Killer Move

I decided to shut up, and went to the bathroom. This was small but also tidy, and smelled of other people’s soap. Compared to Stephanie’s stash in the bathroom at our home, there was a notable lack of Women’s Bathroom Stuff, and I realized Cassandra probably just didn’t have the money for it. It was a long time since I’d been in the company of a woman who didn’t have the money for Stuff. I splashed a lot of water on my face, which made my head feel colder but no more clear. The towel I used had a hint of mildew, which made me feel nostalgic and affectionate, too. I think it was the towel I was feeling this toward, anyhow.

Back in the living room I saw that Cassandra had opened the frosted door at the end, revealing a minuscule balcony. She’d also taken off her coat, and was holding a white USB cable in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other.

“One of these you need,” she said, jiggling the cable hand up and down. She was wearing black jeans and a close-fitting, multilayered top made from black lace, with a scooped neck and sleeves down to her wrists. “The other, not so much. But, like, it’s your call.”

“A small glass, maybe,” I said, businesslike. “While the phone charges. Then I’d better head home.”

She efficiently connected my phone to the battered laptop on the desk and waited until it had chirped to confirm it was getting juice. “All systems operational. All we can do now . . . is wait.”

She poured me half a glass of wine and a full glass for herself and sat down on the edge of the kinda-sofa.

“So, my friend.”

I felt lumbering and awkward, an untidy older man in a young woman’s just-so room. “So . . . what?”

She looked up, glass in her lap. Her face was open, very pretty, and unlined. “We’ve got a little time. You totally don’t have to, but . . . do you want to share?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

An hour later, to my surprise, I’d told her quite a lot. About the e-mail with the joke, about the book from Amazon, about the fact that the police were claiming David Warner was dead when I had the evidence of my own eyes to prove he was not. We were sitting on the floor by then, our backs against the kinda-sofa, and I had been informed that, should I wish, I could call her Cass. In my defense, I’d tried both the house phone and Steph’s cell again, twice. It was now well after eleven, and the world felt like it was teetering in the balance. Midnight is a feasible time to get back: I’d returned home around that time after the evening trying to meet Warner. Midnight can happen if the evening gets away from you just a little. Much later than that, however, and either you’re trying to make a big and serious point, or . . . I couldn’t complete the thought. That or led in directions that tangled and became poisonous.

“Okay, well, that’s pretty strange,” Cassandra said, after thinking about what I’d told her. She poured us both another glass of wine. It was not the first refill. “Weirdness-wise, you can tick the box.”

“Yeah.”

“But what I don’t get is why your wife is so mad at you. I mean, a salacious photo book, even if you had ordered it . . . not such a big deal, right? I’m not getting the impression she’s notably uptight or a total vanilla wife, so why the spat?”

Red wine on top of beer, I’m not sure what it was . . . but I reached in my pocket and pulled out the thumb drive. “Last night,” I said, “I got home, and she’d been on my laptop looking for pictures I took at a friend’s party. Instead, she found what’s on here.”

I had been intending to describe the images, in very vague terms. Cass grabbed the stick from me, however, and was on her feet and up at the desk, slipping the drive into a port on her laptop, before I’d had time to react.

“Hang on,” I said, struggling to my feet. By the time I got there, however, the first of the images was already on-screen.

“A bad photo of a window, at night,” Cassandra said. “Yeah—I can understand why that would . . . Oooh, oh, I see. Gotcha. La-di-da.”

By the time the fourth picture was up—the first showing Karren White with nothing above the waist—I was standing beside Cass. “I didn’t take these,” I said, about as embarrassed as I had ever been. “But they’re dated to a night when I was kept out all evening.”

“Kept how?”

“Chasing the meeting with Warner, which his assistant now disclaims all knowledge of.”

The next picture came up. “Who’s the pretty lady?”

“Her name’s Karren. She works in my office.”

Then the next picture, frontal, in better focus. I was uncomfortably aware that I was standing close to a young woman while we looked at pictures of another woman, in a state of undress.

“So how did these end up on your machine?”

“I have no idea.”

“And this is why you met up with Kevin?”

“I didn’t tell him about the pictures, only that it seemed like someone had gotten remote access to my machine.”

“What’d he say?”

“That it was possible. Though he liked the idea of physical access better.”

“Is the woman aware of her starring role?”

“No.”

“You didn’t tell her?”