Once he was off the phone, Matt had sat numbly in his cubicle, staring at the shoulder-high walls and mulling his plight. The detective may have called the dead woman by another name, but she had to be Susan Callison.
As the hours passed, Matt called into question everything he knew or thought he knew about Suzie Q. She had claimed to be separated from her husband and had said she lived in Glendale. Now Matt wondered if any of that had been true. According to Detective Holman, the dead woman had been married and living near Sedona. Where did that leave Matt? Out on the end of a limb, while Detective Holman, armed with a chain saw, was ready to lop it off.
From the time Matt’s mother had first put a red Crayola in his hand, he had done his best to color inside the lines. Fearing disgrace, he had always played it safe and had never taken chances. Not until Monday. But now disgrace was coming anyway. Matt knew he wasn’t guilty of murdering anybody. Surely, with the help of someone, somewhere, he’d be able to prove that, no matter what phony evidence the cop had manufactured about him. But in order to prove his innocence, Matt knew he would end up losing everything else. Jenny would know he had been unfaithful-at least he had tried to be. Their friends at church would know all about it, and so would everyone at work.
That was particularly galling. Work had always been Matt Morrison’s safe haven. No matter how tough things were at home, he’d always been able to escape by going to work. Once word about this got out, though, he knew what would happen. Everyone in the office would recognize Matthew Morrison for the loser he was. They’d laugh about him behind his back and whisper about him before and after he left the break room. It would be like the checkout line at Lowe’s-only worse.
So Matt set out on a course of action that he hoped would spare him some of that humiliation. It might spare Jenny some ugliness as well. He did it the way Matt Morrison did everything-in a thorough and organized fashion.
First he brought up his folder of Suzie Q correspondence. One at a time, he went through all the e-mails that had come and gone between them, reading each message as he went. The ones that hurt the most weren’t the ones at the beginning, when they’d been testing the waters, or the plaintive ones he’d written to her this week after she hadn’t written back. No, the ones that made his heart ache were the ones in the middle of their not-quite-affair, the sweet-nothing silly notes from when they had both believed-well, both had claimed to believe-in a future that had included the tantalizing promise that somehow, someday, the two of them would be together, living a happily-ever-after existence.
Matt read through the messages and remembered how he had felt when he read those miraculous words the first time-remembered how they had buoyed him and given him hope. Now, once the words had been committed to memory, he deleted each and every one of them. When the messages were gone, Matt went to his buddy list and deleted Suzie Q’s name. He didn’t doubt that cops, armed with a search warrant, would be able to obtain the deleted messages from the server, but he was hoping they wouldn’t bother.
With a sigh, Matt turned off his computer. He put away the files he’d been working on earlier. He straightened his desk. He returned the stapler he’d borrowed from Bobbie Bacon. Once his cubicle was in order, Matt was ready to head home. He knew it was time, but he also knew there was no hurry.
On his way out of the building, he stopped off in the men’s room. There, standing behind the closed door of a stall, he removed the condoms and the packet of little blue pills from their hiding place in the back of his wallet. He was dismayed that it took a series of several flushes before the plastic-wrapped containers disappeared down the toilet.
He spoke pleasantly to the security guard at the desk in the downstairs lobby. Out in the parking lot, Matt retrieved his ’96 Corolla from the employee lot and then meandered east toward home. Traveling on surface streets rather than hitting the freeways, he stopped at a 7-Eleven on Indian School long enough to fill the gas tank and buy two pint bottles of Baileys.
He opened one of the bottles while he was still parked at the gas pumps. Swallowed straight, the stuff was so cloyingly sweet that he almost gagged, but he managed to keep it down. He hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, so the booze hit him hard. Not wanting to be picked up on a DUI, he waited until he was at Scottsdale Road and North Chaparral before he took his next big swig. It was important that there be enough booze in his system to blur the lines between deliberate and accidental. The trick was being able to show an intent to get drunk without an intent to do anything else.
When Matt pulled up in front of his house, he was relieved to see that all the interior lights had been turned off. Jenny wasn’t the kind of person who would leave a porch light burning on those rare occasions when he came home later than she did. The darkness inside meant she was fast asleep. Considering her snoring problem, he doubted that his opening and closing the garage door would disturb her in the slightest.
He drove into the painstakingly neat two-car garage and parked the faded blue Corolla next to Jenny’s much shinier ’05 Acura. Once the garage door had closed behind him, he put the car in park and engaged the emergency brake. Leaving the engine running, he reached for the bottle again and took several more quick swallows, one after the other. As the stuff slid down his throat, he started to feel the buzz. That was good. So was having a full tank of gas.
Leaning against the headrest, Matt wondered how long it would take. It would be better for all concerned if it was over long before Jenny woke up. She usually staggered out of bed around seven or so and came scrounging out to the kitchen in search of her first cup of coffee. Matt knew there would be far less fuss and bother if there was no chance of reviving him when she opened the door and found him. Things were going to be bad enough for her that Thursday morning. He didn’t want to make the situation any worse.
The first bottle of Baileys was entirely empty, and the second was mostly so by the time he started feeling more drowsy than drunk. It took several tries before he was able to twist the cap back on the bottle, but he managed it.
Good, he thought dreamily. No sense in spilling what’s left and making a mess.
Ali’s phone rang at five to six, dragging both her and the cat out of a sound sleep. Samantha left the foot of the bed in a huff while Ali groped for her phone.
“We have a bingo,” B. announced triumphantly. He sounded wide awake and amazingly chipper.
Ali was not. “A what?” she grumbled.
“A bingo,” he repeated. “Our bad guy tried logging on to your e-mail account a little while ago. I’m pretty sure we nailed him.”
“And you collected all his files in the process?”
“I think so,” B. said. “And if he had to sit there and watch his computer die, he’s probably not a happy camper at the moment.”
Ali made the effort to sound a little less grumpy. “That’s great,” she said. “So does that mean I can use my own computer again?”
“Probably,” B. said. “If I were him, I’d have learned from my mistake. I doubt very much that he’ll be trying to invade your computer files again anytime soon. He won’t want to risk damaging a second computer.”
“So we’re done, then?” Ali asked.
“Not by a long shot,” B. said. He sounded focused and energized. “I’m a little surprised it was that easy. I would have thought he’d do more about securing his own equipment. He does have a fairly sophisticated encryption code. I’m working on breaking that in hopes of getting a look at his files.”
“What are you hoping to find?” Ali asked.
“We managed to stop him before he could do any real damage to you, but there may be others who weren’t as lucky-people who maybe don’t yet know they’ve been victimized. If we can find them and let them know what’s going on, we may be able to bring law enforcement in on this after all.”