“Thanks for coming,” said Rachel. “As I said in the message I left, it’s probably nothing.”
“No problem,” I said. “Worst case scenario, I get to have good crumb cake and great coffee with very pleasant company.”
She smiled, something I hadn’t seen her do before, but certainly something I hoped to see her do again. She had one of those smiles that transformed an attractive but basically ordinary face into a visage that could, under the right circumstances, be almost irresistible.
“So tell me about it,” I said.
She took a breath and said, “Okay. The night before Terry was killed, when he was telling me about how he thought he’d be getting a partnership sooner than we’d expected, he was holding a computer disc in his hand. I don’t think I was even aware of it at the time, probably because I was so thrilled at the prospect of his being a partner, with all the extra money and prestige and everything. Then, yesterday, I was going back over that scene, trying to picture it in my mind, and suddenly I remembered the disc.”
“And what’s the significance of the disc?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Rachel. “I mean, I don’t know what was on it, but why would Terry be holding onto it the whole time he was telling me about the partnership thing? This may sound silly, but, looking back on that conversation, I just have this feeling that, for Terry, there was some kind of connection between that disc and the partnership offer.”
“And where’s the disc now?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “That’s the reason I called you. I don’t know where the disc is. After Terry and I finished talking that night, I took Sammy out for a walk, and when I got back, Terry was in the shower. When he left for work the next morning, I know it wasn’t in his briefcase, because over breakfast he was reviewing some documents, and he asked me to put them back in his briefcase for him while he got his suit coat from the hall closet. There wasn’t much in the briefcase, just a few other papers. I’m almost sure I’d have remembered if that disc had been in there, too.”
“What about in his suit coat?”
“I’d just picked it up at the dry cleaner the day before,” she said. “It wasn’t even out of the plastic bag. Terry never wore his suit coats or sports jackets while driving. He always hung them on hangers in the back of the car, so they wouldn’t get wrinkled. He carried his suit coat out with him that morning. I suppose he could have put the disc in his coat pocket, but then I would have gotten it back from the police when they gave me Terry’s personal effects. All I got were a few things like his wallet, his watch, and his . . . wedding band.”
She was quiet for a minute then.
“All right,” I said. “Maybe he hid it somewhere here in the house. Have you looked?”
“Yes, I have,” she said. “Everywhere that I could think of.”
“Do you mind if I try?” I asked her.
“Of course not,” she said. “You’re probably much better at it than I am, anyway.”
It took me over two hours, and in the end, it was almost by accident that I found it. With Rachel’s help, I’d done a very methodical search of every room in the house, with no success. We ended up in the living room, me on the sofa and Rachel in one of the side chairs. As I sat there trying to think of places we’d missed, I noticed that the Pendletons had a Heatilator fireplace, just like the one in my townhouse. On either side of the fireplace were four narrow vertical slits, and on the wall on the right-hand side of the hearth was a knob. Once you had a fire going, you used the knob to adjust a fan that forced hot air out through the slits instead of allowing the air to escape up the chimney. The whole process simply made the fireplace more efficient at heating a room. As I looked at the slits, I realized that they were about the size of a computer disc.
Fifteen seconds later, I located the disc in the third slit I tried. Turning to Rachel, I asked, “Is this it?”
“It looks like it,” she said. “See, the label has a rose-colored background with the firm’s logo on it.”
I’d seen a computer system in one of the upstairs rooms. We went up there and booted up the disc and were asked for the password, which stopped us cold. We tried a few wild guesses, but nothing worked. Since neither of us was anywhere near proficient enough to figure out a way around the password, we didn’t waste any more time on it. On the way back downstairs, I asked Rachel if I could keep the disc.
“Sure,” she said. “If there is something on that thing that will tell us why Terry was killed, I want to know.” I thanked her and told her I’d be in touch. Then I went out to my car and started the drive back home. On the way, I thought about the disc and how I’d get whatever information might be on it. That part was easy. I’d be calling Irv as soon as I got home. I also intended to make another call, this one to the offices of Chaney and Cox.
As I pulled into my garage, I had one more thought about the disc.
It was labeled “Master Copy.”
Chapter 34
It was after noon when I got home,
