“What’s gone?” Renie had virtually shouted. She gave
a quick look down the hall, then lowered her voice. “What
are you talking about? Barry’s ID?”
“All of it,” Judith whispered. “Credit cards, notebook, the
whole bit.”
“Jeez.” Renie reeled around the corridor, then shoved Judith
back up against the door. “Did you lock up when we left last
night to go downstairs?” she asked under her breath.
“No. Did you?”
“No.” Renie grimaced. “I didn’t think about it.”
“Who knew I had the stuff in my purse?”
Renie appeared to concentrate. “Everybody. You mentioned it in the lobby while Gene Jarman was questioning
you.”
“So I did.” Judith slumped against the door. “What’s the
point?”
Renie grabbed her by the arm. “Who knows? But we can’t
stand out in the hall and talk about it. Let’s go.”
The kitchen looked exactly as they had left it the previous
night. Judith had planned a simple self-serve breakfast of
cereal, toast, fruit, juice, and coffee. But there were eggs in
the refrigerator and bacon in the freezer. She decided she
might as well improvise.
“It had to be the notebook,” Judith said, filling the big
coffee urn. “The rest was all the usual plastic.”
“But there was nothing in the notebook,” Renie noted,
apparently jolted out of her early morning mood by the theft.
“The pages had been ruined.”
“Whoever took it didn’t know that,” Judith said, measuring
coffee into the urn’s big metal basket. “I don’t think I mentioned how the damp had ruined the notebook.”
“You didn’t.” Renie put two pounds of bacon into the
microwave and hit the defroster button.
Judith carried the urn into the dining room. “Tell me
everything you know about these people,” she said when she
got back to the kitchen.
“You didn’t want to hear it last night,” Renie said in a
contrary tone.
“That’s because my brain had died of exhaustion. Give,
coz.”
Renie removed the bacon from the microwave and began
laying strips in a big skillet. “I don’t know that much. You’ve
already heard about Frank Killegrew—he was a former Bell
System vice president who decided to start up his own
company. While he claims to be from Billings, Montana, he
was actually born and raised in some itty-bitty town about
thirty miles away. His background was hard-scrabble, a fact
he likes to hide. To his credit, Frank went to college, in Butte,
I think, then straight to the phone company after he graduated with an engineering degree. His rise wasn’t
