wouldn’t stop going over the papers from inside the package whenever she had a free moment. The birth certificate named her biological parents. She’d never known who they were. Hadn’t really cared. But now she wondered if she should make an attempt to meet them . . . like maybe that was important to Deborah? Did that sound right? It was much more likely that her mother had just wanted Liv to have the information in case anything happened to her. . . . Maybe she was toying with the idea of suicide when she’d made up the package? Or, maybe she’d sensed something else . . . something coming toward her . . . something—
“Hey.” Aaron snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Come back.”
“I was just . . . thinking.”
“I could see that. Did you hear what I said?”
She tried to run back the last few minutes, but it was useless.
“I said,” Aaron reminded her in a measured tone, “that I think I’d like to meet Tiny and get to know her on a more personal basis.”
“Tiny . . . oh, the cat. Yes. Well, about that—”
“You don’t have a three-hundred-pound cat.”
“Well . . . no.” She smiled.
“Figured.” His answering smile was faint. “Just thought maybe you and I . . . could do something? Before I’m gone for good.” He made a face, as if he’d tasted something bad.
“What does that mean?”
“My father . . .” He looked back inside through the glass door with an unreadable expression. “He and my mom don’t get along. At all. Ever. She hates it that I’m here. Says it’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Liv repeated.
“Oh, it’s all bullshit. She doesn’t even mean it. She just mainly wants to irk my father any way she can. And it works, ’cause he starts yelling that he should just fire me to get her off his ass. And she tells him where to stick it, and blah, blah, blah. It just goes on and on. God. They can’t stand each other.”
“But you’re leaving Zuma?”
“I overheard the old man tell her that he was really gonna do it this time. By the end of the week.” Aaron shrugged. “Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But if he does, I’ll survive. Just wanted to make sure we could stay friends.” He peered at her through heavy blond bangs. A scraggly beard darkened his jaw. His clothes looked like they’d come straight from the clothes hamper and his pants rode low enough on his hips to make her wonder exactly when gravity would win and puddle them around his ankles.
She liked Aaron. She really did. But not in the way his eyes said he was hoping for. “We’re friends,” she said lightly.
“Olivia . . .” he said, disappointed. “Give me something more than that.”
“Good friends?” To his crushed look, she added, “Maybe later, we could talk? I’m just on my way to lunch now. I’m late already.” She half-turned back to the building.
“Sneak out this way,” he invited, opening the gate. Now, this was definitely against all the rules. “Paul won’t like it.”
“Paul doesn’t have to know.”
Liv felt a stirring of rebellion fueled by the encouraging light in Aaron’s eyes. Add to that, she didn’t want to turn him down again, for anything. She hesitated a moment, then shrugged her shoulders and said, “All right.”
He swung open the gate. “I’m not trying to push you, or anything. I just would like to . . . keep things going between us.”
“Okay.”
He smiled and swung the gate shut behind her, satisfied.
“But when I come back through the front door, Paul’s going to rip me a new one,” she said.
“Call me on my cell. I’ll sneak you back in.”
“I don’t have a cell.”
“Oh, God, that’s right.” He shook his shaggy locks. “I’ll leave the door propped open.”
“Nah, I’ll go through the front and just take the heat.”
“Check the side door. If it’s open, it’s open. If it’s not, the old man or somebody caught me.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Hey, I’m a short timer. I want to.”
“Okay, then.” Liv waved to him as she headed out. Aaron was a slacker and a truant and a bit of a slug, but at least he amused her. Everybody else on the main floor seemed to have had the humor centers of their brains lobotomized.
She went to a local deli whose chicken salad was to die for and ordered a chicken salad sandwich, Diet Coke and a packet of Miss Vickie’s Jalapeño Chips. She sat at a bistro table and watched the passers-by outside the window, her mind flitting back to the packet and Hague and his comments about the zombie man.
If I look he’s always there. Out of the corner of your eye . . . there!
Gooseflesh rose on her arms beneath the three-quarter-length sleeves of her V-necked shirt. It was late August and hot, and she could feel her skin break into a sweat.
Since she’d pushed her lunch break till after one, it was two-twenty by the time she made it back to the building. This time she did park her car in the front, way in the front, so no one saw her car return so late. Then she hurried around to the right edge of the parking lot. She might be able to sneak by as a pedestrian if she kept the parked cars between her and Zuma’s main doors and therefore screened herself from Paul’s line of vision. As she ducked along, she peeked a time or two through the glass windows of the front atrium but she saw no one. She found her way to the side entrance and saw that the door was firmly shut. Uh-oh. Somebody was onto Aaron.
Sighing, she retraced her steps to the front doors. She had five different excuses to tell Paul, none any good, and decided to just breeze in as if she owned the place and let him rain the litany of her transgressions down on her head. Take the bitter pill and get it over with.
Drawing a breath, she strong-armed the mahogany front door and wondered why Paul wasn’t standing at the ready, poised to berate her. As the door swung shut behind her she stepped through the atrium and turned toward Jessica’s desk, a question on her lips as the door swung shut behind her, and then she saw the carnage in the office.
Paul de Fore was splayed on the tile floor face down, blood pooling beneath his open mouth from a gunshot wound to the back of his head. She could hear moaning from beyond him. In a dream state she stepped over Paul and went to Jessica’s desk, giving a quick look over the top to see the receptionist on the floor behind her chair, curled up in the fetal position, blood blooming around the mounds of her breasts from a wound to the chest, small mewls issuing from her lips.
A roaring started in Liv’s ears. She glanced to the partition of her own desk, her blood pounding, a voice screaming loudly. She clapped her hands over her ears to stop it and realized the shrieking voice was coming from her.
She
