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Jessica looked confused. “What does somebody as slimy as Barclay have to do with you being here?”
“Just his trial. It has us so busy, and Jake so completely swamped, that I came by to do two things. I need for you to take me off the volunteer schedule for a while until things get back to normal.”
“I can pass that word on to Susan, the shelter’s director. I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll miss the Christmas party.”
“Not if I can help it. I can’t make room for much on my schedule this month, but if I do anything, it will be the party here. It’s always such a good time.”
Holly had been volunteering at the shelter for most of the time she’d been back in Colorado Springs since leaving her job in Ohio. This was probably the fifth Christmas she’d been around the Galilee Women’s Shelter, and she didn’t have any intention of missing the best Christmas party in town. Mayor Montgomery might have a more elegant one, and Jake probably went to half a dozen most years that were flashier than this one, but nobody had one where more delighted kids squealed over their gifts.
“I really hope you can make it. This one is going to be such a special Christmas for me personally. Lots of firsts involved.” Jessica’s gray eyes shone with happiness.
“I guess so. I’ll just have to make it here for that,” Holly said. “And it ties in nicely with the other reason for my trip over here.”
“Oh? If you’re going off the volunteer schedule, it can’t be an offer of help for the party.”
“Not exactly. At least not from me. But Jake needs to get his mom a meaningful Christmas gift, and he thought that contributing money for something here would be the best thing to do. Once you mentioned the party, I thought maybe I’d ask if you needed any more funding for it.”
“Always. Even with all the wonderful people like Liza Montgomery who give time and money to this place, there’s always more that can be done.” Jessica’s normally smooth forehead wrinkled. “Especially since we were counting on one hundred thousand dollars from Mr. Barclay that turned out to be nonexistent. We could hardly take money from him now. But maybe if you guys put people like him away, and others who help bring drugs into town, we’d have fewer clients to have to provide for in the first place.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?” Holly tried to imagine a world in which no woman felt the need to go to a place like Galilee. It was hard for her to do. Once her life had been sheltered enough that she hadn’t known places like this existed. Now she’d seen enough of the outside world’s ugliness, even before working for the FBI, that she knew just what some people were capable of. Silently, she thanked God that most people weren’t capable of terrible evil.
“It would. And we can always pray for it to happen.” In a flash, Holly knew what was different about Jessica, and about this office. It wasn’t just a physical brightness in the change of lightbulbs, or pictures of smiling people that made things in this office look different. It was Jessica’s new attitude, radiating from her because of her walk with the Lord. It wasn’t just displayed in things hanging on the wall, although when Holly looked around, she noticed a wonderful poster with words from the Psalms on the wall in a location where both Jessica and visitors to her office could see it as a reminder of God’s goodness.
Holly could feel herself smiling, reminded again about how good God was in every situation. “We sure can. And if you want to, we can pray together right now for that, and a little guidance on how to spend the rest of this Christmas present money from Jake in a way that will make his mom happy, honor the Lord and do the best things for the shelter.”
Half an hour later Holly was on her way to the office, buoyed up by the prayer time and discussion she’d had with Jessica, and the knowledge that she’d gotten this errand done quickly and so well. She stopped at the coffee shop in the lobby, never doubting for a moment that Jake hadn’t made coffee upstairs. He drank plenty when it was made, but didn’t bother making a pot just for himself. So she ordered a latte for herself and their largest cup of dark roast for Jake, complete with the three ice cubes he always had them put in the cup to bring the brew to his perfect drinking temperature. Going up the elevator took less time than usual, at what seemed like midmorning for her. When she got to her office, there was only one light on and her computer screen was dark, giving the front office an eerie, almost cavelike look. From his slightly open doorway, she could hear Jake talking to himself, and small metallic noises.
She set her coffee down along with her purse and knocked on his door. “Hey, Jake. You mind company as long as I come bearing coffee?”
“Come on in, Holly, as long as you can stand the mess in here.”
She started to say something glib about never minding the condition of his office, but froze a step into the place and forced her mouth closed to keep her shock from showing. “Uh, Jake? I think Barclay’s computer exploded.” The tower housing of the machine was in pieces and there were bits of the insides of the computer strung out over almost every flat surface in the room.
