“Why?”
“Because she’s let the drugs drive her crazy.”
“My dad’s checking her out. But he doesn’t think it’s her.”
“What about my computer? Have you figured out if someone’s breaking into my office?”
“Robert has the security footage from the camera out in the hallway, but he doesn’t think anyone was actually coming into the office. He thinks if it’s someone other than you, they were doing it remotely.”
Lucien shook his head. “The whole thing’s pretty insane.”
He turned back to his computer, returning to whatever it was he sat there and worked on all day. I turned back to my magazine, but I was so bored that I was beginning to go stir crazy. Jaime came into the room, shooting me a dirty look before dropping a couple of file folders onto Lucien’s desk.
“Jacob asked me to remind you that you have a meeting at two.”
“Thanks, Jaime,” he said without even looking up.
The moment she was gone, I stood. “I’m gonna go.”
“Aren’t you supposed to hang out with me all day?”
“You’re safe as long as you’re inside this building. Call me if you get worried.”
He came around his desk and pulled me against his chest. “What about tonight?”
“What about it?”
“Can I take you out? A nice dinner, maybe?”
“Like a date?”
“Why not?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Meet me back here about five.”
I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed him lightly. “I’ll see you then.”
I left, but I didn’t go far. I’d set a little camera up on a low shelf in Lucien’s office while he was off at a meeting this morning. I just hung around long enough to see if he would notice it, but he didn’t. I curled up in the front seat of my car and watched the feed, smiling as Lucien settled back down behind his desk, completely unaware that he was being watched.
Robert had accessed the webcam on Lucien’s desk, but he hadn’t thought of this. This camera wouldn’t just show us who was staring at the computer monitor. It would show us who was coming and going through the room all day long. That might tell us more, if whoever was doing this wasn’t smart enough for a remote log in, but too smart to sit where the webcam could pick them up.
I could do more than just teach rich, complacent CEOs a few self-defense moves.
Chapter 17
Lucien
“Come to the house for dinner.”
I sat back and turned to look out the window. “Mom, I have a date with Adrienne tonight.”
“Bring her with you.”
“We were kind of hoping to have a little time alone.”
“Rachel’s refusing to even consider returning to college. She says that she doesn’t need a college education because of the trust fund Karl set up for her. You have to make her understand that she can’t live her life just surfing on her father’s money. She needs to be able to take care of herself if the money suddenly disappears.”
“If she won’t listen to you, what makes you think she’ll listen to me?”
“I hear Adrienne had a brilliant idea on how to make her go back to school.”
“Jacob told you that?”
“He actually calls me from time to time.”
“I just saw you two days ago!”
“That was two days ago.”
I laughed even though it really wasn’t funny. I was a grown man, twenty-six years old, and she still treated me like I was a child.
“What about the Andersons? Didn’t you say the Andersons were coming to the house this week?”
“Tonight.”
I groaned. “So your real motive is to get me in the same room with Cindy Anderson, right?”
“What harm would it do?”
Cindy Anderson was a friend of my mother’s from the days when she was still married to my father. She was a secretary at Karl’s oil company who happened to marry one of his vice-presidents or something. I don’t remember for sure what her husband did at the company, but he’d quit long ago to start his own real estate company. Long story short, Cindy wasn’t much older than my mother, maybe forty-eight, but she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. My mother thought she would be an ideal candidate for the trials we were going to start soon. I kept telling her that I wasn’t in charge of that, or even had anything to do with it. She’d be better off talking to Jacob or, better still, one of the FDA officials who was helping design the protocol for the human trials. But she wanted me to meet her.
“You know I can’t do anything for her.”
“But you can see the face of someone who will be helped by your work.”
“It’s not my work, Mom. It’s Jacob’s.”