CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

WE DON’T HAVE to look at that stuff now, you know,” Hayley Ward said softly from the other side of the kitchen table, blowing on the steaming mug she held before taking a slow sip of her coffee. “We could put it in the closet and come back to dig through it some other day.”

Blond with blue-eyes, Hayley was an investigative journalist with the San Diego Daily News. When she and her husband, Wes’s boss, Chasen, had helped Kyla put Nesbitt behind bars all those months ago, she and Hayley had become close. Along with Wes, Owen, and Andrew, Hayley had been one of her rocks throughout Nesbitt’s trial. While having the guys there for her had been amazing, the truth was that sometimes it was nice to have another woman to lean on.

That’s why Kyla had asked Hayley to come over to her mother’s place this morning to help her do something she wasn’t looking forward to, something her mom simply wouldn’t be able to do—go through Kyla’s father’s stuff.

Kyla gazed sadly at the battered cardboard box sitting on the table between them. It was scary how much she wanted to take Hayley up on her suggestion to hide the box away somewhere and forget about it for a while. Or maybe forever. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do that. Someone from the prosecutor’s office had dropped off the box yesterday, saying it held all her dad’s personal effects plus the evidence the police had collected from his home office. It should have been the stuff used to put Nesbitt in jail for the rest of his life. Instead, some lackey had delivered it to her mother with a rather impersonal request to sign here, please.

“As much as I’d like to do that, I can’t,” Kyla said, still staring at the box. “Mom is going to be out of the house this morning and I want to go through the box before she gets back.”

She would have asked Wes to help, but he had to work. On a Saturday morning. She sighed.

Hayley gave her a small smile. “I understand. I’ll help any way I can. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Kyla sipped her coffee, still not ready to open the box. The truth was, she had no idea what might be in there, so it was impossible to tell if there was something that would have her in tears. It had been a while since she’d totally lost it and would prefer to refrain from doing it again. Especially in front of Hayley.

“I’m not really sure,” she finally said. “I guess just be here to pick me up off the floor if I open that lid and find something I’m not ready to deal with.”

“I can definitely do that,” Hayley said with another smile.

As Kyla sat there, silently drinking coffee, she thought maybe Hayley was right about waiting to do this another time.

“How’d your date with Wes go?” Hayley asked out of the blue, snapping Kyla’s attention away from the box and whatever it might hold.

“How’d you know about our date?” she asked, knowing exactly why her friend had changed the topic of conversation and loving her for it. “What, does SEAL Team 5 have a newsletter that goes out every morning with stuff like this?”

Hayley laughed. “SEAL Teams are like a big family, which means there aren’t a lot of secrets. We’ve all been waiting for you guys to get together.”

Casually picking up the butter knife Kyla had gotten to open the box, Hayley carefully sliced open the tape along the top.

“It was amazing.” Kyla smiled, despite how nervous she was as Hayley pushed back the flaps of the box, revealing piles of file folders, loose papers, and rolled up engineering drawings. “It was the best date I’ve ever been on.”

Hayley grinned. “Ha! I knew you two were perfect for each other.” Reaching into the box, she pulled out one of the drawings and handed it to Kyla. “When are you guys going out again?”

Kyla unrolled the drawing enough to see that it was the pedestrian walkway that had collapsed in San Clemente. The one her dad had been investigating when he’d been killed…the reason he’d been killed. Unless she chose to believe Nesbitt’s incomprehensible ramblings before he was shot that there was another reason her father had been murdered.

She pushed that thought aside and unrolled the drawing a little more. Tears filled the corners of her eyes as she saw the math equations doodled here and there around the outside of the drawing. Static load calculations, wind loads, concrete hardness ratings. Random thoughts her father would jot down on the paper anytime he worked. It was difficult seeing his familiar handwriting—so neat and perfect—without feeling a tightness in her chest that seemed to force all the air out of her lungs and prevent her from ever breathing again.

She looked up to see Hayley regarding her with a patient, empathetic expression. Kyla wordlessly rolled up the drawing and handed it back to her.

“We’re going to get together tonight at his place,” she said. Talking about Wes was better than thinking about her dad’s notes. “Order pizza and watch Netflix or something.”