Jake laughed and took the coffee from her. He took a long drink before he said anything, setting the cup down on a small island of clear space on his desk. “I know. It’s not the commonest way to find somebody’s passwords, but I’m down to desperate measures. See, you can find the BIOS password by taking apart hardware, and I’m figuring that this will lead me to the other passwords I need to open the files he thought he’d hidden. I found them, just can’t open them.”
“Okay.” The room still looked like the elephant’s graveyard of computer parts. Holly trusted her boss to do the right thing in most situations, but this was a new one on her. “There sure looks like there’s more than one computer in all this.”
“There is. Somewhere along the line someone apparently expected this kind of interference. So when I opened up the tower, there were dummy circuits as well as the real thing. I looked around this morning until I found somebody with a similar unit and borrowed it for a little while to compare the innards.”
“This means that somewhere in this building is an agent who has no idea that his computer, which he loaned you, is now totally in pieces.”
Jake’s grin was a delight. “Well, yeah, but it’s Bob. He doesn’t use his computer all that much anyway, and I’m nearly to the point of putting it back together. He’ll never know what it went through. In fact, it will probably run smoother once he gets it back.”
Holly just shook her head. “As long as mine’s in one piece. Now give me your lunch order. I’ve already decided I’m going to run over to the café and bring stuff back about one. From now on we’re eating healthy and keeping to as regular hours as possible.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, throwing her a mock salute. “And thanks for the coffee. It really hit the spot.”
“You’re welcome.” Holly was surprised he even noticed. If she had this much hardware strung across her office, she wouldn’t have noticed a mere cup of coffee. She did the rest of her morning’s work to the accompanying tune of Jake putting the two computers back together and continuing to talk to himself while he did it. As far as Holly was concerned, there were few sweeter sounds outside the church choir.
Jake looked around at the piles of stuff in his office, wondering if he could really put it back together as easily as he’d told Holly that he could. She was a great assistant, and thought he could do anything. He hated to disabuse her of that notion. If anything would, it would be this case they were preparing for the prosecutors. Everybody knew that Barclay was working for La Mano Oscura, the drug ring that was bringing tons of junk into Colorado Springs. But Barclay had certainly hidden his connections well. So well that even though he’d ratted out his boss in Venezuela, Baltasar Escalante, there just wasn’t the trail leading back to Barclay that would let prosecutors convict him of the worst of the charges against him. They needed proof that matched Escalante’s files to Barclay.
While Jake toyed with all the options for opening those files on Barclay’s hard drive that could provide that proof, he put Bob’s computer back together. It wasn’t a difficult job. During college and in the twelve years since he’d built far more complicated computers himself from parts. In fact, he preferred building his own because it allowed him to look at the circuit boards fairly quickly and see whether or not someone had tampered with anything.
By the time Bob’s tower was back together, Holly was at his door again. “Okay, I’m double checking your lunch order before I go over to Aunt Lidia’s and get it.”
Jake glanced at the watch his long-sleeved shirt hid. “Man, time flies when you’re having fun.”
“So does the snow. It’s been snowing off and on all morning since I came in. Can I borrow your car keys to take Big Red on the lunch run? I’ll be nice to him, I promise.”
Jake fished around in his pocket. As late as he’d made Holly come in, her Jeep was more than likely in a parking space she’d lose if she left it for lunch now. Especially on a snowy day. Since his spot was reserved, it made more sense to let her drive his vehicle. “Sure. And the soup and sandwich I ordered earlier are fine, unless they have apple pie left this late. Then get me a piece of that, too.”
Holly caught the keys he tossed her and grinned. “Already done. I had Aunt Lidia save two slices so they’d be there this late. Otherwise it was no chance. I’ll be back in twenty or so.”
“See you then.” He started putting the screws back into Bob’s tower housing, ready to take it back to the other agent. As he’d told Holly, no one would ever know that the machine had been in pieces on his floor and desk half an hour ago.
