you recall Patrick ever mentioning the name Claire Powkowski?” Shoe asked.
“No. Who’s she?” Shoe told her. She shook her head. “He never told me what he and Mrs. Ross talked about.”
She was quiet for a moment, then stood and moved past him to close the door. Her perfume, light and flowery, tickled his nose. She went back to the sofa but did not sit. She looked as though she had something to say.
“What is it?” Shoe asked.
“I wasn’t completely honest with you the other day,” she said, head down, not looking at him. Shoe waited. There were tears on her lashes when she finally looked up. “Patrick and I were having an affair.” She picked up a stack of file folders, tapped them on the desk to align them, and put them down again.
“It was just sex,” she said. “At least, it was supposed to be just sex.” She smiled ruefully. “You don’t want all the sordid details, do you?”
“Please, no.”
She smiled gratefully.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked.
“Sure. No one dies of a broken heart, and mine isn’t broken, just a little bent.”
More than just a little, Shoe thought.
“But it wasn’t just that I wanted to tell you,” she said. “A couple of weeks before he resigned I had the feeling he was trying to make up his mind about something. I thought maybe it had to do with me, like he was thinking of dumping me. Then he told me he was leaving and I realized that that wasn’t it at all, that he’d just been trying to make up his mind about resigning. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Why not?”
“When Patrick and I were—” She paused, blushing, then went on. “Well, we didn’t talk much. When we did talk, it was usually business. Except once, about a month ago. There was a report on TV about that woman in Abbotsford who turned her son in to the police for sexually assaulting the little girl next door. I made some stupid remark about how she couldn’t have loved her son very much to have done that. Patrick said, maybe that was true, but maybe it was because she loved him that she’d reported him. I said, ‘It must have been awfully hard then,’ and he said that when we were faced with hard choices, generally the right thing to do is the one that’s the hardest to do.”
“And you don’t think Patrick’s ‘hard choices’ had anything to do with you or with leaving the company?” Shoe asked. “Could he have been talking about leaving Victoria, asking her for a divorce?”
“No. Although he felt guilty about being unfaithful to her, Patrick had no intention of leaving her. He loved her, even though he thought she might have been having a lesbian relationship with some friend of hers. As for leaving the company, I don’t think that was a hard choice at all, after Mr. Hammond’s refusal to go public. I think Patrick had the idea that he could get rich off stock options. He wanted very much to be rich. I never realized how much.”
“Thank you for telling me this,” Shoe said. Sandra opened the office door. “By the way,” Shoe said, “did Patrick keep notes?”
“He was a compulsive note taker,” she said. “He made notes about everything. And his day wasn’t complete until he’d transcribed them into his daily journal on his laptop.”
“What about his handwritten notes?” he asked.
“As far as I know,” she said, “he shredded them as soon as soon as he’d transcribed them into the laptop.”
The information technology department occupied a cramped but bright corner office one floor down. A polite young man with yellow hair and a silver ring through his left eyebrow consulted his computer and informed Shoe that according to his records Patrick O’Neill hadn’t turned in his laptop.
“How will I know it if I find it?” Shoe asked him.
The young man wrote the model name and serial number on a sticky-note. “Check with security,” he said. “Maybe they’ve got it.”
Upstairs, Shoe knocked on the door of Del Tilley’s office. The door was so heavy and solid that his knuckles made hardly a sound. He knocked again, harder, and wondered what Tilley had in his office that he needed a security door. Feeling perverse, he thumbed a random sequence of numbers into the security lock. To his utter surprise, the door opened.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Del Tilley demanded.
“I’m trying to find Patrick O’Neill’s laptop,” Shoe said, peering over Tilley’s head into his office. It was dark and windowless, the only illumination supplied by a small halogen desk lamp that cast a bright circle of light in the middle of the desk.
Tilley stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. “Well, I don’t have it,” he said. He moved away from the door so he could stand farther from Shoe.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where it is, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t. Now go bother someone else. And don’t fool with the lock to my office again.”
Shielding the lock with his body, Tilley entered the code that unlocked the door, opened it partway, and slipped into his office, leaving Shoe standing in the hall. Shoe stood there for a few seconds, staring at the closed door, then went looking for Charles Merigold.
With a hiss, Del Tilley slammed the lid of the laptop shut. “Shit, shit, shit!” he swore. He’d tried everything he could think of, from O’Neill’s birthdate to Victoria’s name spelled backwards to O’Neill’s mother’s maiden name, but still the computer refused to start up. What, he wondered, was so important anyway that O’Neill needed a boot password to prevent anyone else from starting up his computer?
He lifted the lid, fearing that he may have damaged the fragile liquid crystal display, but it seemed all right. Gently, he closed the computer and put it in a drawer of his desk. Although there probably wasn’t anything of vital importance on the hard drive, he knew a hacker who, if he couldn’t crack the password, could dump the contents of the hard drive to a data file.
His telephone rang. He looked at the call display before answering. It was an outside call on his direct line, but no number was displayed.
“It’s me,” a voice said when he picked up the phone. A woman’s voice, but not a feminine one.
“You got my message?” Tilley said.
“No,” the woman replied. “I’m psychic.” She sighed heavily, breath hissing in the earpiece of Tilley’s phone. “Of course I got your message. What do you want?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Tilley said.
“Very funny,” the woman said. “But feel free to waste my time. It’s your nickel.”
“That’s right. You would be wise to remember that.”
The woman sighed. “Tell you what, bud. Next time you want something, call someone else. I got no patience for amateurs.”
Tilley’s knuckles cracked on the handset. He
