Best Laid Plans(16)

“Would he talk to his daughter?”

“No, not about his marriage.”

“Why?”

“This isn’t relevant.”

“Let us be the judge of that,” Barry said.

Debbie bristled, but said, “Jolene and Adeline didn’t really get along. Jolene was a daddy’s girl for a long time, and Harper adores her. It was the two of them. Harper did everything for Jolene, and she has a great respect for her father. Jolene simply didn’t have the opportunity to get to know Adeline because she was away in college at the beginning of their relationship, and that caused some friction.”

“Between father and daughter?”

“Oh, no. If Jolene had told Harper not to get married, he wouldn’t have. She wanted him to be happy. The friction was between Jolene and Adeline. You know how some fathers think their daughter’s boyfriend will never be good enough to be a husband? That’s how Jolene was with Adeline, that no woman would be good enough for her father. But as far as Harper was concerned, Jolene had no issues. She kept them private. They both were very private people.”

“Then how do you know about them?” Lucy asked pointedly.

“I’m observant. And since Jolene married Scott last year, she’s mellowed out.” Debbie frowned. “That probably isn’t a polite thing to say.” She pulled a file folder from her drawer and put all the papers she’d printed out inside and handed it to Barry. “Schedule and phone records.”

Gregor Smith walked into Debbie’s office. He went over to her and squeezed her shoulders. “Why don’t you go home?” he suggested.

She shook her head. “Donny is working today. I don’t want to be alone.”

“If you need anything, let me know.” He then turned to Barry and Lucy. “Our tech guy has some information about Harper’s phone that I think you should see.”

*



The IT department was in the basement. Their servers were state-of-the-art and they didn’t skimp on staff. “Corporate espionage has moved high-tech,” Smith said. “It’s becoming rare for competitors to come on-site to steal secrets—they’re far more likely to use cyberspace.”

He knocked on the window of a glass-enclosed office. A young tech in jeans and a polo shirt with the HWI logo on the pocket swiveled in his chair. “This is Todd,” Smith said. “He’s the one who ran the report. I’ll let him share the information.”

“Hi,” Todd said and cleared his throat. “Um, the cell phone was off from nine oh-five P.M. until ten twenty-seven P.M., likely because Mr. Worthington was on the airplane. He turned it back on while at the airport.” He brought up a screen on his computer. It was a map of San Antonio with a yellow line cutting through. “I mapped his route based on cell tower pings—we have tracking software in all our phones.” It was clear from the map that Worthington had gone straight from the airport to the White Knight Motel just as the taxi driver had said.

“He made one call at ten fifty, to another company cell phone registered to Jolene Hayden. That’s Mr. Worthington’s daughter.”

Todd enlarged the screen. Lucy leaned over. There was a dot at the White Knight Motel, then a red line leaving the motel. “At twelve fifteen, the phone pinged here.” He had a dot at an intersection about three blocks from the motel. “I connected the motel with the location, and this is the most likely route by vehicle to get to that intersection. It would only take a minute.”

“What about on foot?” Lucy said. The driver had said the girl had left on foot. “What would it take, five to seven minutes or so?”

“Yeah, about that.” He tilted his head.

“And then the red line is thicker, why?” Lucy asked.

“Oh! Well, the phone was pinged at multiple locations between here”—he pointed—“and ended here, two point six miles away, at twelve twenty.”

“A car.”

“That’s most likely.”

“What’s at that location?” Lucy asked.

“A hotel—a real nice executive hotel.” He wrote down the name and address and handed the piece of paper to her. Barry took it out of her hand.

“Where is the phone now?” Barry asked.

“Still at the hotel,” Todd said.

Smith said, “I’ve already locked out the phone, in case anyone attempts to access any of Harper’s or HWI’s private files. We would need the phone to determine what might have been accessed on it, such as contact information, but Todd verified that the phone hasn’t been used to access company files or emails.”

“Do you have the phone backed up to a cloud server?”

“No,” Smith said. “That kind of security is marginal at best, and we have too much sensitive information. We have an intranet that employees can access from home with a login and password.”

Barry excused himself to take a call. Lucy complimented Todd on his program. “This is useful.”

“I hope you find out what happened to Mr. Worthington.”

“We will,” Lucy said with confidence. She had a modicum of guilt over what she’d first thought of Harper Worthington. With this additional information, she didn’t know if what appeared to have happened really did happen. But she trusted the evidence wherever it led them. Like Julie Peters said, the dead don’t lie.