He’d dropped the unit off in Bob’s office and was back, reassembling parts of Barclay’s when Holly came in with the bags and bundles that made up lunch. He could hear her rattling around in the outer office, and expected to hear one of her always cheerful greetings. Instead she was standing silently at his doorway a moment later, and she looked upset.
“Hey, you’re back. What’s up?” He laid down his tools and came to the doorway to greet her. His normally smiling assistant looked on the brink of tears.
“I was careful like always, and I parked in one of the café’s twenty-minute spots right in front. I took my eyes off your car only for a minute or two inside.” Her lip was trembling.
“It can’t be that bad, because you drove back here, right? What happened, did somebody hit Red?” If so, they would have come out the worse for wear unless they were driving the biggest truck or SUV on the market. He couldn’t see what Holly was this worked up about.
“Worse. Somebody scratched the paint all the way down the passenger side. It wasn’t a little thing like an accidental door ding, either, Jake. Looked like a screwdriver blade or a key, drawn all the way from front to back.” She covered her face with her hands, and Jake thought the usually calm and reserved Holly Vance was going to sob on him. “It’s all my fault. I should have just taken my old Jeep. Nobody’d even notice if that happened to it.”
“Hey, it isn’t your fault. It was probably some thoughtless kid, or somebody with a kid’s intelligence anyway, just looking for a little stupid fun. Could have happened anywhere, no matter who was driving.”
Holly seemed to calm down a little. “I still feel bad. You drive such nice cars, and keep them up so well. It isn’t fair that somebody would do this to one of them.”
Jake shrugged. “A whole lot of life isn’t fair. Now let’s have lunch and afterward I’ll go down to the parking garage and take a look. It might not be as bad as you’re making it out to be.”
Her dubious expression said that it was going to be bad, but Jake still wasn’t prepared for the depth of the damage when he stood in the garage half an hour later. The gouge was deep, and ran an easy eight feet across the front fender and both passenger side doors. There was no way this could have been anything but a deliberate, malicious act.
He went back up to the office where Holly was still cleaning up the remains of their lunch. She hadn’t done more than pick at hers, even though Jake had tried to reassure her that this was no big deal. He tried to stay nonchalant even as he asked her questions now.
“Anybody parked next to you on the passenger side when you went in?”
“Nobody. I remember, because there was still snow in the space as if no one had been in it for a while. Even when I came out, there were no fresh tracks over there.”
“Did you happen to see any vehicles peel out in a hurry?” Jake was forming a picture in his mind, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Hard to tell. In this kind of weather there’s always somebody seeing what their truck or SUV will do, the old man against machine thing.” Holly had lived here for most of her life, Jake knew. She was familiar with the macho contests that seemed to go on every time it snowed. “I don’t know, maybe…”
“Go on. It doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while.”
Her brow wrinkled. “I’m not sure. There might have been a dark-blue SUV pulling out across the street. If I didn’t know better, I would have said the driver of that one didn’t want me to see him.”
“It’s something. Not anything I’d bring to the police, or even put on the insurance report I’m going to file, but it’s something.” It was the kind of something, Jake decided, that made him want to talk to Rose D’Arcy again. And this time he’d tell her that her suspicions that somebody might be out to get him could be on the money after all.
Chapter Three
“I still say this is ridiculous.” Jake’s expression wasn’t quite as grumpy as a frown or a glare, but there was a serious cast to his features that Holly wasn’t used to.
She sat at her desk, determined to stick to her guns. “Sorry, this isn’t negotiable. I was the one driving when Red got all scarred up. I’ll handle all the insurance paperwork. Just give me your card and I’ll do it.”
“With everything else you have to do?” Jake waved an open hand over her desk, highlighting the piles of paperwork, print requests, sticky-note-covered documents and more that kept them from seeing the surface.
“And your workload, we both know, is going to let you handle this before next Christmas?” Holly shook her head. “Face it, Jake, you have to admit I’m right this time. Or at least that my way makes more sense. If you wait until you handle this yourself, it will be February, at least. And if you wait that long, you could be inviting rust spots on Red.”
Holly was pretty sure she had him now. While she might not understand what drove her boss to the endless round of social engagements he usually went to, she did know one thing: the two vehicles that he drove were far more important to him than any of the women he went out with. It wasn’t a priority she would have chosen in her own life, but it was Jake’s.