“Sounds fun.” Hayley took another rolled up drawing out of the box and held it out to her. “When you can do absolutely nothing with a guy and enjoy it, that’s when you know you have something special going with him.”

Kyla set the drawing down on the table without looking at it. Hayley was right. After one official date with Wes, she already knew there was something special about him. That said, there were still a few nagging things hovering in the back of her mind since she’d seen that bruise on Wes’s back last night. That was another reason she’d asked Hayley to come over this morning. She needed to talk to someone.

Hayley held out a brown folder with a label along the top side in her dad’s handwriting. Kyla flipped it open and saw that it was the investigation report on the walkway collapse her father had been working on only hours before his death. She immediately closed the folder and set it on the table, unable to look at it.

“How do you deal with Chasen being a SEAL?” she asked before she chickened out. Simply putting the words out there was enough to make her heart thump faster.

Hayley set the folder she was holding on the table with a frown, not bothering to hand it to Kyla this time. “Where did that question come from? You’ve been hanging out with the team for months. You’re smart enough to know what they do for a living.”

Kyla sighed and reached into the box to take out a small notebook full of field notes on what she assumed were failures within the city’s irrigation system. Random stuff her dad had dealt with every day at work.

“We were at a shop in the Gaslamp Quarter,” she murmured, dragging out the last pile of paperwork and setting it all aside without looking at it. “Wes bent over to look at a pair of jeans on the bottom rack and his shirt slipped up. That’s when I saw a big bruise across his lower back.” She rooted around in the bottom of the box to find a set of keys. “I know he got it earlier in the week when he and some of the other guys on the Team disappeared for a few days, but he wouldn’t tell me what happened. He won’t even tell me where he was.”

“You know he would if he could, but he can’t,” Hayley said softly. “If someone found out he’d revealed classified information to you, getting fired would be the least of his problems. He’d be looking at a court martial. Maybe even jail time.”

Crap. She hadn’t considered there was a possibility Wes could go to prison for something like that.

“I know Wes has a job that requires him to keep secrets and I never thought that would bother me, but it does,” Kyla said. “And it’s driving me crazy.”

Hayley laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Kyla asked.

“For someone who is so brilliant, I’m amazed you can’t see something so obvious.” Hayley sipped her coffee. “When you and Wes were merely friends, you didn’t think about what he was doing when he went on training or missions, but now that you’re falling for him, it’s different.”

Kyla opened her mouth to deny it, to insist she couldn’t be falling for Wes after a single date, but that was crap and she knew it. Hayley had hit the nail on the head. She was acting like this because she was scared of something happening to Wes.

“How do you put up with it?” she asked quietly, going back to the few remaining contents of the box. “Aren’t you worried about Chasen getting hurt? Don’t you want to know where he goes, when he’ll get back, and what he’s doing?”

Hayley took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I worry about him getting hurt all the time. And sure, there’s a part of me that’d like to know where he goes when he gets those calls, what he’s doing when he’s away, but in the end, I have to push all that aside and accept it’s the price I have to pay to be with the man I love. I know that sounds dramatic, but honestly, it’s not much different than it is for people who give their hearts to cops and firefighters or any other kind of dangerous job out there. You overlook the bad that comes with being with a SEAL so you can have the good.”

That all sounded so reasonable, but Kyla wasn’t sure this was something she could logic her way through. Which was a scary thought for an engineering girl.

She took her dad’s leather wallet out of the box. “What if I find out I can’t overlook the secrets and the worry and the waiting?”

“Then you walk away from him.” Hayley shrugged. “Wes is a SEAL. If you can’t deal with it, do yourself and him a favor and break up before your heart gets any more attached.”

Startled at the blunt words, Kyla looked up sharply to see Hayley’s expression soften. “I’m not trying to be harsh, but this is the same conversation I had with myself before deciding to be with Chasen. It’s the same conversation every woman has before getting serious with a SEAL. Or it should be. I’ve seen what happens when a woman isn’t honest with herself about the costs she’s been asked to pay when she falls for a SEAL. I’m not saying it would be the same for you, but I want to make sure you think before you leap.”

So, it was a case of get in or get out. There’d be no middle ground in something like this.

Kyla sighed. Hayley had definitely given her more than enough to think about.

