‘Erm, Darnell, you’re showing brain.’ The detective shot up and looked down, quickly covering himself with his towel. He mumbled an apology before covering his face with his hands. ‘Listen, you can stay here as long as you need. I have a spare room, although it’s a single bed, but feel free to use it. Better than sleeping in the cold. Winter is on its way and you won’t survive the streets when it comes.’
‘Thanks, Vanessa, I might have to take you up on that. Although hopefully I won’t be around too much longer. I better find somewhere to live.’
‘She’s pretty hot-headed, she didn’t even give us a chance to explain. I see why you two got on so well.’
‘She’s always been like that. I know I’m no better.’
‘Jasmine will come round, I assure you.’
‘I doubt it, not after what she said about Indiana. How could she possibly know? Are you sure you haven’t told anyone?’
‘No. Nobody. No offence, but I don’t want this coming out any more than you do. I have a reputation to uphold and sleeping with my co-workers won’t exactly put me in a good light. The women’s movement isn’t moving any faster than the black movement; I already get the accusations of sleeping my way to the top without them having any evidence for it. So no, I haven’t told anyone about this, Darnell.’
‘I get it. Take your career out of it for a second. Personally, why would you tell anyone? I mean, look at me.’ Darnell feathered his palm up and down, showcasing the package which was on offer. ‘I would’ve told you about the bag in Indiana.’
‘No you wouldn’t,’ Vanessa said. ‘Because we wouldn’t have got that far.’
‘Right.’ Darnell forced a smile and nodded.
‘And it really wouldn’t have made a difference to me.’
A ringing from Darnell’s cell phone distracted their awkward exchange. The mumbles of ‘yes sir’, made Vanessa believe that it was their boss. She rolled her eyes with a ‘what now’ stance.
‘I have to go to the precinct. The Commander wants to see me,’ Darnell said as he hung up. He stood up and Vanessa arose too, collecting her belongings into a handbag.
‘I’ll grab my files. Have they found something?’ Vanessa asked optimistically.
‘No, there’s no need for you to come. He just wants to see me.’
Darnell got dressed and left the house, leaving Vanessa to feel rather vulnerable. Why did their boss just want to see Jackson and not her? Were they not working together on this case? She already felt inferior with Darnell’s experience.
She decided to crack on to overcome her anxiety by looking over the limited clues which they’d built up. An A4 sized brown envelope with her name on it remained unopened, which she’d picked up from her desk before escaping the precinct. Inside a disc labelled Lincoln fell out. She lifted out her laptop and slipped the disc into the drive. On the disc were spreadsheets with the names of employees and contractors from each Lincoln site, compiled together by their analytics team. Vanessa used a VBA script to combine the sheets together and read over the colleague data. She’d learned the trick from an old boyfriend, who was a programmer for a national internet provider.
Now with all the data together, she filtered the information by employee name to see if there were any trends between the sites. There were thousands of names over the decade which had been provided. There was one name of a person who appeared to have worked at each site except for Oak Ridge within the past year. That individual was named Patrick Burns.
She picked up her cell phone and made a call.
Chapter 18
Detective Jackson waited in his manager’s office for the commander to arrive. He felt sick, wondering why he alone had been dragged into the office. There had been numerous requests from Commander Hill like this over the years, and none of them had been good. Usually he was invited after he had managed to screw up yet another case, most recently with Chuck Cunningham. The daunting feeling of a meeting with his boss reminded him of waiting in the principal’s office in Springfield High after playing truant.
School was never of interest to him. He hated the fixed routine and obligation to sit still for six hours as teachers, who thought they knew it all, yelled at him for his lack of concentration. His parents were invited in on a weekly basis for discussions with the school’s leadership team regarding his behaviour and constantly reminded him that he’d never achieve anything more than being a waiter at Wendy’s if he continued to misbehave. How wrong they were. Darnell would love to go back and tell the school that he once saved the President’s life and was now working on the biggest security breach in modern history. Even if he had managed to fudge it up.
The office that Hill worked within was small and impersonal. Most employees kept a photograph of their families or pets on their desks, but not Hill. He kept his home life at home. Few knew if he even had a family. Some suspected he was gay, but Darnell knew otherwise. He bumped into him with a woman and a stroller in a supermarket once but hid behind a display of beans before his boss caught sight of him. He didn’t like seeing him at work, never mind in his personal life.
The only element of personalisation in the office was the framed MBA certificate from Yale, something which made his subordinates, when out of earshot of their manager, joke that he attended that
