A Local Habitation

The desk was covered in drifts of paper scribbled with complex calculations, while a pile of origami roses offered silent testimony to her preferred form of stress relief. Most of the papers tacked to the cube wall were work-related, with the exception of a poster of a kitten with the motto “hang in there” written in large, cartoony letters, and a photograph of a smiling man with white-blond hair. I removed the tack, turning the picture over to read the inscription on the back. “To my dearest Babs; a cat may look at a king. May I look at a cat? Love, John. ”


Oh, damn. I smothered a sigh as I put the picture down. There weren’t any other photographs, which struck me as a little strange; if Gordan had been her best friend for as long as Alex seemed to think, I would have expected to find some sign of their relationship—a picture, a card, something. But there was nothing to indicate they’d ever met outside a professional context. I started shuffling through the papers littering the desktop, frowning. Most of what I found seemed fairly mundane; notes on troubleshooting the company’s latest software offerings, bug reports, documentation of program glitches.

Barbara hadn’t been very highly ranked in the department; aside from her glaring lack of an office, the memos I could understand seemed to indicate that she’d been at the bottom of most of the corporate food chains. Whenever something went wrong, it seemed like Barbara took a lot of the blame. More tellingly, a lot of the blame was coming from Gordan. “Maybe they had a little falling-out,” I murmured, starting to test the drawers. Most opened easily.

The top drawer was locked. Frown deepening, I knelt and peered at it. Jan would give me the key if I asked, but I wanted to think about it first. There was probably a perfectly logical reason for Barbara’s drawer to be locked; maybe someone kept stealing her pencils.

Or maybe she was trying to hide something.

Breaking cheap locks is just one of the fun skills I’ve picked up in my day job. It’s astounding how many divorces you can finalize with things that were protected by a fifty-cent tumbler in a standard-issue desk. I scanned the desktop until I spotted a paper clip. It took only a few seconds to straighten it out, and I bent back over the lock, makeshift lockpick in hand.

Desk locks generally don’t take more than a minute to pop. This one was no different. After three sharp twists of the wire the tumblers slipped, and the drawer came open with a loud “click.” The sound of Gordan’s typing stopped for a moment, then resumed, just as rapid as before. With bated breath, I eased the drawer out of the desk and sat down on the floor, starting to sift through its contents.

The top layer was fairly generic: announcements of company-wide events, torn envelopes, old pay stubs and blank steno pads. I flipped through them and set them aside, continuing to dig downward. More papers, more debris, none of it more complicated than the layers of silt that build up in every desk in the world. Her checkbook was buried at the bottom. I started to flip through it, noting the cute kittens on her checks before I reached the log of deposits and withdrawals. I stopped there, suddenly cold.

Half the deposits were credited to “payday”: those were decently sized, indicating a respectable, if not show-stopping monthly income. Nothing suspicious about those. The other deposits, though . . .

The labels said “contracting bonus.” They were almost as common as the payday deposits, and each was easily three times bigger. I may not know much about the computer industry, but I understand logic. If Barbara was making that much as an independent, she wouldn’t have needed ALH; the contracting payments alone covered her withdrawals and expenses. Whatever those payments were for, it wasn’t contract work.