“So, now that you’ve seen her and talked to her, what do you think? Is she a suspect?”
“The cops haven’t knocked on the door yet. It would have been real easy for her to give them a call and let them know where I was.”
“Unless she didn’t want Colin to know what she was up to.”
He set the bowl on a side table. “True. The people closest to me will all have to remain suspects until I’m one hundred percent sure they’re not.”
She nodded. “What about the guy who attacked you? There were two men. I did manage to jot down a license plate number, but it doesn’t do us much good unless you have a friend in the police force.”
“Hang on to it, will you?”
She nodded again. “Why would someone be trying to kill you? Do you think that lawyer of yours could have had something to do with the attack?”
“No. Mike and Stephanie both seemed genuinely scared. I’ve definitely worried someone, though. It’s no longer good enough that I’m thrown back in prison. This time, they want me dead.”
“But why?”
“That’s the million dollar question.”
“I think it’s time to concentrate on the women who probably knew Dirk best.” She went back to working on her computer, clicking away at the keyboard.
“What are their names?”
“Pam Cooper and Karen Hickman.”
He watched her as she concentrated on the task at hand. Angela Chack was beautiful, inside and out, he thought.
She looked up and caught him staring. “What?”
“I was just thinking about how special you are...and beautiful.”
“Stop,” she said with a smile.
“Everyday that goes by, my opinion of Rob gets lower and lower. He had no idea what he had, and now he’s going to spend the rest of his life regretting letting you go.”
“That’s sweet of you to say.”
“It’s the truth. After what I put you through, here you are doing everything you can to help me. If none of this had ever happened to me, I think someway, somehow, we would have bumped into one another. We have a connection.” He let out a breath. “You do something to me, Angela. You make me feel things I’ve never felt before. I’m falling for you.”
She scrunched her nose. “That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve said since we met.”
“It’s the truth. I realize our time together has been beyond unconventional—”
“You think?”
He shrugged.
She pointed a finger at him. “You, Jason Caldwell, have been locked up for too many years. I think you’ve tasted freedom and you like it…so much so that everything around you, including me, seems refreshing and attractive.” She sighed and went back to her research.
After a moment, she looked up at him again, his feelings for her all but forgotten. “I’ve got an idea,” she said.
He waited for her to continue.
“I’m going to take the car in the morning and pay Pam Cooper and Karen Hickman a visit. I’ll pretend I’m a reporter doing a story about you.”
“Eight years after the fact?”
“Since you’re in the news right now, they won’t think it’s unusual.”
“What if they recognize your face?”
“I bought some hair dye when we were in Utah, but didn’t have time to use it. I’ll darken my hair tonight, cut it, put on some lipstick and a pair of sunglasses, and no one will be the wiser.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“We have two people who talked to someone with a voice synthesizer, which could be anyone. We need a name. If I set off early in the morning, I should be able to talk to both women and return here by five.”
“I’ll go with you. They could be dangerous.”
“You need another day of rest. I’ll be fine.”
The three hundred dollars Sophie had left on the table caught his eye, and got him thinking. “Most of the guys I met in prison murdered for one reason only,” he said under his breath.
She looked over her computer at him. “And that would be?”
“Money.” Gingerly, he moved his feet off the couch and to the floor. “Maybe Dirk not only wanted to sell the business, he needed to sell the business.”
“You think he might have owed someone a large sum of money?”
“You asked me a while ago who wanted to sell the business in the first place. I’ve thought about it some more and it came to me while I was sleeping earlier. It was Dirk. He was the one who brought the deal to the table. Why was Dirk suddenly interested in selling the business? At the time, I knew he needed money to take care of his son, but mostly I thought the idea to sell came out of left field. Now I can’t help but wonder if he owed someone a lot of money.”
“If that were true, selling the company would be a logical thing for him to want to do. So who do you think he could possibly owe that kind of money to?”
“Dirk wasn’t just a player,” Jason told her, “he was a partier. He made a lot of bad decisions. He liked to gamble, and lost a lot of money over the years.”
They were both quiet for a moment
“Now more than ever, I need to get hold of my computer.”