door and flung it open. With a mumbled apology, she hustled past the visitor waiting outside on Ali’s front porch.
“That was Athena, my son’s fiancee,” Ali explained to B. Simpson, who stood there with a roll-aboard computer case stationed behind him. “They had a bit of a disagreement.”
“Nothing too serious, I hope,” he said.
“No,” Ali said. “I think Athena and Chris both have a case of new-engagement jitters.”
“If this is a bad time and I’m interrupting, I could always come back later.”
This whole encounter was one Ali dreaded, but it had to be done. “No,” she said. “Come on in. Let’s get this over with.”
One by one, the last few stragglers left the building. Finally, there was no one left but Matt, who sat there agonizing about Detective Holman’s phone call and struggling to understand how this unforeseen disaster had come to pass.
In the movies, earth-shattering events happened with the hero stranded on steep, rocky cliffs overlooking roiling seas. Matt had always loved those black-and-white romances from the thirties in which star-crossed lovers would dine together in high-class restaurants where they could say their bittersweet goodbyes, all the while sipping high-toned cocktails or champagne. But Matthew Morrison was no movie-worthy hero. He was just a regular Joe whose downfall had started months earlier in the checkout line at his neighborhood Lowe’s.
He had gone there after work with Jenny to pick up some gardening supplies and flats of annuals, mostly petunias and snapdragons, for the pots she liked to keep blooming out on the back patio. As they left the store, Matt did what he usually did: He scanned through the receipt. When he spotted the error-an eighty-seven-cent overcharge on the bottle of slug bait-he had turned on his heel and marched back into the store and back to the cash wrap to have the clerk set it right. It was an error; it needed to be fixed.
As per usual, Jenny was in a hurry. She had been for as long as Matt had known her and for all of the eighteen years they’d been married. She had followed him back into the store, berating him all the way. Despite the long line of strangers at the checkout, she had kept after him the whole time, bitching him out, screeching at him that “only an anal-retentive auditor would waste his precious time and mine for eighty-seven goddamn cents!”
Matt had prided himself on being a good husband. For the whole time they’d been married, he had been unfailingly faithful to Jenny, even though she’d made it clear from the beginning that no matter what Matt did, he would never measure up to her sainted and mercifully deceased father. Matt liked going to work. Compared to what went on at home, work was peaceful and quiet. He had hired on with the state auditor three years after they married. For fifteen years Matt had kept his nose to the grindstone, doing his important but unheralded work in a quietly efficient manner. It bothered him that when it came time for promotions, he was always pushed aside for someone younger-often someone Matt himself had trained-but he never made a fuss about it. That was something Matthew Morrison didn’t do: make a fuss.
In all those years and in all situations, he’d kept a mild-mannered smile plastered on his face and done his best to get along. With everyone. Without realizing it, though, he must have been moving ever closer to the edge. And that fateful night, as the clerk counted out Matt’s eighty-seven cents’ worth of change and with the people in line snickering at him behind his back, something had snapped. After emptying the trunk and carrying Jenny’s flats of annuals out to the back patio, he had locked himself in his home office and gone shopping at Singleatheart, a site for “married singles,” which, Matt decided, was what he was.
A month or so later, he had found Suzie Q, also a married single, separated from her husband, not interested in a divorce, but wanting to put some fun and joy back into her life. That was what Matt wanted, too-some fun in his life, although for him, it wasn’t so much putting it back in as it was having fun for the first time. Ever.
It hadn’t worked. He had never actually seen Susan Callison, had never, as they say, laid a glove on her. But as of this afternoon, his whole nonaffair with her had blown up in his face. He was convinced that Suzie Q was dead, and he seemed to be the prime suspect. Tomorrow morning the detective would be here at his office. Would that be for questioning, or would it be worse than that? Was Holman planning to place him under arrest? Right there? In the office? With everyone around them looking on? Matt’s insides squirmed at the very idea.
The janitorial crew swept through the floor. Ignoring Matt completely, they emptied trash cans, vacuumed a little, and then went away. Matt knew what he needed to do, but only when he was left alone once more, only when there was no one left to see, did Matt Morrison reach for his keyboard.
CHAPTER 10
In talking to B. Simpson on the phone, Ali had forgotten how tall he was-six feet five, at least. He wasn’t particularly good-looking. His most outstanding feature was a pair of gray-green eyes that seemed to change color depending on the lighting. There was a hint of natural curl in his short brown hair, and the smile he offered was engagingly shy.
“Can I get you something?” Ali asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I find it’s best not to eat or drink around computers.” Rather than stopping off in the living room, he headed straight for the dining room table, where he deposited the computer bag. “Mind if we set up shop here?” he asked.
“Sure,” Ali said. “Go ahead.”
He opened the case and began hauling out two separate laptops as well as a whole series of cables and power cords, which he began connecting.
“Why so many computers?” Ali asked.
“Since we have to assume our friend is monitoring your computer at all times, we’ll have to do our own file sharing via cables rather than over the Internet. Oh, and I’ll need your computer.”
With a nod, Ali went to fetch it. When she came back, she couldn’t help noticing that a subtle hint of aftershave had permeated the room. Good stuff, she thought.
B. took the laptop from her. After removing her air card, he placed it on the table, where he began connecting the computer into what was by then an impressive tangle of computer cables.
“So here’s the thing,” he continued, talking as he worked. “High Noon has been looking after your system for over three months now. Until today, other than some relatively harmless adware programs and cookies, there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary. The Trojan horse wasn’t there last night during our midnight scan, but it was there today at noon. So I have to ask you the usual cliched computer troubleshooting question: What were you doing just before that happened? Had you visited any unusual websites, for example, or did you open any attachments this morning, even an attachment from a regular correspondent, from someone you know?”
“I logged on to something called Singleatheart,” Ali said.
“What’s that?” B. asked.
“An Internet dating site,” she replied.
B. stopped what he was doing long enough to give her an appraising look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d have any reason to go looking at one of those.”
To her consternation, Ali found herself blushing at his unexpected compliment. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me. I was doing it for a friend of mine.”
That sounded lame, she thought. Totally and completely lame.
“Right,” he said, then returned to his cables.
Bob and Edie had left Ali with the impression that B. Simpson was something of a recluse. She wondered if that was true or if it was simply what he wanted people to believe.
“How much do you know about what goes on in town?” Ali asked.
“Not very much,” he admitted with a shrug. “I’m more in tune with what’s out there on the Web than I am with what’s going on down the street. Why?”
“I have a contractor who’s working on my house,” Ali said. “My new house. His wife, Morgan, was murdered earlier this week, and now Bryan’s fallen under suspicion. I learned that his wife had been involved with this Singleatheart website. That made me curious. I logged on because I was trying to find out why a happily married woman would have signed up on a dating service to begin with. The problem is, you can’t go there and look around
