Shelly lifted her slim arms, rolled her hair into a bun, leaned over my desk, opened my drawer, and retrieved a pencil. She stuck it into the bun. Then she leaned back over the desk and shut my drawer. And I could see down her shirt all the while. Jesus. I was in trouble.
“In other words,” she said, “she fucking lied through her teeth. He’s guilty. She’s guilty for wanting to protect him. And there’s more than one dead girl out there. There will be more unless someone catches him.”
“What makes you feel this way?”
“I have an excellent bullshit meter.” She shrugged. She walked into the kitchenette and busied herself doing something. A few minutes later, she came back with a cup of coffee. “Black,” she said, as she set it in front of me.
I stared down at it. “No thank you.”
“Caffeine helps when you have a bad headache.”
“No thank you,” I said again.
“Fine,” she said. “Be stubborn.”
“Hello pot. Meet kettle,” I muttered. “What are you doing here?”
She rolled her eyes, and it would have been adorable if it hadn’t been so damn aggravating. “Working,” she sang out. “You should get me a key so I won’t have to break in again.”
“I had the locks changed.”
She snorted. “I’ve never met a lock I couldn’t pick.” Then she got up, took a small kit out of her purse, turned the lock on the door, stepped through it and closed it behind her. The handle jiggled as she tested the knob from the other side.
Twenty seconds later, the door snicked open.
“That one was much more difficult than the last one.” She blew a lock of hair from her eyes and sat down. Then she put her lock picking kit in her bag, pulled a laptop out of it, and opened it on the other end of my desk. She logged in, clicked a few keys, and then she reached over and took the legal pad from in front of me. She looked at it for a moment, and then she set it down, and started doing whatever the fuck Shelly wanted to do. Suddenly, she looked up at me. “Would you rather I go in the reception area?” she asked.
“Certainly not,” I said, my voice cold. “Take up my whole desk, doing whatever it is you’re doing.” I propped my head in my hand and watched her work. She really was rather striking. She was beautiful in a Katharine Hepburn kind of way, a classic beauty that was startling in its intensity. Her clothes were perfect, and she wore a thin strand of pearls around her neck.
I finally gave up on watching her and started to read my emails.
She made clucking noises with her tongue while she worked, but it wasn’t otherwise irritating. I did drink the coffee she’d brought and the vise squeezing my head did begin to ease.
Suddenly, she shifted her laptop over and motioned for me to pass her the legal pad. I slid it across the desk.
She jotted down several lines of text, and then she slid it back to me.
“Rachel Marie Munson?” I read aloud.
“The other woman he killed. Although technically she wasn’t a woman then. She was seventeen when she went missing. No one ever suspected him.”
I sat back and steepled my fingers in front of me. “And how did you come to this conclusion?”
“His mother told me the girl’s name. Well, her first name. I had to figure out the rest. This was the girl he couldn’t have killed. But I had this feeling. So I went to various social media sites, looked at his friend list, and all his friends’ friend lists, until I found her. She’s missing. Has been missing for years.” She picked at her nails like she was bored.
I looked back down at the paper. “And this address?”
“That’s probably where he is.” She crossed her legs and began to wiggle her foot.
“And how did you come up with this location?”
“Tax records for his friends.” She rolled her eyes. “His best friend’s uncle’s father has a cabin in the woods of Montana, very rural area. I doubt anyone even knows he’s there.” She tilted her head to the side. “Do you want to call the police? Or do you want me to?”
“You know I can’t call the police with circumstantial evidence.”
“It’s not circumstantial. It’s just evidence.” She heaved in a breath and moved her mouth like she was praying for patience. Then she opened her eyes and stared into mine. “I might have logged into the friend’s uncle’s account at the power company. Someone is there, and he has been there for the past two months. Before that time, there was minimal power usage. Now, there’s power consumption going on.”
“How did you log into his account?” My head spun. Maybe my headache was worse than I’d thought and I was hallucinating.
“I wrote some code,” she said with a breezy wave.
“You…wrote some code?”
“It was nothing.”
“It was illegal.”
She jumped to her feet. “Do you want more coffee?”
“I can get my own coffee.”
“So…is there anything you want me to work on? Anything specific?” She looked around the room. “If not, I can work on your invoicing.”
“My invoices are on my computer. They’re private.”
“Oh,” she said quietly. Then she winced. “So last night, I sort of, kind of, maybe just a little bit might have hacked into your computer so I could compare your paper invoices with your computer invoices. Then I transferred your files to my computer, just to make things easier.” She held the wince on her face.
I jumped to my feet. “You did what?” I slammed my palms down on the desk in front of her.
She stood up opposite me and took a similar pose. “You can say thank you now,” she spat out. We stood nose to nose and I realized her mouth smelled like cherry lip balm. I looked down at her lips.
“Don’t do that,” she said quietly.
“Don’t do what?” I whispered back.
“Don’t think about kissing me.”
“I wasn’t thinking about kissing you.”
“Yes you were.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Puhleeze,” she said as she straightened up and put her hands on her slim hips. “You were totally thinking about what my lip gloss would taste like.”
Fuck me. She was right. “Why do you do that?”
“I like the truth.”
“No, why do you say everything that comes into your head?”
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You distract people by delivering the truth. You notice things that will throw them off balance.”
“I do?” She stared at me, her blue eyes soft and yielding for the first time ever.
“You do.”
“I throw you off balance?”
“Very much so.”
She smiled. “Good.”
Then she picked up her computer, reached into my desk drawer and removed a file labeled “invoices.” Then she went to the desk in the reception area. I assumed she was going to work, even though I wasn’t paying her, and I didn’t want her here.
She leaned around the corner of the doorway. “Do you want me to call the building maintenance people to get them to try a new lock?” She didn’t even smile when she asked the question.