Death in Paradise (34 page)

Their reaction to my suggestion about Rory was so positive that I kept my next one to myself—that if someone was going around attacking potential witnesses, they should keep an eye on Laura Mitchell. Still, I had to have the last word. "Do what you want," I said. "You always do. I don't know why you keep bothering me." Another grunt. Then they were finally gone. I was blissfully alone.

"Screw you," I told the chairs they had occupied, half surprised they hadn't suggested I was actually the murderer and I'd faked my own drowning to throw off suspicion.

I back-burnered my plans to take a bath, locked the door as many times as it would lock, and got out Rory's computer. First item of business was to check on tomorrow's arrangements. I couldn't print but at least I could take notes. Four workshops requiring four conference rooms—surely Mrs. Sato would have anticipated that—followed by our closing lunch. All carefully confirmed in writing. Again, it seemed like a no-brainer to me, but compulsive that I am, I called and left a message on her voice mail reminding her to check on the details.

Rory's suicide attempt puzzled me. The Rory I was used to was careful, detailed, compulsive, serious, and hardworking. In my experience, in times of extreme stress, people reverted to their most conservative behaviors, taking refuge in the familiar. Quiet people stopped talking altogether. Depressed people got more depressed. Compulsive people, like me, got more compulsive. Workaholics worked harder. But Rory had fallen apart. Maybe it was just that she was young, but that was being a bit condescending, considering that I wasn't so much older. It had to be something else.

They had told me she'd been stealing money. That didn't sound a whole lot like Rory, either. From my observation of her, I would have said that while Rory was ambitious and aspired to bigger than things than being Martina's assistant, she was basically the assistant type. Given direction, she would perform brilliantly within her normal sphere. But Rory was not an innovator. For all that she'd accused me of being like Martina in giving her an assignment and then taking it away, when she'd had the chance to step into Martina's shoes and prove herself by running the conference, she'd fallen apart and failed to do anything. In fact, not only had she not done anything, but she'd whined and acted like it was terrible imposition when asked to do something. Not leadership behavior.

If I'd been in her position, I would always have been nosing up against Martina's domain, appropriating pieces, taking over whatever I could. I've often described myself as the perfect second-in-command. Put me there and I'll always be trying to seize power. Give me power and I get nervous. Actually, that's how I used to describe myself. Over the years, I've gotten more comfortable with power and responsibility. I've gotten used to being in charge.

Going back to Rory, I pondered. Was being a shrinking violet consistent with concocting a scheme to embezzle money from the association? Was it the kind of behavior a smart but chronically oppressed and ill-used person might resort to? A sly and underhanded revenge? Maybe it was. Maybe Rory's self-pitying declarations were only anticipation that someone would discover her fiscal irregularities, not fear that she'd be accused of Martina's murder. But that's not what I'd seen. I'd seen a girl who believed she was going to be accused of murder. Who expected to be caught and thought she deserved it. I couldn't see Rory as the murderer. Only as the murderer's assistant.

I stared at the glowing screen. As long as I was here, I might as well see what else I could find. I browsed through her meeting notes. Nothing of interest. Her correspondence. That, too, was just more business. I poised my fingers over the keys and closed my eyes. Where was the secret heart? Where would there be anything personal, revealing? Where would I find Rory in this little metal-and-plastic box? I decided to check her E-mail files.

Bingo. There was some very interesting correspondence between Rory and someone called Fox. Among other things, this Fox had advised Rory on the fine points of stealing the money, including making the suggestion that she type up Alt Corp. invoices and get them copied at Kinko's, the papers she'd need to set up a corporate bank account, and how she should keep the amounts small so they wouldn't be noticed. Rory's responses to the Fox were equally revealing. Rory was going to rendezvous with the Fox here in Hawaii. Alt Corp. would purchase a ticket to Maui and one from Maui back to Honolulu. There, presumably, Fox would lie in wait for Rory. Until. Until what?

