After years of futile effort, she had finally given up. Gabby’s vision blurred. She’d not given up easily, and there was a phone number. She had prayed that one day he or Gabby would use it. “If I’d known, I would have,” Gabby whispered into the silent house.
It occurred to her she still could. She reached into her pocket for her phone and dialed the number.
Disconnected.
She tried searching, but there was no new listing. Her aunt had either moved or disconnected her landline. Either way, she wasn’t where she had been. But if anyone could find her, Shadow Watcher could. Gabby texted him. “That offer of help still open?”
“You bet.”
“I found some letters from an aunt I met once many years ago. She wanted to see me, but my father refused. I tried calling the number for her, but it’s been disconnected. Would you see if you can find her? Her name is Janelle Reinhardt,” she texted, then added the last known address. “I guess she never married, or she kept her name.”
“On it,“ he said. “Be in touch.”
“Packing. I’ll message you when I get home tonight, if that’s okay?”
“Anytime.”
“Thanks, SW.”
“Course, GK.”
He’d find her. If Janelle could be found, Shadow Watcher would find her.
Her heart much lighter, Gabby taped a few boxes and headed back upstairs. The long hallway and its linen closet were all that was left to do upstairs. “Progress.”
She emptied the closet in record time, then walked through each room to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. When leaving her father’s room and making a left into the hallway, she bumped her shoulder on a painting. The walls. She’d totally forgotten to empty the hallway walls.
When she lifted the third painting off its hanger, a panel in the wall slid open.
Surprised, Gabby lowered the painting to the floor, propped it against the wall, then looked inside the panel opening. A narrow frame between a couple two by fours made a shallow box. Inside it, on the raw wood, lay three thumb drives. Gabby’s heart raced. This is what the killers had been looking for; these drives. Innately sure of it, she scooped them up and was halfway down the stairs before she recalled the killer had stolen her father’s computer.
Grabbing her handbag, she headed to the office supply store, bought a dozen thumb drives and had four copies of each drive found duplicated. Not wanting to leave the store seemingly empty-handed—you never knew who was watching—she picked up a couple spare rolls of tape and a roll of bubble wrap, which she needed to protect the paintings before boxing them.
Back at her father’s, Gabby brought down the new laptop. As she suspected, he’d never used it. That struck her as odd, but worse, as unlikely for a man who would lose everything unless she put her neck on the line to help him. Maybe the killer hadn’t missed seeing it. Maybe the killer had chosen not to steal it. Maybe the killer had left it, hoping she would use it and he’d see what she saw.
Lacking the equipment to ensure that wouldn’t happen, she closed the laptop untouched, and returned to her apartment, where she tested a copy of the thumb drives.
Clean.
She opened the first one. Financial records. Spreadsheets with dates, names, and vast sums of money changing hands in all kinds of coded transactions. George Medros’s transactions.
The other two thumb drives held the same kind of information and belonged to the same man. Gabby’s heart thundered against her ribs. It didn’t take a forensic accountant to see that Medros was violating at least a half dozen federal laws.
And her father not only knew it, he participated in it.
Why had he done this? Why?
One thing was clear. Medros or his henchmen would be back. With this kind of information out in the wild, they had to come back—and to keep coming back until they found the data.
And that explained why the FBI was involved in the murders. They wanted the data before Medros got it.
What was Gabby going to do to protect herself? She had to call Bain. If she didn’t, she would be as legally vulnerable as her father. But if she did call him, and he went after Medros, the man would know Bain had gotten the data from her. Either way, odds were good she’d end up dead. Unless . . .
An idea struck her. She grabbed Bain’s card, the three original drives and backup copies of each one, stuffed them all into her purse, and then left the apartment to return to her father’s.
Using his house phone in the kitchen, she called the FBI agent’s number.
He answered sounding irritated. “Bain.”
“Agent Bain, this is Gabby Blake,” she said, hoping she wasn’t making the biggest, most deadly mistake of her life.
“Yes, Miss Blake?”
“I’m at my father’s, emptying the house.” She grabbed a fresh bottle of water from the fridge. “You asked me to call you if I found anything of interest.”
“I did.” He sounded engaged now.
“I found something of interest.” She felt like a fool repeating herself, but if Medros or his people were watching her, she wanted to control what she let them see or hear. How they could not be watching her, she couldn’t imagine. Not with all this detailed information about Medros’s business loose.
“What did you find?”
“Well, I’m not sure exactly. Maybe something. Maybe nothing. Three thumb drives. I have no idea what’s on them. The computer, you’ll recall, was stolen.”
“I’ll be right over,” Bain said. “Give me twenty minutes.”
“That will be fine.” She hung up the house phone. Her hands were shaking.
What had her father dragged her into? Why had he dragged her into anything at all?
Chapter Seven
Tuesday, December 8, 3:30 p.m.
When the doorbell rang, Gabby looked through the peephole and saw a man she didn’t recognize. He wasn’t Bain. That much she knew for sure. This man was huge, older than Bain and in his fifties, she’d guess, bald with dark eyebrows and a salt-and-peppered mustache and beard, trimmed short and neat. His eyes were the coldest brown she’d ever seen in her life. And rather than the FBI suit and sunglasses Bain favored, this man wore a black shirt and a lumpy black jacket. Cold and wet, it clung to his chest. He was hiding something that printed in the fabric—a weapon.
Her heart slammed against her ribs and an instinctive warning sounded in her mind to not open the door. Her second thought was if she didn’t open it, he’d shoot his way in. Suck it up and stuff it down. An idea struck her and took root. She plastered a smile on her face and opened the door. “Agent Bain?”
The stranger nodded. “His partner, Miss Blake.” He looked oddly familiar, though she couldn’t say why. Had she seen him before? If so, she didn’t recall it. And why was he looking at her as if she’d risen from the grave?
She stepped back and let him in, praying she was doing the right thing. “It’s good to finally meet you.”
He seemed to relax and shielded his expression. “I apologize, Miss Blake, but I’ve been called with an emergency. Can I get the drives from you?”
“Of course.” She retrieved them, covertly snapped a few photos of him, and then walked back to him and passed the drives over. “Like I told you on the phone, they might be something or nothing.”