| |
KATIE
––––––––
I HIT THE HALLWAY WITHOUT her calling me back, and quickly disappeared around the corner—and right into her office. The apartment wasn’t enormous, but it was big enough that it had a second bedroom, and she’d converted it into an office for when she wanted or needed to work from home. She’d given me the grand tour earlier, when I arrived, and I’d quickly marked this as the place I needed to investigate the most.
I mean, if you were going to have proof that you were stealing from the company you worked for, this was where you were going to have it. And along that same route: If you were going to have proof that you had a sugar daddy or a second job or were the head of some evil drug smuggling ring that actually gave you plenty of money for your bills, you’d definitely have the paperwork in your office rather than the kitchen or the bedroom.
At least, if I was doing that sort of thing, that’s where I’d keep the paperwork. It was just so much more organized that way, and an office was, after all, where you did business. Rachel might come off as flighty, but at heart, she was a smart girl. I was betting she kept paperwork in the most logical place, where she had easy access to it.
I yanked a small mag light out of the pocket of my skirt, thanking everything good in the world for skirts with pockets, and hit the switch, sending a beam of illumination into the room. It wasn’t fancy in here, and there wasn’t a lot of furniture, but I didn’t want to end up kicking anything or knocking a lamp off the table or something like that.
The last thing I needed was for Rachel to actually come in here and catch me snooping through her things. I already had an excuse in mind, but I really, really didn’t want to have to use it.
I shone the flashlight through the room, taking in what I’d already marked. The place was lined with bookshelves, and they were packed full of what looked like everything under the sun. Hardbacks, paperbacks, ratty things that looked like they’d been read twenty times and others that looked like she’d never touched them. I wouldn’t have pinned her for a bookworm, but this room definitely made me think twice about that.
You didn’t keep ratty old paperbacks around as decorations. You kept them because you wanted to be able to get your hands on them again at a moment’s notice.
You also didn’t hide things in them. This wasn’t an organized library, where there was one specific book where she kept important things—and which she could always find. There were stacks and stacks of books that looked like they were probably constantly moving and being updated. Nothing was in any sort of order, and I could see that some of the books still had the price tags on them.
No, this wasn’t an organized space. She wouldn’t be hiding anything in those books.
Besides, this was her own house. She probably wouldn’t have felt she needed to hide anything.
I turned to the desk, my eyes roving over it quickly. I already knew what it looked like: a faux antique that took up half the room and looked really impressive, but probably only had two or three workable drawers. I’d seen desks like this before. I knew that half the handles weren’t actually to any movable piece, and that there was probably some sort of secret compartment somewhere in one of the bottom pull-outs.
That secret compartment was what I was looking for. Because she might not feel that she had to hide things in her own house. But if one has a secret compartment at one’s fingertips...
I made it to the desk in record time and ran my fingers quickly underneath the edge of it, looking for one of those pull-out keyboard supports. It wouldn’t have been fancy, but I’d known plenty of people who thought that the fact that the support was hidden unless you pulled it out meant it was a good hiding place.
No dice here, though. There also wasn’t some sort of fancy button or switch up there, key to a truly hidden spot.
Well, bottom drawers it was, then.
I pulled the first one out quietly, then paused and listened closely for what might be going on in the other room.
“Mom, I do not want to meet him! How many times do I have to tell you that? I don’t care if his mom is your best friend! That does not mean, and has never meant, that I want to date the guy! Do you remember when you two tried to set us up in high school?”
Her tone was all exasperation and frustration, and I smiled to myself. I could completely understand what it was like to have parents who tried to set you up with their friends’ kids. My mom had had much the same idea when I was young.
Once I was through in here and she was off the phone, I was definitely going to ask her about it.
Right now, though, I had more important things to take care of. I pulled the drawer out a bit further, as far as it would go, and turned the beam of the flashlight down to it, then slid my hand in and toward the back, as far as it would go. There wasn’t much in here—just some receipts and a whole bunch of dust—but if there was a secret panel in the back...
I knocked quietly on the back of the drawer, trying to figure out whether the drawer was as big as it should be, or if there was an opening behind it.
The knock sounded solid, though. This wasn’t a fake piece, slid in to hide a compartment behind it.
Damnit.
I shut the door just as quietly and paused to listen for Rachel’s voice—she was still arguing about whatever guy her mother wanted her to date—and then moved to the drawer on the other side of the desk. When I slid it out, I registered that this one was heavier than the last. My heart jumped a bit, and I bit my lip. When I turned the beam down into the body of the drawer, though, I saw that there was a good reason for that.
This was evidently the drawer where Rachel kept all of her external hard drives.
This could be it. Those hard drives could have proof of something on them. A fake account at the bank. A pyramid scheme. A second job.
A secret account where she was depositing the money she stole from Miller and Co.
All the emails she’d ever collected from her sugar daddies.
I was just trying to figure out how I could check for any of that—there had to be at least five drives in there—when the lights suddenly came on in the office and I realized that I hadn’t been listening for her voice in the other room.
“Katie? What the hell are you doing in here? This isn’t the bathroom, you know.”
It was a joke. But she hadn’t been laughing when she said it. Instead, she sounded deadly serious, like she already knew the answer.
I popped up from behind the desk, my hand going to the back of my skirt and the waistband, where I’d tucked the card I’d brought with me. I yanked it out and held it up.
“I was leaving you a card, actually, to say thank you for having me over! I wanted to leave it in here as a surprise, for you to find tomorrow—or whenever you came in here, I guess—and I was clumsy and dropped it. You caught me literally on my hands and knees, searching for it.”
It was a pretty good excuse. I’d prepared for just this situation, and had bought not only a card but also a gift card for her favorite bar, just in case. If she wanted to see the card or the gift, she’d be able to open it right now and see that it was indeed a thank you card, with a gift enclosed.
The dark part was true, too. It had been pitch black in here before she turned the lights on.
Her eyes narrowed and shot from the card in my hand to the flashlight in the other.
“Looks like you probably had plenty of light, actually. Considering you have a mag light in your hand.” She moved quickly around the desk and glanced down to where I was still pushing the door closed with my foot. “And you just happened to drop it into the drawer, did you? Or did you open that on accident as well? While you were searching?”
“It was already open,” I lied. “I thought I might have dropped the card in there, so I reached in and was feeling around, and it turned out I was right.”
I held the card out to her again, praying that she was drunk enough to buy the story—or at least enough to give me time to come up with something a bit more concrete.
Honestly, I’d hoped she’d be asleep when all of this went down. I still hoped she’d fall asleep and forget about the whole thing. But judging from the look on her face right now, her buzz had completely disappeared on her.
She looked furious.
Way too furious to be completely innocent, in fact. She looked...
She looked like the kind of person who was definitely hiding something in here and was afraid that I’d found it—and was even more worried about the fact that I’d been in here searching in the first place.
Dammit. I hated when people looked guilty. It almost always meant that they were.
“Get out,” she said coldly. “I don’t know what you’re doing in here or why, but I want you out of my house. Right now.”
I left without trying to give her another excuse. There was no point, not when she had her defenses up like that and was already trying to figure out exactly what I’d been doing—and why.
I could see her already coming up with a hundred different stories for who I was and what I might actually be doing. And I knew enough to know that no matter what I said, she was going to choose to believe whatever she wanted.
I could only hope that she went to sleep soon, and actually had consumed enough wine that she didn’t remember any of this. Otherwise, our friendship was probably finished—and along with it, my opportunities for figuring out what she was hiding, and how bad it actually was.
