The P.U.R.E. Read online

  “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.

  “Thank you. Your reaching out means a lot to me, and I know Jon will feel the same way.” I matched her smile with one of my own, perhaps a smidge less forced than hers.

  “Okay. Good. But while it’s just the two of us here, a word of advice, if I may be so bold.” She paused for a second. “There’s a lot more to Jon than initially meets the eye. He keeps secrets he can’t and won’t share with you. Be careful around him until you understand him better.”

  I should have foreseen she’d lob a spoiler in the mix. Kudos to Thalia for catching me off guard.

  “He does value his privacy.” On that point we agreed.

  She shrugged. “That’s not quite what I meant.”

  My smile withered. I shifted my arm and checked the time. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work. It was … nice … talking to you, Thalia, and I appreciate all you’ve shared.”

  “Likewise, and you’re welcome. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other in the future. But, Gayle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you dare hurt him, or I’ll come after you.” She shifted her purse on her shoulder and drew to her full height. Her shadow engulfed me.

  I wanted to laugh but nodded instead. My worries centered more around the destruction Jon might do rather than on Thalia’s cursory threat.

  Thalia fixed her gaze on a spot beyond me and propelled her long legs in that direction without saying goodbye.

  I left the store and rushed back to the office. Tony sat with the first of a huge stack of reports we’d been deluged with while at lunch.

  “What happened to you?” he asked without looking up.

  “A sale at Neiman’s required a brief detour. Sorry I’m late.” I slipped off my jacket and took the chair opposite him.

  “No matter.” He sighed with what I took as passive-aggressive annoyance. His fingers clicked over the keys of the adding machine with tommy gun speed. Who knew he had such prowess with a ten key, especially when in bitch mode?

  I attacked the next report in the stack and all was quiet for at least half an hour except for our fingers tapping against the adding machine keys.

  “Don wants to ask you out.”

  “Oh. Thanks for the heads up.” Yuck but my own fault.

  “Don’t mention it. Aren’t you dating Jon though?”

  “No.” Clickety-click-click.

  • • •

  The rest of the day passed with the rapidity of tectonic plate movement. I couldn’t wait to go home, to be with Jon. I hadn’t called him after my meeting with Jeff because what did I have to tell? Nothing we hadn’t already anticipated. Plus, I couldn’t call him in front of Tony. Maybe he’d been too sleepy to register I said I would. I couldn’t tell him about Marilyn. I also doubted I would be sharing any of my encounter with Thalia. Don’s information, however, was worth hunting him down.

  I found him at his apartment, tinkering with Christine.

  “Hey, there’s my girl,” he said when I stepped out of my car.

  My heart did a cannonball into the deep end of the happy pool.

  He appeared in high spirits though he hadn’t shaved and wore ripped jeans and a greasy T-shirt. “You didn’t call like you said you would. What happened?”

  Drat. He heard.

  “Nothing. The whole meeting was more of an exercise in political posturing. He dismissed the stock thing, he dismissed the inventory counts, and he dismissed me with a pat on my wittle bwonde head. We were done in less than a half hour. Surprised?”

  “No. But come here, wittle bwonde girwl.”

  “You’re covered in grease.” Nevertheless, I walked to him and stretched forward, head back, lips puckered so they were our only point of contact.

  “Go home and change, then come back and get dirty with me.” He cocked a naughty brow when he finished.

  Sounded good to me—the filthier the better. “When I come back, I’ll tell you about another interesting conversation I had today.”

  “A cliffhanger? Gayle, you’re such a tease.”

  I opened my car door and smiled. “Not really. You only have to ask nicely.” I slipped inside and drove home.

  After hauling in my huge dry cleaning order—that took three round trips between car and closet to complete—I put on a pair of ripped jeans and a T-shirt. Whistling and singing as I hurried about my apartment, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I swiped a comb through my hair. I paused to gaze at the giddy girl. She blew a kiss to shoo me out the door and told my legs to run the three blocks to Jon’s apartment.

  • • •

  “What did you do, jog?” Jon asked.

  I stood beside him panting to catch my breath. “Yep. You got a problem with that, jail bait?” I threw a few shadow-boxing jabs at him and gave him a gentle roundhouse kick in the butt.

  “Put your energy to some productive use, and hand me the black and orange wrench on the bumper, please, wittle bwonde girwl. Heh-heh, I like that.”

  I did as he asked, plopped down on the curb and leaned back on my elbows. “You know, from this angle you are very doable right now.”

  Beneath Christine’s hood, he turned his head to shoot me a wicked grin. He chuckled as he returned to his wrenchy business.

  “When I was in Jeff’s office, he took a phone call while I sat there like a lump.”

  “I hate that.”

  “Yeah, me too. So anyway, he says to his caller, ‘Finish it up, and I’ll see you tonight to strategize. Come to my new address in Richardson.’ He wrote ‘BT’—or Bob Turner, I’m assuming—‘bio/pic and ALS at nine’. What do you think his notes meant?”

  “Hmm, he said Richardson not Addison? Interesting.”

  “I was thinking …”

  Jon popped out from underneath Christine’s hood and frowned. “Oh no, here come the Lindley machinations.” He checked his watch. “You’ve been here for exactly three minutes. Sadly, I think I know what you’re about to say.”

  “Oh yeah, weisenheimer? What was I about to say?” I stood and moved to his side to peer into Christine’s engine with him. I had no idea what was what—all those metal parts and hoses were nothing but car guts to me.

  “You want to go to Jeff
’s house in Addison and tail him to his house in Richardson, or you want to tail Bob from his home in Turtle Creek to Jeff’s house in Richardson.”

  “Close but no cigar. I thought we could log in using Bob’s password and go through his contacts and emails to see if we could find Jeff’s new address and maybe drive over.”

  “From what computer?”

  “Not mine, that’s for sure. IT put a keystroke capture on it. I thought we could go into the office and use Bob’s. Or, if Bob’s office is locked, we could use Jeff’s. If either Bob’s or Jeff’s vehicle is still in the garage, we can instead do what you suggested and tail one of them. Lots of options and flexibility with my plan, don’t you think?”

  “But your end goal is to find Jeff’s Richardson address and spy on his meeting? Did you try a reverse lookup on his phone number?”

  “I would have if I’d had it,” I retorted, crossing my arms even though it really hadn’t occurred to me.

  “You do. It’s in those copies you made. I brought them to my apartment and was reading them today. I circled it for you.”

  “Awesome. Can I go use your computer?”

  “Give me a second, and we’ll go check together. Afterwards, let’s grab some dinner before you have us rabbiting off on some new adventure.” He picked up a greasy rag from the ground and wiped off his hands. “I also need to take a shower first.”

  “Alright.” I followed him inside, calculating how long his pre-requisite steps might take.

  After he degreased and scrubbed his hands and fingernails, he sauntered to where I waited at his computer. He reached over my shoulder and typed in his password after he made me turn away. When I turned back, he’d launched a browser that was new to me.

  “Do you have the other browser, the orange icon one? Sorry, I’m drawing a blank on the name.”

  “I do, but it’s corrupted, and I haven’t downloaded the latest version yet. Just grit your teeth, and use this one.” He reached across his desk for the copies he’d brought from my apartment. A sheet of notes he’d taken lay on top.

  He ran his finger down the margin, pointed to an entry he’d decoded and circled in red ink. Jeff had contacted the phone company to get a line hooked up. Jon impressed me with his attention to detail. He wasn’t as blasé about the mystery as he pretended to be, wasn’t merely humoring me. I smiled at my discovery but kept my observations to myself.