search without a warrant or a subpoena, and I don’t have probable cause for either. I’m sure he has bank records, but I wouldn’t know where to look for them. There’s a half dozen people with similar names in the credit agencies, but none of them near his age.”
“So he’s using a phony name?”
He shook his head. “Look, there are people who live off the grid, as they say. People who don’t own anything and haven’t done anything that would pop up on a background check. Some just don’t like using credit. Some want to be anonymous.”
“I can’t imagine a good reason for that.”
“That’s the thing. Like I said, not everyone who chooses to live that way is necessarily a bad guy. You see the problem?”
She hesitated, aware that her nerves had begun to coil again. “I don’t like this.”
He sighed, rubbed his hands together as if to warm them, then reached for his mug again. “How nervous are you, Trish? How far do you want me to go with this? Because there are limits to what I can legally do.”
She couldn’t find a reasoned answer, which surprised her. Generally speaking, she was a reasonable person.
“What’s got you so nervous? Apart from the fact that this guy sits in the park every night for a little while?”
She lifted her brows. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve known you long enough to know that you don’t shake easily. Yeah, the guy sitting out there every night might get your attention, and you’d watch him, but you wouldn’t worry about him.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t.” She hesitated, then finally said, “I’ve got a little thing going on at work. I think I found that some product is missing, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. So I notified the CFO about it, but I haven’t gotten an answer yet. And I’m wondering if I messed up.”
“Messed up how?”
“Well,” she admitted with a wry smile, “I’m the chief accountant. If it turns out I did my numbers wrong, I’m likely to be the ex-chief accountant.”
“Ahh.” He took a deep drink of his coffee, then shook his head. “Relax, Trish. Nobody gets fired for one mistake.”
“Yeah, maybe.” And he was probably right. She should just stop worrying, check her office e-mail before she turned in for the night in case the CFO replied, and then put it out of her mind.
But part of what made her such a good accountant was her accuracy, and sitting around wondering if she’d made a mistake, no matter how many times she had rechecked her numbers, made her feel utterly unsettled.
And that, she decided, was the only reason she’d even gotten paranoid about the guy sitting in the park. She was just in a paranoid mood to begin with. “Sorry I put you to so much trouble, Gage.”
He shook his head. “No trouble at all, Trish. Tell you what I can do.”
“Yes?”
“I can do a stop and identify. Ask for his ID. Maybe we can get a little more info on the guy. But that’s all I can do unless he does something he shouldn’t.”
She nodded. “Thanks. Thanks, Gage. I’d appreciate it. But I guess I should just forget about it. It’s probably all perfectly innocent.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to be telling you. And most of the time it is. But since I can’t say so for absolute certain, I’ll try to get a little more information.”
She thanked him again. He finished his coffee and headed for the door. “We’ll keep an eye out, Trish. We won’t just ignore it.”
She was certain of that.
Put it from your mind, girl. Let it go.
But not until she checked her e-mail.
Powering up her laptop in her tiny home office, she checked her work e-mail account. And there, answering her uneasiness, was finally a response from the company’s CFO, the man who had trained her at the corporate headquarters in Dallas:
Trish, thanks for alerting me to this. Sorry my reply was so slow in coming, but your memo somehow got routed to the bottom of the stack on my desk. Apparently my secretary didn’t see the urgency.
I’m having an independent auditor come look it over. Of course, I hope you just mismatched some things, but if not, we’ll find out. Either way, you’ve done your job exactly as you’re supposed to. I tried to call this morning and they told me you’re on vacation. Enjoy the time. And thanks again for the great job you do. Hank.
There it was. Done. No need to remain on tenterhooks any longer. No suggestion that if she’d screwed up she was in trouble. The head office in Texas had basically said she’d done exactly what she should.
She put the message in her private file on her home computer, then logged off.
Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
Except the stranger who sat out in front of her house every night.
He was out there again. This time she started watching early and saw his painful approach as he limped down the sidewalk and finally dropped onto the park bench with evident relief.
She had twitched the curtain aside just the tiniest bit so that she didn’t have to hold it as she peered out, because she didn’t want him to know she was spying on him.
And now, watching him, seeing the way he stared at her house as if nothing else on the street existed, made her feel like a creep herself. Was she losing her marbles or something? Her house was locked. She had a shotgun upstairs, a hand-me-down from her father, which she could load with birdshot in no time at all. If the guy tried anything, he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. With birdshot she wouldn’t even need a good aim to plaster him painfully enough that she could escape.
So what was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she just ignore it? What if it had been someone local, someone she knew by sight, doing the same thing? She wouldn’t be at all worried.
But he wasn’t local, and that made her nervous.
Okay, she told herself, try being rational. The guy obviously had suffered some kind of injury, which made him less than threatening to begin with. Maybe the injury had also affected his neck and he was having trouble turning his head.
Possible, yeah. That stare might be nothing but a stiff neck.
Maybe she just needed to cool it and stop acting and thinking like someone on the edge.
Of course she did, but the realization didn’t help. At some level something was niggling at her and wouldn’t give up.
She saw a deputy’s cruiser pull up near the bench. The man didn’t move, so apparently he wasn’t disturbed by the approach of the police. Then Gage
