How ironic, she thought. I don’t know if I can trust her, and yet it stings to know there was a moment when she didn’t trust me. Maybe, her devil’s advocate argued, she checked up on you to see if you could be bought.
“I’m trusting you with everything that matters to me,” Tam said quietly. “I’m sorry I blurted it out like that. I did feel guilty afterward.”
Kip swallowed noisily. “We’re even because I don’t know how to tell you all the little things I know about you that you probably wish I didn’t.”
Tam’s expression clouded slightly with wariness. “Such as...?”
There was nothing for it. “Nobody knows where your adoptive parents were born. The data on your passport application can’t be verified. There’s no record of when you immigrated to the U.S. And so on.”
Tamara’s breath caught—it was almost a gasp. “How...?” She pressed her lips together, staring at Kip intensely.
She felt ensnared by Tamara’s eyes, but her fight-or-fly instincts weren’t engaged. She was terrified, but not because she felt in physical danger. “I hired some very good help who suggested that Tamara Sterling was a cover.”
“And if it was, it’s blown.”
Kip nodded. She ought to be on alert. Tamara could snap her neck and toss her overboard with no one the wiser until at least morning, perhaps longer. Nobody knew she was even here. But 90
her body refused to feel threatened. What could it possibly know that she didn’t?
“What do you think?”
That I don’t know and it’s killing me, Kip wanted to say.
Instead, she spoke another truth. “I don’t know what to think.”
“It concerns what some might think an odd matter, but I will say it’s very, very private.”
“Who were your adoptive parents, then? Their last name wasn’t Sterling.”
“No. But then as you’ve guessed,” Tam said coolly, “they didn’t exist.”
She drew in a sharp breath with a needle of anxiety jabbing under her ribs. “I truly don’t understand.”
Tamara shrugged. “I’m surprised to learn that my passport didn’t pass close scrutiny. It used to. I’ve been Tamara Sterling for twenty-five years. Who I was before that really doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.”
Kip blurted out, “I can’t clear you as a suspect.”
Tamara’s answer was a quiet, “I know.”
“I want to.” She admitted it before she could stop herself. “I do believe some people are above temptation.”
Tamara nodded. “I know you do. You’re like me. You know yourself. You know if you’re above temptation other people can be as well.”
Kip had to lower her gaze. There was a flare of something in those gray eyes that was too dangerous and she could no longer ignore the warning alarms in her head. Her arms were trembling with the effort it took to keep them at her sides. A good investigator always stood in the middle of the evidence.
Leaning too soon one way or the other was a sure way to lose her balance. It was too soon and too risky to lean.
“Kip?” Tamara took a deep breath. She had been calm only moments before, but now tension was written all over her body—
shoulders bunched, nervous flexing of her fingers. “Do you really think I’m guilty?”
The abrupt question startled Kip out of her reverie. Her 91
heart told her to say no, she didn’t think she was guilty. All the earlier camaraderie they’d shared during dinner was gone. You fool, Kip railed at herself, you fool. She felt her Secret Service mask descend on her face. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
Tamara finally said, “You’re tough, Kip Barrett.”
“I have to be.”
She shifted again out of the light. “All day, every day?”
Kip found herself missing the feeling of Tamara’s gaze on her.
The feeling that Tamara wasn’t telling her something relevant was pronounced. She got to her feet and gathered up her papers. “I don’t know what to do next. I need to directly gather the keycard user data, which I can’t do without your help. And you can’t help.
I think no matter what I do, I’m going to tip off the thief.”
Tamara was silent. There were too many shadows, and not just because of the low light. For the first time, Kip felt a shiver of physical fear whisper over the back of her neck.
She needlessly added, “Lots of puzzle pieces but not enough to see any kind of picture. There are things I just don’t know.”
She let the unspoken question dangle in the air.
Finally, turning away from the railing, Tamara said, “I might be able to add some pieces to the puzzle. I’m not sure they fit at all. And I have no proof for any of it but my own word unless we bring in some of the other directors.”
She nodded, her heart pounding in her chest.
“For the last three weeks we’ve had an unusual number of potential clients cancel pitch meetings, including one that looked like a sure thing. Big rush, secret meeting—canceled without explanation. It’s happening in all of the offices. The office directors are looking into it. This morning we lost the standing contract from the New York office of a major client. I expect to find the same for the office here any day.”
Kip considered the information. “A rumor do you think?”
“Yes, Diane and I thought so.”
She disgested the casual intimacy of “Diane and I” and refused to let it unsettle her. “It’s almost as if...” She paused, not wanting to sound stupid.
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“As if what?”
“Well...” She swallowed and summed up her thoughts.
“Embezzlement is theft. But we both know that theft is sometimes motivated not by greed but the desire to steal from a particular person or company. If this was about money alone, someone with that kind of talent could go after an oil company, grab seven hundred million, not the penny ante quantities in SFI’s accounts.
If it’s not about money, then it’s directed at SFI for other reasons.
An attack.”
Tamara cocked her head. “These rumors certainly feel like an attack. But why?”
Kip shrugged. “Thinking horses, not zebras, it’s aimed at you or SFI, which are sometimes one and the same. Lots of people would love to see our credibility jeopardized. We must have close to a hundred pending cases on dockets all over the country. A little high-end cybercrime combined with malicious gossip...”
Tam was nodding. “And presto! SFI isn’t the company it once was. We become the same pariah as an accounting firm caught faking its audits, then trying to testify to the veracity of our findings.”
“Exactly.”
“An attack.” Tamara nodded slowly. “They’d have to have an accomplice inside to doctor the statements.”
“And that could be nearly anybody. I think the security attached to keycards was tampered with.”
“Child’s play for this kind of hacker.”
The relief in Tamara’s voice was plain. Not a trusted, close associate. If a disabling attack by a hired gun was the why and who, Kip told herself, that meant who Tamara Sterling is, or was, really didn’t matter.
It did, though. It deeply mattered to her.
“The bank hacking—that’s not cheap or easy,” Kip pointed out.
“I can only think of a handful who could do it.”
“Including you?”
Tam stilled and drew back until her face was shadowed again.
“Including me.”
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For a moment there was only the sound of water lapping against the dock.
Finally, Tam asked, “Do you really still think it could be me?”
With all her heart Kip wanted to say no. But what did her heart understand? Nothing, that’s what. She had to do her job.