I recognized the number.
A rush of anxiety hit me so violently the legs of my chair rattled. Nauseated, like I’d been punched in the gut, I fought the urge to throw up.
I looked again.
Graham.
What the hell?
What possible reason could there be for Graham to be calling Devin? To my knowledge, they hardly knew each another. And why would she have a second phone? I fought to control my breathing, to regain some semblance of composure, and to think through what I was witnessing, the gravity and believability of it all. I thought of the credit card charges to the hotels and restaurants in Seattle when Graham said he’d been away on business. Could that have been Devin? Was she the woman he was having an affair with? The credit card bills included the dates Graham had been gone. His cell phone bill would show his calls and the dates he made them, but I didn’t know the number of the phone in Devin’s purse.
Still, it wouldn’t be too difficult to figure it out.
I looked over my shoulder, saw no sign of Devin, reached inside her purse, and grabbed the phone. The screen indicated she’d received multiple text messages from the same number. Graham’s cell phone. Only partial messages appeared on the screen.
Hey, hoping to get . . .
Just got to . . .
Did you talk to . . .
I couldn’t unlock Devin’s phone without the password to read the full messages. I also couldn’t determine the phone number, but I didn’t need to.
I looked over my shoulder to the hallway on the other side of the bar and watched Devin emerge, walking toward the table. I dropped the phone back inside the purse, slid from my bar stool, and put on my jacket.
“You all set?” Devin asked, grabbing her purse and her jacket.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m tired.”
She paused when she went to zip closed her purse, no doubt seeing the last registered call on the phone. Maintaining a poker face, she calmly dropped her regular phone inside her purse and zipped it closed. She reached out and gave me a warm hug. My entire body tensed. “So, let me guess, you’re heading home to stick your nose in a book.”
“You know me,” I said.
“Like a book,” Devin said, laughing. Then she turned and walked toward the table where the guy awaited her.
“Except you’re reading the wrong book,” I said to her back. I was no longer going home. I was going to the office, to stick my nose in Devin Chambers’s computer.
CHAPTER 21
At first, Vic Fazio thought he was having one of those anxiety dreams in which everything feels stilted and magnified. An annoying insect circled his head, buzzing loudly. He couldn’t swat it or otherwise make it stop. Then his subconscious gave way to instincts he had honed over decades, a cop conditioned to being awakened at odd hours. He realized the insect was his cell phone. He turned the ringer off at night so as not to disturb Vera, who was a light sleeper, but that didn’t keep the phone from buzzing and shaking on his bedside nightstand.
Faz didn’t need to open his eyes to know it was still the middle of the night. His inner clock, honed as a parent of two boys, told him. He felt Vera roll away from him, onto her side, well acclimated to life as the spouse of a homicide detective. Except, just then, something else became clear. Faz and Del were not the homicide team on call. They had been working the Andrea Strickland murder, but that case got pulled last Thursday.
Faz reached blindly, missing the phone the first time before finding it. He brought it up in front of his face, the numbers blurry without his glasses, but he could make out only the local 206 Seattle area code. He hit the green button.
“Hello?” His voice sounded like he was speaking through a drainpipe clogged with pea gravel and water. He cleared his throat. “Hello?”
“Hey, Faz. How’s it going?”
“What?” he said, confused.
“How’s it going?”
“Who the hell is this?”
“Who is it?” Vera asked, rolling toward him and sitting up. “Did something happen to one of the kids?”
“It’s Nik,” the caller said. “Your favorite skip tracer.”
Faz struggled to sit up. Vera turned on the light on her side of the bed. The two of them squinted at the brightness. “Nik?” Faz asked, looking at the nightstand clock radio.
“Who’s Nik?” Vera asked.
“What the hell time is it?” Faz said.
“It’s three thirty-two.”
“In the morning?”
Nik laughed. “Hey, April Fool’s, Fazio!”
“Son of a bitch,” Faz said under his breath. “What is wrong with you? My wife is worried sick something happened to one of the kids.”
“Yeah, and my wife is still pissed at me for throwing her cell phones in the damn lake. So maybe now we have a truce?”
Faz blew out a heavy breath, looked at Vera, and said, “I’m sorry, it’s a business call.”
“At this hour?”