Jake harrumphed some, and pulled up the side chair next to her desk. Holly felt a twinge of surprise; he never did this unless there was a serious discussion coming on, and she wasn’t sure that even repainting one of his precious vehicles rated that.
“Okay, I’ll let you do it your way,” he said, settling into the chair. “But you have to promise me something.”
“What?” Even for Jake, she wasn’t about to make promises without hearing the details.
“That you’ll be careful while you’re out in public with Red. And it’s not because I’m afraid for the car, Holly. I’m getting a little bit worried for you.”
Now it was her turn to scoff. “What for?”
“It’s the case we’re working on. When Rose was here a week ago, she warned me that somebody working for Escalante might target me because of what I’m doing. I didn’t believe her then, but I’m starting to think she was right. And I don’t want my problems spilling over into your life.”
Holly blinked. This just hadn’t entered her mind before. “Okay, I’ll be careful, even though I think you and Rose are probably getting worked up over nothing. You were probably right when you said it was a kid that did this, or just somebody being ignorant.”
“I hope it is. But until I can be sure of something like that, I want you to look out for yourself. Human beings are worth more than anything with an engine, Holly, and I want you to remember that.”
“I will.” It wasn’t a sentiment she was prepared to hear from her boss. Especially not said with such warmth and conviction, those blue eyes boring into her in a way that made her feel extremely warm. Suddenly it was time to change the subject to almost anything else.
“So, what’s the next step in taking down Alistair Barclay?” The project was taking up more and more of Jake’s waking hours, and because of that, her life as well.
Jake shrugged. “You tell me. The man might have been unfamiliar with computers to a large degree, but somebody working for him was very, very good with them. And the programs that someone wrote to hide and encrypt Barclay’s personal files are good. I keep thinking there’s something I’m missing that could help me unlock all this, but I don’t know what it is.”
Jake was already looking through his open office door, anxious now to get back to the puzzle. “Go in there and work on it. I’ll tell you if I’m going any farther than the copier in the hall, okay?”
“I expect no less.” And whatever else she knew, Holly was sure that she’d do whatever Jake Montgomery expected of her. He headed to his office, and she went back to untangling the piles of notes and paperwork on her desk.
As she plowed through the piles of stuff, sifting out the important tasks and taking care of them, setting aside what she could for later, an idea began to form in Holly’s mind.
By eleven that morning she’d gotten through the worst of the piles of paperwork on her desk, and made the phone calls and e-mails that were necessary to take care of the things that came next. She knocked on Jake’s partially closed door. “I’m going to the drive-though insurance claims office and I have one other stop to make on some errands. So I’ll need your car keys. And yes, before you ask, I have my cell phone.” She hadn’t worked for Jake this long without being able to answer at least half the routine questions before he asked them.
He smiled wanly. “I figured you had your cell phone. And now you’re going to ask if I want you to bring back lunch, right?”
“Wrong. I’m going to remind you that you have the monthly update lunch meeting to get all the regional heads-up bulletins. Even I can’t get you out of that one. It starts in an hour. If I’m not back, do I need to call you and remind you?”
Jake looked positively glum. “I guess not. Some things I have to remember on my own. Which is a shame, because I’d really love to tell them I forgot this one. Meetings. Bah, humbug.”
“Gee, all you need now is a Santa hat and you’d be right into your normal holiday spirit,” she teased. Of course it wasn’t far off. Jake went to the usual round of society and charity holiday events every year, but he grumbled about wearing a tux and doing the party circuit every time. He might be more than a little relieved to get out of most of that, given the evidence he needed to build against Barclay. Holly felt like telling him the best news of all—that she might have found the key to unlocking the codes he’d been working on for over a week. But in case her idea was out of line, she held off. No sense in giving Jake false hope. She borrowed his keys and went off on her errands, trying to keep from whistling cheery tunes as she left the building.
An hour later she was done with the insurance claim business and cruising down the side streets of Colorado Springs, looking for El Rey Construction. She found it without too much problem, and went into the shabby building, hoping to find the one person who could make her boss’s day.
