“Boyfriend,” Donald said, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “Please… you don’t want to do this.”
The man seemed to relax and lowered his weapon. “Shit,” he said. Then he gestured for Donald to step into the living room, waving him in with the gun. “Get the hell in here, but turn on the light first.”
At the sight of the man relaxing and lowering his weapon, Donald did as he was told, still deadly afraid. He stepped forward cautiously and flipped on the light to the living room. With the living room now bathed in light, he caught a better look at the intruder and his fear started turning to curiosity as the man replaced the handgun somewhere at the small of his back beneath his shirt. The man turned to the sofa and sat down.
“What’s going on?” Donald asked, standing near the entrance to the kitchen and the living room. Behind him the dining room was still dark, as was the rest of the house. “Why… are you looking for Michelle? What’s going on?”
“When’s the last time you spoke to her?” the man asked. He was sitting on the sofa, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. Donald saw that the man’s forearms were tattooed.
“Last night,” Donald said automatically. What he wanted to say was, who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house? But he didn’t; the instinctual urge to do something to protect himself and his property was momentarily paralyzed.
“She didn’t call today?”
“I don’t know. I was seeing patients all morning and was in surgery this afternoon. I haven’t had a chance to check my messages.”
“Check ’em now.”
“Who are you?” Donald was feeling a little more bold now that there wasn’t a gun pointed at him.
“My name’s Jay,” the man said. “I met Michelle Monday evening in El Paso.”
Donald knew who the man was now. He remembered Michelle mentioning him on the phone a few nights ago. Something about Jay suddenly no longer being with the company she was consulting for; she’d feared he was let go due to something he’d said at a bar the night she met him. “Michelle mentioned you to me,” he said. “Something about she met you Monday, went out with a group of your co-workers and that you didn’t show up to the office the next morning and she later learned you were let go.”
“Yeah, that’s me.” Jay O’Rourke glanced out the window quickly, as if checking to see if the house was being watched. “And I don’t have much time to explain shit, so you’ll have to trust me. Okay?”
“Where’s Michelle?” Donald asked.
“Check your messages. Let’s see.”
Donald pulled his cellular phone off the clip on his belt and flipped it open. “There’s a message,” he said. He pushed a button, brought the phone up to his ear and listened. His eyes met Jay’s briefly and he nodded. When he was finished listening to the message he punched another button and folded the cellular phone up. “That was her. She must’ve called when I was in surgery. I didn’t have the phone with me then and I didn’t get a chance to check my messages. I was so wrapped up with what was happening.”
“What did she say?”
Donald didn’t know if he could trust Jay, but something told him Michelle had trusted him. She’d certainly spoken favorably of him the other night, and she rarely had nice things to say about the people she worked with. She either spoke neutrally of them or negatively. If she’d spoken well of somebody that meant she really liked them. That convinced Donald. “She said her boss called her when she was at the airport in El Paso and told her she had to go to Chicago this weekend on another project. She sounded upset. She said her boss met her at the airport in Harris-burg with her flight arrangements, a corporate credit card, and materials for the project. She was just about to board the flight when she called.”
“Shit!” Jay muttered.
“What’s this about? Why are you here? And how the hell did you break into my house?” For the first time since meeting Jay, Donald felt himself growing angry.
Jay groped for his breast pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I need a smoke. Mind if we step outside? I’ll tell you all I know there.”
“Yeah, sure.” Donald’s curiosity grew, as did his fear. “Is… she’s not in danger, is she?”
“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I don’t think so. I dug Michelle the minute I met her, and it’s rare I meet somebody in her position and like them automatically. I think she’s fine, but she’s not going to know what the hell’s going on and that concerns me.”
“She’s in some kind of danger, isn’t she? Does it have something to do with her job? Is she involved in some kind of corporate scandal?”
Jay looked up at Donald and put his finger to his lips. When he answered, his voice was low. “Outside,” he said. He rose to his feet, placed a cigarette in his mouth, and headed through the darkened dining room as if he already knew the layout of the house, and opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard. And Donald, still stunned from finding Jay in his home and having a gun pointed at him, could only follow him outside.
Donald slid the back door shut softly as he joined Jay on the patio. Jay lit a cigarette and took a drag. “I needed that. I haven’t had a smoke in three hours. That’s how long I’ve been in your house waiting for her to come home.”
“How’d you get in?” Donald asked. It sounded like a stupid question; he should’ve been pressing Jay to tell him what the hell was going on.
“Side door of the garage,” Jay said. “Sorry. The deadbolt’s shot to shit now. I had to snap the lock to get in.”
“Couldn’t you have just walked up to the house and knocked on the door when you saw me pull up?”
“I didn’t want to chance that,” Jay said. He took a deep drag and exhaled second hand smoke. “I didn’t know if the place was bugged or not—it isn’t, by the way. I made a sweep of the house when I got in and it’s clean.”
“Why would you think my house is bugged?”
“Because I found out my place was bugged Monday night when I came home from the Lone Star.”
“How…” Donald’s mind was spinning, trying to connect the dots. “I don’t understand.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” Jay O’Rourke’s voice was low and he seemed to be an entirely different person now as he leaned close to Donald. “And I wouldn’t have noticed if Julie, my wife, hadn’t mentioned that our phone line was acting up. She was up when I came home Monday night and mentioned it to me, and I had to call a buddy anyway, so I tried the phone. And there was this echo, kinda faint, but I could hear it. I hung up the phone and slipped out the back door to where the dmarc is on the side of the house. I checked the line and there it was. A bug.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “I took it off, went back into the house and picked up the phone again and called somebody else, another friend. No echo. I knew something was up, but I didn’t want to scare Julie. She went to bed and I spent the rest of the night tearing the place apart and found more of ’em stashed under furniture and pictures in every room of the house, even the bathroom. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.”
Donald said nothing. He took it all in, wondering what this was leading to.
“The next day I faked being sick so Julie wouldn’t worry. She took Danny to day care and went to work, and I called in sick and finished tearing the place apart, looking for more bugs. I checked my computers, ran spyware programs, and did some debugging and found stuff planted on my computer. I blasted those out. I started getting paranoid, tried calling Michelle but got her voice mail. I didn’t want to leave a message, didn’t know if I could trust the cell phone. So I drove over to the hotel she was staying at, since I’d heard from Brian that she was staying at the Hampton near the airport. I knew one of the other Corporate Financial guys was staying there and—”