Page 168 of Our Little Secret

It was time to turn the damned tables.

CHAPTER 36

“Are you crazy? Brooke, it’s Christmas Eve!” Caleb Reynolds said from the other end of the connection. Caleb, her coworker at Clayton Electronics, was a security expert—the best in the business, as far as she knew—and one of her closest friends at the company. He’d been in the military, working in army intelligence for nearly twenty years before being honorably discharged and hiring on at the company. Caleb had the ability not only to fix the bugs in their own products, but he was also at the cutting edge with tech security. For Caleb there was no dead end when it came to accessing information. Brooke suspected he was a hacker of the highest order, though he’d never copped to it, and if Bill Clayton or anyone at the company suspected him of it, they looked the other way. Somehow Caleb could access all kinds of corporate and/or government files. As far as she knew, he’d never crossed that invisible criminal line. But she wasn’t sure. Tonight would be the test.

“Who asks someone to work on Christmas Eve?” She could almost see him shaking his head at her folly.

“I know, I know, but you’re not celebrating with your kids until the day after tomorrow; you told me so at the office,” Brooke whispered into the phone as the snow danced and swirled around her as she crouched in her neighbor’s backyard. Thankfully, the Bennetts’ house was dark and unoccupied, no lights burning. She’d found a thinning spot in the hedge separating the properties. From her position she was able to peek through the frozen branches to her own backyard, where lights glowed bright, reflecting in patches on the deepening snow. The woodshed obstructed part of her view, but she caught glimpses of everyone—Marilee, Neal, Leah, and Eli, even Shep. She reminded Caleb, “You said Tanisha had Kayla and Booker for Christmas. Isn’t that right? You go over to her place to see what Santa brought, but you don’t have them until the next time.”

“But it’sstillChristmas Eve,” he complained.

“Look, I’ll owe you. Big-time. It’s a lot to ask, but it’s important. Really. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”

He hesitated.

“Please?”

He muttered something unintelligible, then sighed loudly. “Okay, I know I’m going to regret this, but lay it on me,” Caleb said. “And I haven’t promised to do anything yet.” She heard a rattling of papers. “Wait a sec; let me turn on my computer so I can take some notes.”

God, it was cold. She was shivering, the wind cutting through her jacket and jeans, her lips beginning to chap, her gloves unable to shield her from the freezing temperatures.

“Okay,” he said, and she heard ice cubes clinking in a glass. “Ready.”

“Good. I need information,” she admitted. “Anything you can find on a guy.”

“What guy?”

“That’s just it. I’m not sure.”

“Hold up a minute—”

“He’s got several aliases, I think, and I’m not sure which one is his true identity. Maybe none of them. But the names I have are Gideon Ross, Eli John Stone,” she said, then realized she had no idea how many names Gideon went by. “Also possibly Jake or Jason Ross or Stone, or any other amalgam of them. I’ve got two driver’s licenses and some credit cards, and from the pictures on the licenses, you can probably do facial recognition, right?”

“Possibly,” he said thoughtfully, the wheels seeming to already turn in his head. “But we’re treading in dangerous legal waters here.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” she said again and heard a sound in the distance behind her. She stopped to listen, all her muscles tense, her heart racing. Had someone in the house seen her? Come outside in this storm? Eli? Neal?

From the corner of her eye she spied Gina Duquette pulling her sled in the opposite direction, vanishing behind the curtain of snow.

“Ask what?” Caleb said on the other end of the connection. “What is it you want exactly?”

Satisfied that she was still alone, she explained, “I just need a positive ID and a criminal background check on him. I want any accident reports, that sort of thing. Birth records, marriage licenses, divorce decrees, especially any arrest history or outstanding warrants. Anything you can dig up on this guy.”

“With the double or triple or whatever identity.”

“Yes!”

“I assume you have a reason for this?”

“God yes! My sister plans to marry this guy and we don’t know anything about him. I have a feeling that he’s conning her or worse. And now he’s in our home and I’m scared to death. Seriously.”

A pause. “I don’t know . . .” More clinking, as if he were swirling a drink as he deliberated.

“Caleb, please.” She heard the anxious tone in her voice. “I have a really bad feeling about him. I’m sure I’ve met him before and nothing about him is matching up, okay? The least he could be is a con artist.”

“And the worst?” he asked, his voice low and sober. She heard the clicking of keys and imagined him, a balding man with smooth, dark skin, a tonsure of black hair, and a trim beard. She figured he was sitting at his desk, the square lenses of his glasses reflecting what he was seeing on his computer screen.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted, remembering her near-death struggle with Gideon on theMedusa. She was suddenly as cold on the inside as she was on the outside. “I think he could be deadly.”