Secure Location

chapter Thirteen

Meg pushed back her chair, ran to the bathroom and threw up everything she’d eaten. When she was done, her skin felt clammy and her legs were weak. Jana, sweet, innocent Jana, who had laughed her way through the day had been in the sights of a maniac. She’d been in danger. Because of Meg.

It was the continuation of a nightmare that had started so many years ago.

“We must have been followed,” she said, as she walked out of the bathroom.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She waved away his concern. “If you didn’t tell anyone and I didn’t, either, that’s the only reasonable explanation.”

“I’m a hundred percent confident that we weren’t,” he said. He started pacing around the small room, running his hands through his hair.

“Maybe there was a tracking device on our car?”

He shook his head. “No time to set it up. I rented the car under the name of Milo Martinez and paid for it with a credit card under the same name.”

She recognized the name as one he’d used before, when working undercover. If the rental company had checked his driver’s license, there would have been one on file in Illinois under that name.

“The car got delivered to the hotel,” he continued on. “There was no way for anybody to know it was for us. Even if somebody watched us get into it, they wouldn’t have had a chance to tag the car.”

She tried to think, to reason, but her brain felt as weak as her legs. “None of it makes sense,” she said.

He didn’t say anything for a minute. When he did, he surprised her. “Earlier today when we wanted lunch, you knew right where the food was. And you led the way to the water rides, like you knew the park. But you’d said you’d never been there before.”

It took her a minute to catch up. “They...uh...have a diagram of the park online. I couldn’t sleep last night. I got up sometime around two. I jumped onto the public Wi-Fi here at the hotel.”

Cruz stopped pacing.

“Oh, no,” Meg said. “Do you think somebody hacked into the public network and looked at what I’d searched for?”

“It’s possible. Especially if your site doesn’t have the best encryption. But I think it’s more likely your laptop. It’s pretty easy to install software on somebody’s machine that allows somebody else to see everything they are doing. It could have been installed by somebody who had access to your machine or you may just have opened an email and downloaded something without having a clue.”

When would she stop screwing up and putting other people at risk? “I’m sorry, Cruz. I’m just so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “Nothing happened.”

“It could have.”

He didn’t respond. She was right. They’d been less careful today, believing that they were safe. The only way Cruz and Jana would be safe was to be away, far away, from her.

Cruz picked up his phone. “I need to fill Myers in.”

She didn’t want to hear the conversation. Didn’t want to relive it. Instead, she went back to her room and brushed her teeth, hoping to get the horrible taste of despair out of her mouth. When she came back, Cruz had just ended the call. He tossed his phone onto the bed. “Myers is on his way over. He wants to see your laptop and to talk to your computer geeks. He’s agreed to let me sit in on the conversation. Can you page the right person and ask them to meet us?”

“Of course.” She picked up her phone. Minutes later, she’d arranged for their chief information officer to meet Cruz in the lobby.

Cruz had his hand on the door. “Myers offered to bring a female plainclothes officer with him. She’ll be here in the room with you and Jana while I’m gone.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“He’s getting bolder. I’m not sure what the hell he’s going to try next.”

* * *

THE FEMALE OFFICER was tall, blonde and looked as if she could have stepped out of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Her name was Greta. It made Meg’s heart flutter a little when Cruz didn’t give the woman any more than a cursory glance.

It had always amazed her that sexy Cruz Montoya had fallen for her. It had been so unexpected and so wonderful.

She’d had so little experience, having dated a few times before Missy’s death but not after. She’d studied, worked and tried to ignore the whispers behind her back. When her dad had lost his job, everyone knew it was because she’d done a terrible thing.

It stopped feeling safe in Maiter, especially after rocks got thrown through their living room window and their house almost burned down after someone started a fire in their overgrown backyard.

They left Maiter in the middle of the night, like criminals. Her parents found a small house in Houston and she hoped that life would return to normal. But it had taken months for her dad to find work. Every day she saw her mother get angrier and her father more depressed.

She wasn’t surprised when the two of them decided to quit pretending that it was okay. The divorce happened quickly. Her dad moved to Austin and she stayed in the house with her mother. When her opportunity to go to college came, she took the first bus out of town.

