Off the Clock - Страница 3

Quietly, he moved back into the hallway, and began a more thorough search of the house. The downstairs den proved to be the jackpot.

Quinn had to admit that when he first saw the guy at the restaurant, and was told by Natt that Nick was a “bad man,” he’d assumed Nick lived in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere, probably in Hollywood, worked as a salesman at an electronics store or someplace similar, and spent his free time trolling the Internet or hassling women like Ice.

The first crack in that theory had been when Nick drove off in the Mercedes. The second had been the house itself. By then, Quinn’s theory had evolved into Nick having a trust fund and living off the money of others. It turned out he was both right and wrong.

Not a trust fund. A wife.

Dr. Carol Meyers. She was apparently some kind of vascular specialist. There were plenty of diplomas and certificates of honor and the like hanging on the den’s walls. There were also pictures. Quinn assumed the woman in each was Dr. Meyers. Nick was in many of them, too, smiling beside her. The others in the shots were probably dignitaries. There was even one or two Quinn recognized.

He sat down at the desk and woke up the computer, pleased to see there was no security screen he’d have to hack. He wasn’t the best computer wiz in the world, but simple civilian password protection? Easy.

He opened the calendar first and noted that Dr. Meyers seemed to be on the road a lot. Before he got too far, he found a pad of paper in a drawer, ripped off the top sheet, and started jotting down pertinent dates, account numbers, the doctor’s cell phone number and email address, and anything else he thought might be of use.

According to the calendar, Nick’s wife was nearing the end of a trip that had kept her away for two weeks. Which meant she’d been gone the night Ice found the doctor’s husband nude and in her small apartment kitchen, cooking her dinner. According to Natt, he didn’t touch Ice that night, telling her they still needed to get to know each other before they could be intimate. That was the word Natt used. She said she and Ice could only guess what it meant at first, and had to ask an American friend to confirm it. Since the night of Nick’s visit, Ice had stayed at Natt’s place, not once going back after she had left.

Quinn didn’t ask Natt why her friend hadn’t called the police. He knew Ice was in the country on a student visa and was taking language classes down on Wilshire Boulevard. But a student visa meant she wasn’t supposed to be working. She was probably worried that if she called the police, they would find out somehow, kick her out of the country, and do nothing about her stalker.

Whether that would have actually happened didn’t matter. It’s what Ice believed.

Quinn heard footsteps in the upstairs hallway. He reached into his backpack, pulled out a black stocking cap, and pulled it over his head until the built-in mask covered his face. This was his hometown, after all, no sense in taking any chances of being identified. He then continued looking through the computer.

In the Recently Viewed list of the machine’s photo software, he found several files that didn’t seem to link to anything on the hard drive. He leaned back and thought for a second, then gave the room another look. He identified eleven spots that would be decent-to-excellent hiding places. The five best he discounted as ones Nick would have never thought of, then began checking the other six.

He found the small, portable drive in the fourth spot, tucked inside a folding chess set sitting on top of a bookcase. As he inserted the drive into the computer, he could hear the careful steps upstairs retreating to the bedroom. It wouldn’t be long now, he knew.

The drive was password protected. Not a surprise. Fortunately, the software used was the weak, off-the-shelf variety. Something more robust might have been beyond Quinn’s abilities, but this he could hack into in his sleep.

The drive’s directory opened as the steps returned and headed slowly down the stairs. There were two dozen folders, but only one — marked “Old Reports”—contained actual files. Forty-three to be exact. Quinn opened them all together, then the muscles across his cheeks tensed, and his eyes narrowed.

Nick was the only one in the pictures. They appeared to be taken in bedrooms, no two the same. The bed, fully made, was always behind him, and he was always nude. None were taken in Nick and his wife’s house. From the way they were composed, Quinn guessed they were self-timed shots, taken before whoever lived in the home knew Nick was paying them a visit.

So Ice wasn’t his first.

Quinn thought it was a pretty good guess, though, that the others were women who’d balk at calling the police, too. Immigrants or others in compromising positions. He quickly accessed one of his anonymous servers over the Internet and began uploading the files.