Had Fox come to help Rory with a murder? Come to perform the dastardly deed? Or just come to enjoy some sun and fun? Was Fox an accomplice to murder or just a larcenous boyfriend? I needed to know when Fox had flown in and when Fox had flown out. Difficult if I didn't know Fox's name. But not so difficult for the police. We had Fox's E-mail address. It wasn't much of a challenge to convert that back into a name. Maybe for an ordinary citizen, but not for a cop. Probably not for a good hacker, either.

Once again, I'd set out to do conference business and found myself back in the middle of Martina's murder. I'd taken the laptop because it was important for business. Now, swept away on a wave of anger and curiosity, I'd gone beyond the bounds of business and learned—learned what? More about Rory than I wanted to know. Clearly it was time to turn this baby over to the midnight twins. It obviously held information relating to a crime, even if not the crime of murder. On the other hand, it was bound to mean endless hassles for our post-Martina, post-Rory transition. Once we let it go, it would be hell getting it back. And maybe there was more stuff here that I really ought—

Wait a minute, Kozak,
I told myself. Wasn't I the reformed, risk-averse, don't-get-involved Thea Kozak? Professional woman. Nobody's detective, even if I did get onto elevators and have people call me Sherlock.

Why was I hesitating? Why didn't I just beep Lenny and hand the damned thing over? Maybe it had something to do with the way they'd treated me. My conviction that they'd set me up, pointed me out as a detective to see what might shake loose.

I've been accused by my beloved of being pigheaded and reckless. And the man is sometimes right. It's not that one of us is from Mars and one from Venus. Our problem is that we're both from the same planet, but the behavior that is appropriate for him is inappropriate for me. Well, in a minute, after I'd finished playing with Rory's laptop, I'd get back in touch with my fragile-blossom side. Turn this thing over to competent professionals who would know what to do with it.

I browsed a little more. Aha! There was a more romantic correspondent called Bilbo who got fairly risqué in the comments he made. I recognized some of Rory's physical characteristics from the descriptions. Others were new to me and rather more personal than I would have liked.

I wouldn't have saved them on my machine. The wisdom of living defensively suggested the same rule for one's personal files as for one's person. Never wear anything you wouldn't want to be caught dead in. Never leave a message in your E-mail files that you don't want someone else reading after your death. But then, Rory wasn't dead, just out of commission. So maybe the moral was, don't write anything you wouldn't want the police, or your boss, to see. Well, the police were about to see this one. After all, whoever had smashed my laptop might have thought that they were smashing Rory's. They might have thought that all this stuff had been destroyed. The way news traveled in this group, it would have been no secret that I had Rory's laptop for the benefit of the organization. Heck, it belonged to the organization.

Though I'd stayed perfectly calm about it downstairs—calm because I was too weary and distracted to be anything else—the loss of my laptop really made me furious. I used it so much it was practically a prosthetic device. My synthetic brain. Once I'd gotten over my technophobia, it had become the mainstay of my workday. It was so easy to keep it open at meetings and tap in all sorts of useful data. Its destruction would have meant the loss of tons of irreplaceable data if I hadn't downloaded the entire hard drive just before I left, in case I died in a plane crash. Whoever had done this to me was the same person who had tried to drown me. Or an accomplice.

Was the attack on me because of what I might have seen on Rory's laptop? So far, I hadn't seen anything worth killing to protect, but I was a poor judge of what was worth killing over. I believed nothing was. No. That wasn't quite true. I could imagine killing to protect someone I loved. If I kept this up, I could fall into a real paranoid funk.

Threatening people with bodily harm or attempting to take their lives is supposed to remove them from the picture. Especially when the victim is a helpless female like me. My ordeal should have left me cowering in my boots and packing my bag to depart. I couldn't pack my bag, it was part of the unsorted mess downstairs. As for cowering, I wasn't the type. It is one of my peculiar failings that when I get scared, I get angry. And the thought of someone trying to take my life, trying to asphyxiate me, to dispose of me like unwanted goods, made me mad as hell.