Chicago had been her fresh start. She was no longer Margaret Mae. She was Meg. And every bit as carefree and cool as any other eighteen-year-old girl. On the outside. She worked hard to hide that there were many nights she didn’t sleep. She would wake up to the soft snores of her roommate sleeping close in the crowded dorm room. She’d pull her quilt up to her neck. It couldn’t stop the shaking. Or the terror of reliving the night a two-year-old turned blue and died.

Her mother had gotten sick when she was a sophomore and had been dead by the middle of her senior year. Pancreatic cancer was a cruel beast. Her dad had come to the funeral and had wanted her to come live with him after graduation. She’d have done it but then, exactly thirty-three days later, he’d been killed when a semi crossed the middle line.

And she was truly alone.

She stayed in Chicago after graduation and was happy when The Montray, a wonderful hotel in the high-rent shopping district, offered her an internship.

She worked hard and the internship turned into a full-time job. The people in the big hotel became her family. She loved the complexity of the place, everything from making sure the huge flower arrangements for the lobby got delivered to ensuring that visiting royalty was happy with the thread count in their sheets. She worked in registration, at the front counter, in group sales, in marketing, in accounting and even suffered through a brief stint in the massive kitchen, where she mostly tried to stay out of the way.

She got promoted a couple times and was already a manager when she met Cruz. His mother had introduced them. When they were dating, she’d tell him stories of the crazy things that happened at work. He’d roll his eyes and say pithy things about people who had more money than common sense. During their marriage, she got promoted to director. Cruz had been proud of her. And she’d known that he bragged about her at work. After Cruz and Sam Vernelli became partners, Sam would tease her, tell her that he hoped she never fell off her pedestal.

She’d tried. But pedestals were not always steady and when Cruz started talking about babies, the ground started to shake. She’d been quiet at first, then tried to gently remind him of all the reasons that things were perfect just the way they were. But when he’d started talking about parochial schools, club soccer and advanced calculus, all the things their children would have and do, the shaking advanced to full-blown quaking and the pedestal became very unstable.

Missy had never done any of those things.

Because of her.

She couldn’t tell Cruz the truth. Didn’t want him to realize that he’d been a fool to put her on the pedestal. Instead, she’d let him think that the pedestal had bored her, that it either wasn’t high enough, low enough or some combination thereof. Left him confused, angry, and unable to sort through the mess.

And now she’d led him straight into another bit of craziness. He should run like hell because the pedestal was about to topple over and crush him.

She glanced away from the television that she was watching but not seeing. She got up and peeked in at Jana, who had gotten up shortly after Cruz had talked to Detective Myers, eaten a few bites of her macaroni, and then fallen asleep again in Meg’s bed just minutes after Greta had arrived. She was still sleeping soundly, her pretty little face all relaxed and peaceful.

Peace. Meg could hardly remember the feeling.

She partially closed the connecting door and turned to Greta, who was watching her. “Would you like some coffee or anything?”

The woman shook her head. “No, thank you. Harry and I just finished dinner when your husband, I mean ex-husband, called.”

It took Meg a moment to realize that Harry was Harold Myers. “You and Detective Myers?” she asked, before she could censor herself.

The woman’s face turned pink. “We’ve been living together for a year. There’s no reporting relationship between the two of us but we still try to be discreet.”

It seemed an unlikely pairing but then again, what room did she have to talk? Cruz had come from a sometimes loud, highly charged family. They talked rough, they hugged hard and they counted on each other. Her family had been quiet and emotionless, even in the wake of Missy’s death. They didn’t talk about what happened. The one time she had been brave enough to broach the subject, her father had told her that she should have been more careful and her mother had said that it was best to try to forget it.

She stopped trying to talk about it and stopped hoping to count on anyone else. She sure as heck didn’t want anyone counting on her.

She kept a safe zone around her and the only one that had ever breached it was Cruz. In his bold, in-your-face way, he’d managed to get past all the imaginary alligators and scale the palace walls.

They’d been a team. A cohesive unit.

They’d loved and laughed and in the quiet nights when she awoke and she could hear Cruz breathing next to her, she’d been overwhelmed at the love she felt for him.

Yet she’d continued to keep her secret.

Maybe because she really liked the pedestal. Maybe because she was afraid of disappointing him. Maybe because she’d gotten used to never talking about it and now it just seemed too damn late.

She heard two sharp raps on the door. “Meg, it’s Cruz.”

Greta opened the door. He came in with Detective Myers on his heels. They didn’t have her laptop.