He was watching the status bar when Nick rushed through the door, his gun held out in front of him.

“Don’t move!” Nick shouted.

Quinn stared at him a moment, then returned his gaze to the computer. “You going to shoot me?”

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Checking a few things.”

Quinn’s obvious distain seemed to confuse Nick. He hesitated, then said, “Get away from my computer.”

Quinn held up a finger, still looking at the screen. “Hold on.”

“Get away from my computer!”

Quinn held his position. A few more seconds passed, then the computer dinged.

“There. Done,” Quinn said as he smiled and leaned back. “What was it you wanted?”

“What did you just do?”

“Copy some files.”

Nick’s face started to turn red. “What files?”

“A few old reports.”

“I’m calling the po—” He stopped in mid-sentence, the reality of what Quinn just said sinking in. “What old reports?”

“Didn’t you say you were going to call the police?”

“What old reports?”

Quinn stood up.

“Stay where you are!” Nick told him.

Quinn moved around the desk, forcing Nick to back toward the door.

“Stop!” Nick shouted as he wrapped both hands around the gun.

“That’s good,” Quinn told him, not doing what he was told. “Get a steadier shot that way.”

“Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger.”

Quinn kept coming forward until he was just a few feet beyond Nick’s reach, then finally halted. “Then do it.”

Nick looked at him, his eyes wide and scared, his nose flaring with each breath.

“You’re brave enough to break into women’s homes and make yourself comfortable,” Quinn said. “Here, in your own place, pulling the trigger should be a snap.”

Nick’s mouth dropped open. “Wha…wha…what did you say?”

Quinn’s hands shot forward, grabbed the gun, and twisted it out of Nick’s grasp before the guy even knew what was going on. Two steps forward and Quinn was standing nearly chest to chest with Nick, the muzzle of the gun now pressed against Nick’s temple.

“Should we see if I’m willing to take the shot?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Nick said, trembling.

“Good.”

Quinn paused for a moment. He had been thinking a nice, intimidating chat would keep Nick from paying Ice a return visit. The pictures changed everything. These unclothed visits were obviously a pattern, something not easily broken no matter how much Nick might promise never to do it again. Something that, if it hadn’t happened yet, would one day cross into a potentially deadly area.

Quinn pulled the gun away, flipped it around in his hand, then whacked it solidly against the side of Nick’s face.

* * *

“Hey! Hey! Help! I need help!”

The asshole’s screams meant he’d finally regained consciousness.

“Help!” Nick yelled again, repeating it over and over.

Quinn waited for the last item to finish printing from the computer, then carried the small stack of papers through the house to the central bathroom.

Nick was right where Quinn had left him — standing in the shower, his hands bound together with duct tape and secured over the top of the shower nozzle. Quinn had stripped him down to his underwear and wrapped his ankles together, too.

As soon as Nick saw Quinn, he stopped yelling and squirmed against the wall as if he were trying to push himself through the tiles.

“How you doing, Nicky?” Quinn said.

“What do you want?” Nick asked, terror oozing out of every pore. “Money? I don’t have a lot of cash in the house, but you can have my ATM card. I’ll give you the code. Or take anything you want. Okay? I won’t call the police, I swear.”

Quinn stared at him blankly for a moment. “Are you done?”

“What do you want?”

Quinn turned away from him and set the stack of papers on the sink counter, then one by one began taping them to the mirror. These were the ten best shots — if you could call them that — of Nick’s trophy photos. The eleventh printout was a photo of Nick and his wife.

“Does Dr. Meyers know about your hobby?”

The shock in the man’s eyes confirmed that she didn’t.

“Well,” Quinn said, “she’s going to now.”

“No,” Nick blurted out. “Please. I promise…I promise I won’t do it again.”

“Save your breath. I know you won’t.”

Nick looked confused. “Okay, um, then, uh, then there’s no problem, right? You’ll just let me go, and won’t tell my wife. Yes?”