What was up with Holly? Jake wondered about her lighthearted demeanor this morning, even as he worked on Barclay’s computer for an hour and then went to the dreaded staff meeting. It was as awful as usual, replete with boring turkey sandwiches and vapid little tree-shaped sugar cookies to remind him of the season he was spending behind his office door.
There wasn’t much information in the presentation that he could use right now for anything, but mandatory meetings were just that, so he suffered through as long as he had to, and fled the moment he could for his office.
He was back at Barclay’s now reassembled computer, but it still was not yielding all of its secrets. He’d tried every random compiler he knew of, and still wasn’t having any luck with the series of passwords that would let him open the files he was sure had the information that would link Barclay with Baltasar Escalante.
While he was still muttering over the last fruitless series of code breakers, Jake heard Holly come into the outer office. She was so incredibly cheerful today, which was a surprise. Yesterday she’d been almost beside herself because the car had gotten scratched while she was driving it. Now today she was humming Christmas carols. It just wasn’t like her.
She knocked on his half-open door, and it was all Jake could do not to growl at her. He felt like Ebenezer Scrooge holed up in there, crabbing at Bob Cratchit. Except Scrooge’s clerk had never been as good-looking as the young woman who burst through his door, nearly giggling about something. This was the strangest happening of the week. The sedate, staid Holly Vance, almost giggling? Maybe the stress of the long hours was getting to her.
“Okay, what’s up? I have never seen you in this kind of mood before,” Jake said, getting up out of his chair.
“Blame it all on Miriam Atwater!”
“Who’s she? And what did she do to put you in this frame of mind?”
“Miriam is an administrative assistant at El Rey Construction. But that’s not the really good part. Do you know what she did for a living before November 15?”
“Not a clue. But you’re going to tell me, I’m sure.”
“She was Alistair Barclay’s personal secretary.”
“I don’t think so. Wasn’t his assistant that drippy little character Rose already deposed…what was his name…Brimble or something?”
“Trimble. Carlton Trimble. And he was Barclay’s personal assistant. Merely an honorary position, to hear Miriam tell it, sort of like a valet, only work related. Trimble’s some kind of relation to Barclay, third cousin once removed or something on his mother’s side. Our Ms. Atwater was the one who did the day-to-day stuff, like I do for you.”
Suddenly Jake was beginning to understand Holly’s bubbly mood. It was almost catching, in fact. “If she’s anywhere near as efficient and helpful as you are, she knows everything there is to know about Barclay.”
“I should blush. Thanks for the compliment.”
How had he never noticed before the way Holly’s deep-brown eyes shone when she was happy? Was this the first time he’d ever seen her this excited about something? If so, he really felt like Scrooge.
“But yeah, she knows a lot. And given the lousy situation she found herself in when Barclay decided to hide her away at El Rey, she was more than happy to have lunch with me and discuss all sorts of things.”
“I hope you took her somewhere nice, and put it on my tab.” Jake was also thinking he’d need to call Rose this afternoon and tell her of another potential witness to depose in Barclay’s case.
“We had the quietest table possible at the Stagecoach. And we even used her car, which I’ll have you know came back to El Rey unscathed.” She seemed proud of the fact, and Jake almost laughed.
He sat down at the desk again and rebooted Barclay’s computer. It only took a moment for him to get the commands through to find the phantom files that wouldn’t open. “Okay, so what do you think are the passwords to these babies?” The cursor blinked at him teasingly.
“Let me go get my notebook.” Holly dashed back to her office, and came back with a small memo book. “Okay, let’s look at the list. Miriam and I had a great lunch. I know more about Barclay than I ever wanted to know, including where he went to have that horrible hair job taken care of weekly. Ick.” She actually shuddered. Jake could understand her being repelled by the conversations that must have gone on. She flipped through the notebook and sat down in the chair beside his desk.
“Can you find the creation date on the file you need to open?”
“That much I can do, for what little good it does me. So far I haven’t found anything related to the date that suggested a password. Let’s see…the first one was August 27.”
Holly looked in her notebook. “August. Okay, try Trixie for a password.”
