Wish You Were Gone(73)

Groaning, she slipped the frame into her bag. On a hunch, she began opening desk drawers, looking for scrawled passwords. Instead she found a couple of flasks, a thousand business cards, and an envelope full of cash. She shoved that into her bag, too. That was when Zoe walked in.

“Emma?”

Emma stood up, caught. “Zoe! Hi!”

“Darnell said to check if you need anything.” She stood uncertainly by the door. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I was just…” She looked at the monitor. “You wouldn’t happen to know the password.”

Zoe opened her mouth to respond, then her expression shut down.

So close, Emma thought.

“I really can’t,” Zoe said. “That’s James’s private stuff.”

“Zoe, Darnell gave me the laptop. He’s fine with me looking at it and James isn’t here. All I want is to see who my husband was emailing with the few days before he died. I had no idea what he was up to, and it seems like Darnell and Gray and even you didn’t really know either. I just want answers and I can’t get them from James. This is my only option.”

She said this hoping against hope that Zoe hadn’t been planning on pulling a Jerry Maguire and going with him, because if she had, those emails would likely implicate her as well as James. She also said this knowing that Darnell and his lawyers had likely already looked through all of James’s emails and logged and saved any information they needed.

Zoe wiped her hands against her hips, clad in a black pencil skirt. “Okay, fine.” She crossed over to James’s desk and rapid-fire typed on the remote keyboard. The welcome message dissolved and his wallpaper—a shot of Yankee Stadium packed to the gills—appeared.

“What was it?” Emma asked, curious.

“?‘GiantsYankeesKnicks’ all one word,” Zoe said, and rolled her eyes.

“Classic,” Emma muttered. “Thank you, Zoe.”

Emma sat down again and opened James’s email. There were dozens of unread messages. She scrolled past them quickly, figuring his mistress would have known not to email him after he was dead, and got to the read emails from the day he died. Zoe stepped back as Emma began to open various missives and skim them.

“I’ll just go back to my desk?” she said. “Call me if you need me?”

Emma nodded but didn’t look up. The answer was here. It had to be.

But after twenty, thirty, forty minutes of searching, it appeared the answer was actually not here. Her husband had written to countless people about countless things, from the mundane:

Coffee next week?

to the ridiculous:

We need three cases of Dom, a platter of Texas ribs and peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off. If he sees crusts on his sandwiches, he’ll bail. Even if it is a cover story.

But nothing scandalous. No plans to meet up with a woman that night. She checked the sent emails as well, and the most interesting thing in there was his promise to the party planner to donate a signed jersey to the door prizes for the event that night: One Evan Longoria signed jersey.

That was what James and Kelsey had argued about the night before he died. He’d been looking for something to donate as a door prize and accused Kelsey of messing with his stuff. She had thought it was ridiculous at the time—Kelsey was not a sports fan—but maybe she’d been wrong, since it seemed her daughter did have an interest in his collection.

Her adrenaline was waning. Feeling sluggish now, Emma opened the trash folder. Zero items. She glanced at the phone, wondering if she could somehow summon Zoe, but decided to get up and walk to the door instead. She peeked out. Zoe looked up from her typing, startled.

“It just occurred to me… haven’t you been reassigned? Why are you still sitting here?”

“Ms. Lennox is going to take this office eventually, but we still have to have it packed up and cleaned,” Zoe said. “I’m just waiting for Darnell to give me the go-ahead.”

“He hasn’t yet?”

Zoe shook her head. “The assistants think he’s avoiding it.” She quirked her lips to one side. “Because he’s sad?”

“Oh.” Emma felt a pang, and wondered if that was, in fact, the reason, or if there was something more practical and legal at play. She felt, suddenly, like she really shouldn’t be here—like she shouldn’t have bothered Darnell. “Zoe, is there a way to retrieve deleted emails? The trash file on his computer is empty.”

“Oh. They get archived?” Zoe said. “I can get one of the techs to retrieve them from the server, but it’ll take a while. Maybe a day or two?”

“If you could do that for me, I would so appreciate it,” Emma said. She stepped out of the office and closed the door behind her. Zoe still looked a bit skittish, so Emma put a hand on her shoulder. “If anyone questions you about it, just send them to me, and I’ll play the crazed, grieving widow card.”

“You don’t seem crazed to me,” Zoe said, narrowing her eyes slightly.

“Believe me,” Emma said. “I have my moments.”





LIZZIE


“Why are we doing this again?” Willow asked, hands stuffed deep in her pockets as she trailed Lizzie toward Emma’s front door. Loaded down with paper bags full of food, Lizzie blew a curl of hair off her forehead. She’d spent half the day waiting for the phone to ring and wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that it never had. Plus, Gray hadn’t done a single thing out of the ordinary in the last forty-eight hours—at least not during the odd times Lizzie had been able to catch up with her. Other than skipping work yesterday and catching Lizzie watching the house, it had been business as usual. Now that the adrenaline from the night of the memorial had waned, Lizzie was starting to understand that she had neither the time nor the talent to be a PI.