way back to the office. Neither one saw me slip into Neiman Marcus when I spied a familiar face beckoning me to join her, almost as if I had conjured her with my thoughts.

“Come with me,” Marilyn Driver said when I met her inside.

“What’s going on?”

“Shh …”

When we reached the women’s section, she randomly grabbed articles of clothing off the racks and shoved them at me. She selected another handful for herself. “We need to go to the dressing room to try these on.”

“Okay.” I had no choice but to trail her like a baby duckling.

She pulled me with her into the handicapped changing room. “Sit.” She motioned toward the bench in the room and kept her voice hushed. “Did you talk to Hardinger today?” No lead in, no explanation. We were in full interrogation mode, but I had no reason to trust her.

“Yes, earlier.”

She stood in front of me as I sat and gazed up at her.

“What did you tell him?”

I told her what I told Jeff minus the ditzy blonde rinse. “He didn’t believe me, or at least, he said he didn’t believe me.”

“Leslie Turner owns twenty percent of Aphrodite? Wow. I had no idea. She probably extorted it out of poor Libby.” She blew out a puff of air and propped her hands on her hips. “Un-friggin-believable. That whore is a fuckin’ piece of work.”

I widened my eyes at Marilyn’s profanity-laced outburst.

“Did you have any clue what Kenneth was up to before he was murdered?” She paced in front of me.

Until Marilyn revealed whether she was friend or foe and what her whole cloak and dagger act was about, I intended to keep the rest of my story under wraps.

“Not one hundred percent. I think he was embezzling from Aphrodite.”

“You’re right. He was. Do you know why?”

I stared at my reflection in the full-length mirror when Marilyn stepped to the door to peer out. I looked as clueless as I felt. “No.”

“He used stock tips he purchased from a ring of Anderson-Blakely partners and employees.”

We both froze when a sales clerk knocked. “How’re you doing in there? Can I get you anything? A different size, perhaps?”

Marilyn put a finger to her mouth. “No thanks. I’m doing just fine.”

We kept quiet until the clerk’s voice trickled back to us from outside of the dressing rooms. Marilyn arched a brow and pinched her lips together.

“What’s going on, Marilyn?”

“The FBI installed an undercover agent at Anderson-Blakely a few months ago. Are
you
the agent, Gayle?”

My jaw bottomed out. “What? Me? An FBI agent? No, I’m not. Who’ve you been meeting with? Obviously not the undercover agent.”

“I can’t tell you yet, but suffice to say the FBI knows about Anderson-Blakely’s illegal information trade and has been investigating for almost a year. Kenneth Petrovich’s murder could be the trigger to blow this thing wide open.”

“For almost a year? How? Are you some kind of informant?”

“Something like that. I meet with my contact at regular intervals. The agent is aware of who I am, but they’ve kept his or her identity hidden from me. This stuff had been going on long before they finally sent in the undercover agent. I was beginning to think they weren’t going to do a damned thing about this racket. I can’t say I’ve seen much progress since they installed an inside guy though.”

“Why is the agent’s identity important if you’re on the same team, and why did you think it was me?” I still wasn’t sure I could trust Marilyn. She could be shoveling a steaming pile of horse crap my way in order to get Jon and I to back off our threats to the firm.

“The ringleaders suspect someone is working undercover. I’m worried they think it’s you. Whoever it is, I need to warn him or her.”

“Why don’t you tell your contact to pass on the word?”

“I tried. I can’t reach him. He missed our meeting and hasn’t contacted me to reschedule, nor has he responded to my signals.”

“Did you send any emails to him from your company computer?”

“
Pffft.
No way. The company computers are all tapped.” She resumed her pacing.

“Oh, so you know about—Wait! All of them?” I caught a glimpse of my “gosh, golly” expression in the mirror. Marilyn probably thought me the biggest country bumpkin. I’m sure she regretted opening her yap and tipping me off about the FBI. Thinking I was a spy was laughable.

“Jeff Hardinger is the head of the IT division. Anything having to do with technology cannot be considered a safe means of communication. Jeff is the brains behind the whole scheme as far as I’ve been able to tell, and he has several accomplices.”

“I figured as much. He had a long list of logins and passwords to the company’s network and emails.”

She stopped pacing and sat on the tiny table opposite me. “How did you stumble across that? Do you have the list?”

I hadn’t meant to let my recent discovery slip out before I’d had a chance to dissect and decode as much on my own as possible. My eyes tried to avoid hers as I fixated on the tiny pincushion mounted to the wall. How much more did I dare reveal?

“I happened to stumble upon them in his office one night.” I kept Jon out of my tale. He’d already suffered enough trying to help me—no sense dragging him deeper into trouble of my making.

“He locks his office. How were you able to get your hands on them even if he left them behind?”

“Uh, I have a key. Well, Doug Martin did, but he sort of loaned it to me without knowing.”

She inclined toward me, her voice even more hushed than before. “Do you still have the key?”

“Yes, but not on me.”

“How much have you shared with Jon?”

I drew back, my spine stiff. “Jon knows pretty much everything I do … except what I learned today when sitting in Jeff’s office. He took a phone call during our meeting and said he’d be meeting the caller at his house tonight in Richardson. I thought he lived in Addison though.”

“I’ve been to his home in Addison. The Richardson home I’d no idea about.” She moved to sit next to me on the bench and fumbled through her purse. “Would you come with me to my next meeting with my contact? He needs to hear some of what you’ve learned.”

“Uh, sure.” I had questions of my own I wanted answered, so I’d play along until I at least knew more. “I assume Jeff and Bob, and possibly others, are selling insider information, but why the big cover-up of Kenneth’s fraud at Aphrodite?”

“I can’t tell you, but you can ask my contact. If he tells you, then so be it. I have other confidences I’ve sworn to keep. Listen, we need to go now.” She jotted down an address and a phone number on a piece of paper. “When you get a text message from this number, come to this address. The text will say ‘dinner at’ and the time you’re to be there. Okay?”

“Can I bring Jon?”

“No. Just you. At least for now. Don’t tell him about any of this. I can’t take too many chances, and I’ve already taken a huge one on you.”

“Alright.” We both stood to leave.

“You go first, and I’ll follow in about five minutes. Take these back out and hang them on the return rack.”

I nodded and grabbed a handful of the clothes, mostly sizes sixteen and eighteen. Snaking through the racks that displayed only plus-sized clothing, I headed toward the petite’s section where I normally shopped and, in my haste, nearly plowed into Thalia Milano.

30

“Gayle, right?” Thalia pointed at me with a long slender finger that ended in a crimson red nail.

“Yes. Nice to see you again, Thalia.” Not really, but what else was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, how’s it going? Your ex is fantastic in bed.’ Not likely.

“Listen, I wanted to apologize for being so bitchy to you the other day at Jon’s apartment.”

Only a real heel would not be softened by her words and manner.

“Under similar circumstances, I’d have probably done the same. I’m sorry if I seemed unsympathetic about your broken engagement.”

She furrowed her brow. “I believed Jon when he said he didn’t cheat on me, at least not with his body. I still do because that’s the kind of man he is. His head and heart? Well, we both know he wasn’t quite so faithful with those.”

I opened my mouth to speak—to say what, I didn’t know.

She held up a hand and stopped me. “And neither was I.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Jon has always been, and will always be, my friend. I don’t want any hint of ill will to cloud our relationship even if that means embracing my replacement.” She pressed her lips together and smiled. An absence of teeth conveyed a convincing bittersweet blend of regret and hopefulness.