“He accused you of setting the bomb?” Daniel asked, his expression unreadable, but his body language all about tightly controlled anger.
“Not exactly. Apparently Dad and I are the number one suspects; at least we were until I told him about the nature of yesterday’s break-in and the GPS device on my laptop. He thought the current location was really interesting.”
Daniel relaxed slightly. “I do, too.” He rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “So, Officer Devon isn’t an officer after all.”
“Not according to the records division of the state police.”
“He acted like a soldier, but a lot of police officers are former military, so that didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. I’d like to know how he got a hold of a state police car.”
“So would the state police.” She frowned, wishing they had more to go on. The longer her dad was MIA, the more chance something could happen to him. “The phony officer wasn’t familiar at all.”
Daniel shrugged. “You’ve spent a lot of time away from your dad’s school in recent years. There are probably a lot of people he’s come into contact with that you’ve never seen.”
“His records included photos of each student. I scanned them all into the computer. I don’t remember anyone looking like Officer Devon.”
“You probably weren’t paying close attention to them.”
“That’s true.” She hadn’t given any of the pictures more than a cursory glance.
“And although we know the school was as much a target as your dad, we can’t assume we’re looking for a former student.”
“Besides instructors, potential and current students are about the only people my dad sees.”
“That you know of.”
“True. He mentions a lot of Vietnam buddies in his diaries. I don’t remember meeting any of them, but apparently they kept in contact.”
“That’s not unusual.”
“No, but a lot of them have died. It must have been hard for him, and he never told me.”
“You and your dad are pretty close.”
“Not as close as I thought, but our relationship is better than anything most of his buddies had with their families. Several who died didn’t have anyone to mourn their passing but my dad. I wish he’d told me. I would have mourned with him.”
“He was protecting you from the ugly side of life.”
“I guess. Still, it’s sad.”
Daniel’s eyes narrowed in thought. “What exactly did he write about these friends that died?”
“Just their names and where they were from, the fact he went to their funerals. No one could accuse my dad of being a flowery writer.”
“Do you remember their names, or would you have to go back through and search for them again?”
She had a semiphotographic memory, which was how she reread books in her mind during a lot of long, dark, and of necessity, silent nights in the jungle or desert as a mercenary. “I remember them, why?”
“It’s a lot easier to establish an alternate identity using that of a person who has died, but shares superficial life traits with you.”
“You think Dad used the names of his former friends to establish aliases?”
“It makes sense.”
She thought about it. “You’re right. It does. For whatever reason, he believed he needed a bolt-hole and made sure he had it in the form of several established alternate identities.”
“He hinted as much to me once.”
“He trusted you a great deal to have done that.”
Daniel shrugged. “He didn’t tell me names.”
“He didn’t tell me either. He said it was safer for me that way.”
“Was your dad intelligence during the war?”
“No. He was LLRP, but it was enough. A lot of the soldiers that came out of the field had a hard time acclimating to normal life. I’ve never understood what sparked this particular paranoia, but for the most part, it doesn’t impact our relationship, and no way will he ever seek counseling to deal with it.”
“It’s going to make it dam—uh…difficult if not impossible to find him.”
“If you’re right about how he established his identities, we have a place to start at least.” She began walking toward the study. “We can investigate each name for activity since their deaths, things like buying property, establishing residency, that kind of thing.”
Daniel didn’t say anything, but he followed her into the study.
He indicated a pile of print-out pages beside Hotwire’s computer with his hand. “We’ve been going through the school’s files looking for some kind of anomaly, and so far we haven’t found one.”
“When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s almost impossible to find it,” she said tongue-in-cheek.
He smiled. “That makes a convoluted kind of sense.”
She grinned back. “Yeah, it does.”
He sat down in a chair to the right of the computer desk, and she put herself in front of the monitor. She sent several search queries to databases she thought might have the information they were looking for.
When she was done, there was nothing to do but wait, so she said, “While my queries are being processed, why don’t we go through the student pictures?”
“Good idea.”
She moved her chair sideways a little. “Scoot over here, so you can see, too. We’ll have a better chance of recognizing the fake officer if we’re both looking.”
He moved his chair beside hers, and as always, the closeness of his big body affected her breathing pattern. He laid his arm across the back of her chair, hemming her in, and she had to fight the urge to let her head rest back against him. They had a job to do, and snuggling wasn’t it.
It took a few clicks of the mouse to bring up the image files related to her dad’s school. She set the entire folder up to run as a slide show. The images began playing on the screen, each lasting three seconds, enough time to study bone structure as well as take in surface features that could change.
She grimaced as the third one flashed onto the screen. “There are a few hundred; this could take a while.”
“I don’t mind spending time with you.” His fingers brushed her neck, and he leaned closer so that her shoulder was against his chest. “You smell good.”
“I don’t wear perfume.”
“I know. I like it.”
“The smell of unadorned woman?” she asked jokingly, but warm bubbles of happiness fizzed through her.
“Only one woman. You.”
“I like the way you smell, too,” she admitted.
“How do I smell?” he asked as another picture flashed briefly on the screen.
“Safe.” She didn’t know why she said it, but something about the very essence of this man gave her a sense of security in his presence.
It had been that way from the first, which was why she’d been so shocked by his hostile attitude toward her. Her instincts told her one thing while his actions had told her another. Or so she had believed. She now knew what she’d mistaken for dislike and anger had been him trying to rein in a passion that consumed them both completely when he let it go.
Regardless of the reasoning, she’d come to identify his unique scent with both security and sexual desire, not to mention happiness. She was beginning to wonder if that wasn’t a pretty good definition of love.
“Safe?” he asked, his voice laced with shock and another emotion she couldn’t quite define.
“Yes.” She snuck a quick sideways look at him, but his attention was fixed firmly on the slide show. “When I’m with you, I feel as if you will never hurt me or allow anyone else to either. Which, when you think about it, is really funny. I mean, I’ve been keeping other people safe my entire adult life, and I’ve never been in a situation where I relied on someone else to fight for me.”