Her thoughts scattered, Kyla turned back to her father’s wallet, running her fingers over the beat-up old thing. Her dad had always been the type to stick with something if he liked it regardless of how old it was. He must have loved the wallet because he’d had the same one for as long as she could remember.

She opened it and looked through it. There was a photo of her and her mother inside the little plastic-covered frame in the center of the tri-fold piece of leather. It had been taken right after Kyla graduated from high school. They both looked so happy. Kyla could picture her father gazing at the photo every time he opened the wallet.

She carefully went through the rest of the wallet, searching for anything else that had been especially important to her dad. Surprisingly—or maybe not—there wasn’t much there. Twelve dollars in folded bills, a driver’s license, credit cards long since canceled, insurance cards that would never serve any purpose. Kyla was about to toss everything but the photo when she found a business card. It was so old and worn it had to have been in the wallet for a long time.

Kyla frowned when she saw it was for a restaurant called Pizza Palace. The address and phone number were on the bottom of the card and while she recognized the street name, she didn’t remember ever seeing a place with that name. Flipping the card over, she found a phone number written in unfamiliar handwriting. It was an out-of-state number, which didn’t really fit with the local number on the front of the card. Curious, she grabbed her phone from the table and pulled up Google, then typed in the name of the place. The name and address matched what was on the card, but it had the most boring looking website she’d ever seen. There wasn’t a menu or any way to order a pie online. Another search on Yelp found two reviews, both more than ten years old.

“What’s so interesting about that card?” Hayley asked. “You’ve been staring at it for five minutes.”

Kyla held up the card so her friend could read it.

“So? Your dad had a favorite pizza place. What’s the big deal?”

“Dad couldn’t eat pizza. He was lactose intolerant and avoided it like the zombie apocalypse. He wouldn’t even kiss my mom after she’d eaten it.”

“Maybe he grabbed the card so he could write down the number on it,” Hayley suggested.

“That would make sense, I guess,” Kyla agreed. “Except for the part where he would never have met with someone at a pizza place. So, where’d the card come from?”

Hayley had no answer to that.

Picking up all the folders, files, and papers on the table, Kyla dumped it back in the box and closed the lid.

“You up for a ride?” she asked. “I suddenly feel like pizza.”

 

* * * * *

 

ARE YOU SURE this is the right address?” Hayley asked, looking out the side passenger window at the small building beyond the curb where they were parked. “This looks more like an office building.”

Kyla couldn’t disagree. Sandwiched between two unoccupied businesses available for lease, it didn’t even have a sign saying it was a restaurant. “It’s the address on the card and the one on the Internet.”

She pulled out her phone and checked Google again, but the address continued to come back in every way as a small restaurant, complete with up-to-date tax records and health code inspections. Regardless of what the Internet said, there was no way this place was a functional restaurant. The parking lot wasn’t even big enough to hold more than three or four cars and it was obvious the place was closed even though it was fast approaching lunch time.

Deciding she wasn’t going to figure anything out by sitting in her car, Kyla opened her door and stepped outside. “I’m going to check it out.”

Harley jumped out and caught up to her as she headed for the building. “Do you have a plan or are you going to do something crazy that’s going to get us arrested. Which is fine if that’s the way you want to go. I’d just like to know.”

“I’m just going to look in the windows and see what we can see.”

Unfortunately, trying to peek through the blinds covering the windows turned out to be a waste since they were heavily tinted and it was dark inside.

“Dammit.” She sighed in frustration. “I have a lock pick set in the car, but Owen and Andrew are much better at using it than I am. I guess we could always throw a rock through the window and hope no one sees us. There isn’t a lot of traffic right now.”

Kyla expected an immediate snort of derision from Hayley. Smashing in a window wasn’t the brightest idea and she couldn’t imagine actually doing it, but her friend didn’t say anything. Kyla glanced at Hayley to see her regarding the window thoughtfully. Like maybe she was evaluating the potential for that smash-and-dash idea.

“I wasn’t serious about throwing a brick through the window, you know,” Kyla said.

“Even if you were, I don’t think it’d work,” Hayley said. “Look how thick this glass is. I’m pretty sure it’s bulletproof.”

Kyla did a double take. “Seriously?”

