15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(40)

I cannot explain why an idea suddenly jumped into my mind, but it did. I sat up straight in bed.

Joe had taken all of his electronic devices with him before he disappeared—hadn’t he? I’d gone through our bedroom and also Joe’s office. But I hadn’t gone through Julie’s room.

I got out of bed and went to the nursery next door. Martha trotted behind me. I whispered to her to sit, and then I turned on the Finding Nemo lamp on the white-painted dresser. The light from the lamp was pale and yellow, but I could see the whole room. I peeked in on Julie and she was breathing softly. So I began opening her drawers.

I took out folded onesies from the top drawer, baby blankets from the second, diapers from the bottom, and when I didn’t find anything of interest, I put it all back and stepped over to her closet.

I pulled the chain on the closet lightbulb and took stock. Julie had very few clothes needing hangers, but Joe and I both had stored excess clothes here. I grabbed up armloads of coats and ski outfits we never wore, putting them on the floor. Then I took boxes of shoes off the shelf.

Once I had the boxes on the floor, I flipped the lids on the dress shoes, both mine and Joe’s. And then my heart froze solid. On top of the shoes Joe had worn when we got married was a tablet. I’d never seen it before. The charger was in the box with the shoes.





CHAPTER 61


MARTHA LICKED MY face as I plugged in the charger and turned on the tablet. I pushed her away and stared at the box that was requesting a password.

I had no idea what Joe’s password would be. And then the image of a number jumped into my mind. It was the haziest kind of memory because I hadn’t thought about it when I saw it. Now I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it at all. I bolted to Joe’s office and opened the center drawer. I had put all of the contents back after I had tossed it, failing to find clues or evidence of Joe’s whereabouts.

Now I pulled the drawer all the way out. I dumped the take-out menus and pens and paper clips onto the rug, then took the drawer over to the desk lamp and looked at where the bottom met the sides of the drawer.

Something was written in pencil close to the seam, a long line of numbers and letters that added up to nothing.

Like the best kind of password.

I brought the empty drawer to the tablet on the floor of Julie’s room and typed the alphanumeric into the password box on Joe’s page. I got blocked several times. There were eighteen characters in this chain, and I blew it a few times.

The third time, I was slow and deliberate, and I was sure I’d typed in the eighteen characters perfectly.

And still the password was rejected.

I typed in a few obvious combinations of birthdays and names, but no luck. Joe was a spy. Triple threat. CIA, FBI, Homeland Security. He wasn’t using a password he’d written in his pencil drawer. He wasn’t going to use password1234, either. He wouldn’t use his daughter’s name to guard his secrets. Right?

Just for laughs, I typed in JulieAnne, and bam. I was in. Imagine that. Folders populated the little desktop.

It was immediately clear to me that this storage account was for Joe’s personal stuff. The Brooks Findlay file wasn’t there, for instance, nor any of Joe’s freelance clients. I found a file for football scores, and clips from blogs he followed. I found nothing marked top secret. And his contact list didn’t include Alison Muller’s info.

Before giving up, I clicked on the calendar icon, and when it opened, I flashed over the entries for the many empty days and months when Joe had worked from home.

The notes were brief and straightforward, but there were a couple of cryptic entries at the end of March. Joe had taken a trip back east to see his mother, who’d just had surgery to put in a pacemaker. He’d made notes of his flight reservations on this, his personal calendar.

But what I was reading showed me that Joe hadn’t made a round trip from SFO to New York’s JFK. He had booked connecting flights from SFO through JFK to Brandenburg, an airport in Berlin. And he’d noted the confirmation numbers for two seat assignments.

One for J. A. Molinari. And the second for a fellow traveler, Sonja Dietrich.

Joe had gone to Berlin with Alison Muller.

Who was he? I didn’t know my husband at all.





CHAPTER 62


JOAN RONAN MACLEAN was an attractive twenty-five-year-old bartender from Palo Alto who’d come to San Francisco on her own dime to see Conklin and me. She made himself comfortable in the visitor’s chair next to our desks, flipped her sandy-colored hair out of her eyes, and said Michael Chan frequented the Howling Wolf and had been at the bar a couple of nights before he was killed.

According to MacLean, “Chan was drinking alone, and he had more than his usual two beers.”

“How did he seem to you?” Conklin asked.

“Pensive. The bar was kinda empty and he wanted to talk. I speak a little Chinese because I had a Chinese nanny, so we’re kinda friends. But I was completely unprepared for this.”

“Please go on,” Conklin said.

“Yeah, yeah. He told me he was in love with a woman, not his wife, and that they were going to run away to Canada together.”

“Did he mention the woman’s name?”

“He called her Renata one time, and the other times he called her ‘my love.’ I asked him if he was serious about running away, because he has a wife and kids, you know? And he said she was married, too. And he said this lady carried a gun. So I said, ‘She’s a cop?’