Killer Move - Michael Marshall [31]
“Don’t even try it,” she said.
“Steph, listen. Something else happened today. An e-mail.”
“You e-mailed her?”
“Just listen. When I got back from returning that book to Amazon, Janine was sitting in the office laughing at some joke she thought I’d sent.”
“Yeah, you sent it to me, too. It wasn’t funny.”
“That’s just it—I didn’t send it.”
“What?” Steph looked angry at being derailed.
“I didn’t send it. To you or Janine or anyone. Somebody else did, using my e-mail account. The reason I was late home this evening—before you even start speculating about that—is because I was talking to the IT guy from Shore, trying to work out what happened, how the e-mail got sent.”
She snorted. “Why would I believe that?”
I yanked out my phone. “His number’s top of the outgoing call list. Call him right now, Steph. Ask him if we just sat and had ice cream outside the parlor on the Circle. Ask him if he had a chocolate sugar cone. Or do you think I’ve gone so far into the heart of darkness that I’d recruit some random patsy to lie about my whereabouts?”
She didn’t say anything. The expression on her face remained lodged in a mixture of anger, hurt, and disgust.
“Wait one second,” I said, and sent up a prayer to whatever tiny god looks after Realtors who are in serious trouble not of their own making. I leaned over the laptop and fired up my e-mail app. Five e-mails came straight in. A couple of positivity newsletters, two from clients . . . and one from Kevin the Geek. Thank god.
I opened the e-mail. “Look.”
Reluctantly, Steph bent forward and read what was on the screen. A reference to the meeting I’d just described, a page of complex instructions on how to check for a keystroke checker, and an introduction to Wifi Spying 101.
She wouldn’t look at me. “So what does that prove?”
“Someone’s messing with my e-mail,” I said. “They ordered a book from Amazon in my name and this morning sent out a dumb, racist joke.”
“Even if this is true, how does it have any bearing on you taking pictures of Karren?”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. She was right, in fact. It didn’t. With the photographs, we were into new and uncharted territory.
Which we then set about exploring, at length.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nothing had become clearer or more positive by the time Steph went up to bed. We’d gone round in circles until the momentum of tiredness pulled her out of my orbit. I didn’t follow straightaway. Steph and I have had very few full-blown rows in our years together, but I knew time was needed to deflate this, time and the space it would give for common sense to prevail. You don’t tell an angry person they’re wrong to be angry. You have to wait for the emotion to diffuse.
Before that, following the instructions in Kevin’s e-mail, I’d checked my laptop. There were no strange apps hidden among my login items, no windowless background processes chugging away—at least as far as I could see. Kevin had reiterated in his e-mail that there were more hard-core possibilities, but that any attempt by me to establish their presence would almost certainly result in my computer being “borked.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good and I didn’t want it. My life felt “borked” enough already.
“Right,” Steph said, when I told her I’d drawn a blank. “So no supersecret spy software. How weird.”
She was sitting stiffly at the extreme far end of the sofa. She’d worn through some of the initial fury, but retained the air of a volcano that could wipe the hell out of town if it so chose. I guess she’d assumed that, presented with what she’d thought was incontrovertible evidence, I would cave immediately, throwing myself on her mercy. I hadn’t. In fact, while I’d been running the tests on my laptop, I’d been simultaneously delivering a point-by-point recap of the true events of the previous evening (which did not include amateur night soft-core pornography) and offering her my cell phone (again) to call Melania, Warner’s assistant, for confirmation.
Her refusal to