He eyed her for a minute, chewing the inside of his cheek as he thought. “Okay.” Leaning forward, he pecked on the keyboard a bit, then tapped a final key with a flourish. Across the room a printer sprang to life, beeping and chugging as pages started spitting out.
The device’s activity caught Nicholas’s attention and her curious toddler slid off the sofa and trotted over to grab at the pages feeding out to the tray.
“Is it?” Nicholas asked in his toddler way of wanting to know what something was.
She hurried over to pry the pages from his sticky hands. “That’s not for you, Nicholas.”
“Mine!” His chubby hands reached for the sheets, opening and closing in “gimme” fashion.
“No. Mommy’s.” She took a blank sheet from the paper tray and handed it to him. “Here’s yours.”
Satisfied to have something to crumple, Nicholas carried the sheet back to the sofa and started shredding the blank page.
Pen faced Reid with a shake of her head. “Distraction. A key technique for handling toddlers.”
“Good to know.” He aimed a finger at the papers when she tried to hand them to him. “Those are for you. Look through those. See if anything stands out.”
“Such as?”
“Duplicate billing. Numbers that don’t add up in some way. Clients that don’t quite seem legit somehow.”
“Like this guy.” She waved the top page at him. “He’s billed for his services to Mr. George P. Burdell of Atlanta, Georgia.”
Reid frowned. “Why is that suspicious? He could have clients out of town.”
She scoffed. “Sure, he could. But George P. Burdell is the name of a fake student at Georgia Tech. Campus tradition and joke since...like the 1930s or before.”
Reid arched a sandy eyebrow. “How do you know about him?”
“While I was a student at Agnes Scott College, I dated a guy who went to Georgia Tech. He told me about the student pranks and history of the gag. On one of my visits home for the holidays, I must have told my dad about it.”
Reid snorted a laugh. “Gotcha. Good catch. So be on the lookout for other John and Jane Doe types. Pull the ones that seem suspicious.”
Task assigned, Pen moved to the sofa, and Nicholas climbed in her lap to cuddle as he nibbled his cereal. She set the stack of pages on the seat beside her to flip through with one hand while she snuggled her son with the other.
“Hoss?” Nicholas said after a moment.
“What, honey?”
Her son wiggled down and patted the stone horse statue on the coffee table. “Hossie?”
She grinned at her toddler, marveling at his growing vocabulary. “Yes, that’s a horse. Good boy.”
He stroked a hand down the stone horse’s flank and said, “Good hossie.” Then juggled his cup of Cheerios as he crawled back onto the couch beside her. “My hoss.”
Having mastered multitasking months ago—like most mothers—Pen skimmed sheet after sheet of text, stroked her boy’s silky hair, and ruminated on all she’d learned in the past two days.
A gnawing started in her gut and grew as she paged through the documents Reid had printed out. A bill to a client for $500,000 to probate a simple will. Another bill to a client named Bob Smith. The name was such a common one...and yet wouldn’t the most mundane and common names pass most easily under the radar?
Her uneasiness churned harder. Finally, after thirty minutes of stewing and sorting paperwork, questioning everything she thumbed through as potential proof of her father’s dishonesty, she leaned her head back on the couch and heaved a sigh. “I want a meeting.”
“Hmm?” Reid hummed distractedly.
“I want to go see my father. In person.”
“No.”
“Reid, I can’t let this go!”
“No!”
She resettled Nicholas from her lap to the sofa cushions, and grabbed up her stacks of papers as she pushed to her feet. “He knows we were at his house yesterday. If I hide from that, we look guilty. I want to go see him, look him in the eyes and—”
“And what? Call him out? Confirm to him we’re onto him?” Reid rose from his chair and marched toward her. “It’s too dangerous.”
“What, do you think he’s going to shoot me in his office in cold blood? We already think he has a hired gun after us, how can it get any worse than that?”
Reid swiped a hand down his face, groaning. “Pen, I’m trying to protect you.”
“And I appreciate that. I appreciate your putting us up here and helping get to the bottom of what he’s done.” She drew a shaky breath as emotion swamped her. “Especially if it turns out he had a hand in Andrew’s death.” She paused for a sustaining breath. “But...”
“My motives aren’t entirely altruistic. I have a vested interest. If I can prove he planted the potassium in Andrew’s insulin vial, or connect him to my father’s disappearance, I’ll have removed two large monkeys from my back.”
She hugged herself as a chill washed through her. “I hate hiding. It feels...weak. I may have been a pushover as a kid, intimidated by him, but Andrew encouraged me to stand up for myself. It galls me to know he’s likely run roughshod over the lives of so many people, including people I love, and he’s getting away with it.”
“He won’t get away with it.” The fire of determination blazed in his dark blue eyes. “Work with me. Together we can end his secret reign of terror and bring him to justice.”
She turned up a hand as she nodded. “Of course. You know I’ll do whatever I can.”
“That includes following my lead, listening to my advice, not flying off half-cocked and blowing our investigation because you want to confront him.” She opened her mouth to protest, and he cut her off with, “Nobody wants five minutes alone with him more than I do.” He opened and closed his fist as if itching to punch something...or someone. “I’d love to look him in the eye and ask him how he sleeps at night while he lies to my family about his handling of our business. But we have to be patient. The time will come for all that.”
Her shoulders drooped, and she looked away from his hard stare to the gray winter sky and still lake out the window. He was right, even if she hated to admit it.