Page 29 of Misdirection

When she leaned toward the peephole and peered outside, her lungs froze, and she realized her headache was not even close to being gone.

Olive tucked her gun into the drawer of the hallway table. Then she ran a hand through her dark, curly hair, trying to appear put together.

Finally, she pulled the door open and scrunched her eyebrows together. “Duncan?”

“Olive . . . sorry to stop by uninvited.” Duncan shifted, the bags under his eyes bigger than usual. Not only that, but his shirt was wrinkled and his tie loose. He looked rough.

Very unlike Duncan.

“Come on in.” She extended her hand behind her.

As Duncan stepped inside, Olive glanced in the hallway to see if anyone else was there.

An empty hallway stared back.

She closed the door and turned to her temporary boss, still on edge about his presence here. “Can I get you something to drink?”

He rubbed his chin. “Actually, some water would be nice.”

She grabbed a glass and filled it with filtered water from a pitcher on her counter. Then she handed it to Duncan and watched as he took a long drink.

She directed him to a small table in the kitchen, where they sat across from each other.

Olive waited for him to start. If Duncan had come here, he had a good reason.

“I wanted to check on you.” Weariness etched his voice. “I know it couldn’t have been easy to find Beau the way you did.”

Olive nodded slowly. “It was shocking, to say the least. But I’m okay.”

“I don’t know how someone got a gun past security or why they targeted Beau. Maybe they were after some information, and Beau got in the way.”

This man was on the verge of a breakdown. This had to be about more than just Beau, right? Olive’s best guess was that someone went to get information from the SCI corridor when Beau appeared, making Beau a casualty.

“Did you notice anything missing?” She crossed her legs, carefully choosing her words. “I’m sure the police have asked you that also.”

“Jason and I have been combing through things, trying to figure that out. So far, we haven’t discovered anything missing. But that doesn’t mean that someone didn’t take pictures of some of our documents . . . documents with critical information on them.”

Olive swallowed hard. “That’s unfortunate.”

He ran a hand over his face again. “To say the least.”

“Did you check the log to see who entered the corridor?”

“Something happened to the log. It was erased.”

She blinked. That meant that whoever had killed Beau knew his or her way around the computer network. That meant he or she knew their way around the building, around the company’s operations, around security.

This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill criminal. This person was highly intelligent, driven, and motivated.

She shifted in her seat, trying not to appear overly anxious. “What about security footage?”

“Also tampered with.” He slouched back in his chair as if tired of holding himself upright. “We’ve often been targeted. Many people want to get their hands on the technology we develop.”

“That makes sense,” Olive murmured.

“I’m trying to figure out if there’s a better way to keep this top-secret information secure. The SCI corridor is an industry standard. But now I’m wondering if there are still holes that would allow the area to be breached.”

“Any ideas yet?”

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