Wrecked (Josie Gray Mysteries #3)(22)

Chester greeted her on the porch: tail wagging, whimpering and barking, body swaying, anxious for a bone. Josie entered the house and gave everything a cursory once-over to make sure no messages had been left. Then she went through the motions: changing out of her uniform, feeding the dog, opening a can of soup, dumping its contents into a bowl and putting it in the microwave, and finally, reaching for the bottle of bourbon in the cabinet beside the refrigerator. She poured a juice glass full. Josie did not drink socially. She drank to forget, to feel numb, to quiet the demons.

In the living room she put on an old Johnny Cash CD and collapsed onto the couch, where she forced down the glass of bourbon, her eyes watering from the burn. She scooted up to the edge of the couch and cleaned off the coffee table, a musty steamer trunk that she’d purchased at a flea market. She moved a stack of magazines to the floor, along with the wooden box of aggie marbles she had been collecting since she was a kid. Inside the trunk she stored family photos and trinkets from a childhood she typically chose not to think about.

The happiest but most painful memories of her childhood involved her father. She searched for the photo album he had given her as a gift for her eighth birthday. Six months later he was killed in a line-of-duty accident. All these years, and those were the words she associated with her father’s service as a police officer. A line-of-duty accident: as if those words answered all of her questions and defined him in some way. Her mom refused to talk about his death. A car accident was all she would ever say, but Josie had heard stories that her father had been shot during a routine traffic stop. Her mother’s avoidance of the truth was one of the many reasons she and Josie rarely spoke.

Josie lifted out a pile of high school yearbooks that she had not opened since graduation, smiled at a stash of high school softball medals, and found a framed picture of her grandma. Leaning back on the couch, she studied the picture, looking for signs of her father. It was one of her favorite family photos, the portrait of a woman with a head full of frizzy gray pin curls, wrinkles framing her eyes, and a smile that lit up the picture. It was the smile that got Josie, made her laugh every time she looked at it.

Josie felt the hard edges blur as the bourbon worked its magic. She closed her eyes for a moment, then sat up to put the photograph away. Buried between the folds of a quilt her grandma had sewn, Josie found the photo album she had been searching for. The word Memories was inscribed in gold across the front. She opened to a page almost halfway through the book, and found her father, sitting in a porch swing at the front of their house, smiling at her. His fine black hair was combed to the side, and he wore shorts and no shirt, his bare chest narrow and hairless. He sat in the middle of the swing, his arms stretched out across the back of it as if he owned the world.

Josie got up and walked to her bedroom, where she pulled a framed picture of Dillon from her bedside table. Wrapping herself in her grandma’s quilt, she sat back on the couch and held the photograph of Dillon next to her father’s photo and recognized the quality she had known they shared but had never been able to identify: the genuinely happy smile.





SEVEN


Just before her alarm went off the next morning, Josie woke with a start. She had been dreaming about Dillon. He was sitting at her kitchen table, working on her computer, staring at the screen but not speaking. She had been across from him, angry that he wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t talk to her. As the dream filtered from her memory, something clicked. It wasn’t an unfamiliar image, Dillon at her laptop, working from her house using her wireless Internet connection rather than driving to the office. She sat up suddenly, ignoring the nausea and the throb in her temples, and ran to open the junk drawer in the kitchen. She rooted around its contents until she remembered tacking the paper onto the corkboard inside the pantry. Opening the door, she saw the paper she had been searching for.

*

Josie arrived at work an hour early and found Otto at the coffeemaker.

He turned and smiled. “Coffee’s on. Delores sent apple dumplings for breakfast. She’s convinced that you’ll forget to eat. I suspect she’s right.”

Josie remembered the soup she had put in the microwave the night before but forgot about. She realized suddenly how hungry she was, but felt guilty eating.

“You going hungry won’t help his situation in the least.”

She turned her computer on. “I have good news,” she said, and walked to the conference table. There she found an apple dumpling and fork on a glass plate covered with plastic wrap. She unwrapped it and took a bite, glancing back at her computer, waiting impatiently for it to load.

Otto sat down with two mugs of black coffee and slid her cup across the table.

“I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me until this morning. Dillon stores his files on the Internet. He logs in to some program and can access his files from anywhere.”

“His work files?”

“I’ve seen him access them at my house. On my laptop.”

“Let’s hope you find a list of clients somewhere,” he said. “I spent last night going through Christina’s file folders. More files were taken than we’d thought. I was searching for a client list, some kind of billing statements, but couldn’t find anything.”

When her computer was finally ready, Josie stood and carried her breakfast over to it. She pulled the piece of paper out of her shirt pocket and sat down. “Dillon kept his log-in information on a piece of paper at my place so he could access everything. There’s a list of Web sites here, log-ins and passwords. I’m just not sure which one of these will give us access to his work files.”