Okay, so this time it took a while. On other occasions, I've come up screaming and swinging. This time I'd let them get me down. But not for long. As I once told someone who wanted to know why I hadn't taken to my bed with aspirin and tea, instead of getting back on my feet and into the fight, you can't keep a good woman down. I wrote down Fox and Bilbo's addresses and went to the phone. Sure enough. Rory had logged in a local number. I was sure one of these assholes had tried to kill me. I sent a message to Fox, saying: "Fox: I have Goddess's laptop. You want it? Mermaid." Goddess was Rory's nom. I sent one to Bilbo, too. Probably stupid. No doubt Nihilani and Bernstein would have my head.

Stupid, but I couldn't resist. The midnight twins weren't the only ones who used me as a staked goat. Sometimes I did it to myself. There's a reckless side to my character that scares even me. A cocky, go-ahead-and-push-me-and-see-what-happens part—like the guy at school who's always getting right up in the bully's face. Go ahead, I say, try me and see what happens. Probably I need therapy. My second-favorite cop in the world, Dom Florio, says it's post-traumatic stress disorder and that I should get some help. And he loves me dearly. The way he puts it, it doesn't sound healthy. Nice girls don't act like me.

I disconnected and turned off the laptop, ready to call Lenny and turn over this hot little item. Before I could do anything, the phone rang.

A quick voice, barely audible. "Hey, it's me. The spy? Are you all right? I'm sorry about what happened. It was all my fault, I know. Will you ever forgive me?" She didn't wait for me to say yes or no. She went right on talking. "I wanted to give you a present. To say I'm sorry. My mom says it's all right, so can I come over now and give it to you?"

Bath postponed again. "Sure," I said. "Why not?"

"See you in five," she said.

While I waited, I thought about Bilbo and the Fox. And, with the kind of curiosity that killed the cat, I just had to know whether a civilian could crack the code. Despite the lateness of the hour—or the earliness—I called back East and woke up Bobby.

Bobby was one of our employees at EDGE. A fine writer and researcher. Good-humored and the heart and soul of the office. Well connected to a number of wily computer types. And Bobby owed me big-time, since I'd sublet my condo to his friend Roger who had proceeded to trash the place. When Bobby's sleepy mumble came on, I said, "Bobby, it's Thea. I need your help."

"It's the middle of the night," he said. "Is it an emergency?"

"Someone tried to kill me today, Bobby."

"It's an emergency." He sighed. "Your whole life is an emergency. What can I do?"

Bobby was big and bearlike and had the world's sweetest nature. I felt a twinge of guilt at what I was doing. But only a twinge. I told him what was going on and about the messages on Rory's laptop. I gave him the E-mail addresses, the names of the servers, and the names of every male even tangentially related to the conference.

He hummed a little as he wrote them down. "Give me your number," he said. "I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Say, did you hear? Paul's been offered that headmaster's job up in Maine after all." There was a click as he hurried off to start my research.

I sat staring at the receiver. Hell and damn! If her husband, Paul, got a new job, my partner, Suzanne, would be moving north. Another major crisis and hassle, figuring out what we'd do with our business, but I couldn't deal with any more stuff right now. I shoved the thought into a mental closet and slammed the door. Then I called Bernstein's page number and left a message for him to call me.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. Circumstances have taught me to be a cautious sort, so I looked through the little spy-hole before I undid the locks. It was Laura, a bedraggled, badly sunburned Laura, holding an enormous box with wrappings and ribbons. She came in and dropped dejectedly onto a chair, holding out the box. "Here. I can only stay five minutes," she said. "They're timing me."

"Why?"

"Cuz hanging around with you might be dangerous."

"They think someone's going to attack us right here in the room?"

Her eyes grew wide. "Do you think they might?"

"I doubt it."

She held out the box. "Here. You'd better hurry up and open it."

"You don't seem very enthused," I said. "Does that mean you didn't pick it out?"

"Exactly!" She sighed and hunched further down in the chair. "My mother and Charlotte did the shopping. They love to shop. They would spend their whole lives shopping. Sometimes I feel like I dropped from the moon and landed in the midst of a bunch of strangers who claim they're my family."

Another reason why I liked this girl. All kids feel like they must have been adopted but not every girl of eleven finds shopping a bore. "I know what you mean," I said. "I hate to shop, too. I have a partner named Suzanne who doesn't mind it and she buys my clothes. Just brings them to the office and leaves them on my desk."