She stepped closer to the window to see that Hayley was right. The glass was easily over half an inch thick.

“Why would a pizza place be this well protected?” she wondered out loud.

“It wouldn’t be.” Hayley folded her arms. “Unfortunately, we aren’t getting in there to see what’s really inside unless we have a key.”

“Maybe we do.”

Kyla had no idea why the hell the thought popped into her head, but she reached into her pocket and pulled out the set of keys that had been in the box she and Hayley looked through earlier. She flipped through the key chain, trying each of them to see if they fit the lock on the door. The fourth one she tried fit perfectly. Pushing open the door, she cautiously poked her head inside and saw that it definitely wasn’t a restaurant.

Stepping inside, she flicked on the lights, revealing a big room with a small bathroom off to one side. Two big desks occupied the center of the room along with several comfortable looking rolling office chairs. Kyla almost started drooling at the sight of the multiple processors and the high-definition monitors mounted around the room. Five laser printers were lined up on a table along the back wall and racks full of blank disks, external hard drives, boxes of copy paper, and printer cartridges stood to either side of the back door.

Crap.

If Kyla wanted to make the perfect hacking rig and had unlimited money, the system she’d come up with would be something like this.

She walked over to the closest desk and froze at the sight of a framed photograph sitting right there in plain view. It was the same picture of her and her mom that her father had kept in his wallet. She pulled out the leather chair and sank down into it. This was her dad’s place. He had a Bat Cave. With probably fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of computer equipment and bulletproof windows. In the middle of town.

Hayley was nice enough to remain quiet while Kyla had a minor meltdown, pondering the fact that there’d been parts of her father’s life she—and probably her mother—knew absolutely nothing about.

First Wes and his job, and now this.

Dammit, she hated secrets!

She gazed at the computers, surprised to see they’d started booting up the moment she’d turned on the lights. That was pretty cool considering it had been about a year since her dad had been in here. Unless someone else had access to the place.

When the desktop popped up on every screen around the room, the first thing Kyla saw was the login box. Taking a breath, she typed in the same password he’d used at home—his pet name for her as a kid and the year she was born.

Pumpkin1997

The moment she pressed the ENTER key, the monitors were filled with icons and file folders. Some were for hacking programs and subroutines she recognized. Others were for software she’d never seen in her life. She thought her dad had taught her everything he knew.

Apparently not.

She clicked on a random folder icon and found a whole screen full of files. Another click brought up a password request, indicating the file was encrypted. Clicking around a few more files proved all of them were encrypted. And no, the earlier password didn’t work.

Hayley crossed the room to stand beside her. “What is all this stuff?”

“I’m not sure about the files.” She took out the business card that’d led her here. “But the computers tell me that my dad was hacking for someone, though whether it was black hat work or white hat, I have no idea. It seems my father had a whole secret life I didn’t know anything about.”

“Any idea who he might have been working for?” Hayley asked, looking around the room at all the screens, as if something there might tell her something.

Kyla flipped the card over to look at the number on the back. On impulse, she punched it in on her phone. There was a single ring, then a click.

“You have a secure connection,” a flat, emotionless voice said.

Kyla pulled back and stared at the phone. What the hell kind of way was that to answer a call? She’d gotten more warmth from the fax machine she’d called by mistake the other day.

“My father, Malcolm Wells, had this phone number in his wallet,” she said with a bit more confidence than she felt. “I’m guessing he did hacking work for you. Could you tell me who I’ve reached?”

There was silence for a moment, then the voice was back…with a lot more emotion this time. “Who is this, how did you get this number, and where are you right now?”

“The answer to your first question isn’t important,” she said sharply, seeing the concerned look Hayley gave her. “I already answered the second one, and I can’t believe you think I’m dumb enough to answer the third.”

There was a click and the phone went dead. She quickly pressed the redial button and got a message saying the number was no longer in service, which was crazy since it had been working fine seconds ago.

“Did you just do something really stupid?” Hayley asked.

Kyla put her phone away, then gazed at the computer screens filled with files that would likely take hours to access. “Probably.”

What the hell had her dad been involved in? Maybe Nesbitt had been telling the truth about when he said someone else had hired Stavros to murder her father.