“Well?” she asked, impatient to have the details.

Cruz gave her a tired smile. “There was a program on your laptop. Basically, it was recording and transmitting every keystroke, every website you went to, all the activity.”

She felt nauseous and terribly violated. “Transmitting it where?”

“We’re working on that,” Myers said. “Every computer has an address, sort of like a house number. But whoever installed this was smart. When our technical guys try to trace the address, it’s bouncing them all over the place. Russia. China. India. The guy was good at covering his tracks. Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’re not going to have much success.”

“Why?” she demanded. This was getting old. She wanted answers.

“Two things. First of all, the malware was pretty sophisticated. The technical guys knew what they were looking for and they had trouble finding it on the machine. Two, he has to assume that once he sent the pictures, we’d eventually find our way to your laptop. By now, he’s probably covering his cyber-tracks. Your information is probably being routed through some old lady’s desktop in Indonesia and she’s as innocent of the crime as you are.”

Meg shook her head. “I hate computers.”

Cruz nodded. “Me, too.”

She mostly used her laptop for personal reasons. Online shopping, reading the Wall Street Journal, perusing new recipes. What had someone hoped to gain by tracking that kind of activity? “How did this program get on my computer?”

Cruz ran a hand through his long hair. His face was very serious. “That much we know. You didn’t open some random email and install this. Somebody who had access to your laptop downloaded the software.”

She didn’t know if that was supposed to make her feel better or worse that she hadn’t been fooled by some slick cyber-creep. “How long?” she asked. “How long has this been going on?”

“For almost six months,” Myers said.

She mentally reviewed the termination dates of Hawkins, Looney and Blakely. Six months ago they’d all still been working at the hotel. Oscar Warren had also been there. She looked at Cruz’s face and knew that he’d already gone through the same exercise.

“Where do you normally keep your laptop?” Detective Myers asked.

She shrugged. “At home, usually. I bring it to work occasionally.”

“When it’s at work, do you have it with you? Do you take it to meetings?”

“No. I leave it in my office. I’ll use it during my lunch hour. Sometimes I’ll stop at a coffee shop on my way home and jump on the public Wi-Fi. I don’t see how this could have happened, I have a password on it.”

“There are programs that can break a password in seconds. Child’s play for somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

“Charlotte would have had access,” Cruz said. “Because of his relationship with her, Hawkins probably did, too. You said that you’d come back to the office and he’d be hanging around.”

She nodded.

“And Looney was in Maintenance and Blakely in Security. Both with access to a master key that could have been used to unlock the office when both you and Charlotte were away.”

Her head was spinning. “Yes.”

“Oscar Warren?” he asked.

She shook her head. “We didn’t give keys to any of the people from A Hand Up.”

“Slater would have had a key,” Cruz stated.

“What?” Meg asked.

“I’ve been focusing my attention on these four white men. One because of his jail record and three because their employment was terminated within the last year. But maybe it’s a white guy with a whole other agenda. I don’t want to be stupid and overlook somebody.”

Cruz had never been stupid. “It’s not Scott,” she said.

“Nobody gets a free pass, Meg. Nobody.”

She needed the free pass. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “It was nice to meet you,” she said, looking at Greta. “Thank you for coming to stay with me.”

“Do you want me to get Jana?” Cruz asked.

Meg didn’t want to disturb the little girl. She shook her head. “She can sleep with me.”

Five minutes later, she heard the doors and knew that Detective Myers and Greta had left. Seconds later, Cruz was standing at her door. “Sleeping?” he asked quietly.

She could pretend. “No,” she said.

He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The lights were all off, with the exception of one dim light from the bathroom. His shape was visible but she couldn’t see the expression on his face. She could feel warmth roll off his big body.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she lied. “I’m sorry about this, Cruz. Sorry that you got dragged into it and that it touched Jana. I never meant for that to happen.”

“It’s not your fault, Meg.”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. What if it really was her fault? What if it had something to do with what had happened to Missy?

They sat there in the dark for a long moment. Finally, Cruz shifted. “Is there anything you haven’t told me, Meg?” he asked, his voice soft.

She swallowed hard. “Of course not,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But just a few minutes ago, right before Myers and Greta left, you had the strangest look on your face. Like you were thinking of something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Look, Cruz, I’m really tired.” She rolled over, giving him her back.

And she didn’t start to cry until he’d left the room.