Page 35 of Once a Killer

“I’ll do that. What about Joe?”

She drummed her fingers on the weathered wood of the picnic table and her buffed nails flashed in the sunlight. He couldn’t stop staring at that thin scar on her index finger. “Joe is bitter.” She said slowly. “He resents having to work in your lab. It doesn’t feel personal -- I think he’d feel that way about any lab. He resents having to pay you the 7%. He didn’t say much about the other engineers, but I saw how he looked at them. As if they weren’t as good as he was. As if he deserved a bigger paycheck and was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get it.”

He tore his gaze away from her nails and the thin white line of the scar and focused on her words. “Joe should have concentrated on something that would have wider appeal,” Jameson said. “As it stands, his program is really only useful to NASA. They’ll probably buy it, and I think he knows that. But because they don’t have to compete with anyone to get it, Joe won’t get as much money as he could have if he’d written a program that would work for more than one agency.”

“And that’s your motive right there,” she said. “Resentment and anger. He probably thinks that everyone else in the lab will make more money than he will.”

“They will,” Jameson said. “When he joined the lab, I suggested he try to make his program more commercial. Adapt it so that other types of businesses could use it, too -- like weather forecasters. Airlines. Planetariums. The broader the appeal, the bigger the payday.”

“He wasn’t interested in that?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “He had his vision, and he was sticking with it.”

“Which is his right,” she said.

“Absolutely. But since that was his choice, he shouldn’t complain about a smaller payday for his product.”

“Agreed,” she said. “We already talked about Brewster and Hayley. So four engineers, each with a possible motive for stealing your program. All different, but I can’t dismiss any of them.”

He propped his elbows on the table and scrubbed his face. “What now?”

“You keep working on your program. It’s good that it’s already copyrighted, but try to get it patented as soon as possible. I’ll keep a close eye on your engineers during the day. See if I catch anything off. Suspicious. Anything that raises red flags.”

He slammed his hand onto the wooden table, then shook the unexpected sting away from his palm. “I hate waiting for someone else to make a move. I want to be proactive.”

“I do, too,” she said. “But right now, this is all we can do. We can start looking at the cleaners, and I’ll do that if you get me a list of their names and addresses. With your engineers? We’ll have to wait for one of them to make a mistake. And if it’s one of them? He or shewillmake a mistake. They always do. No one’s plan is perfect. There are always holes, and my job is to find them.

“Once we get more information about the guy driving the black SUV, I can dig into that, too. Someone is paying him, and I want to know who it is.”

“Yeah,” he said, clenching his hand into a fist so hard that his nails bit into his palm. “Follow the money.”

“Exactly.” She stood up and reached for his hand. Pulled him to his feet in one fluid motion.

God, she was strong. He wasn’t sure why it was such a turn on, but it was. He wondered what she could do with her strong, toned body in bed.

Immediately banished the thought from his head. She wasn’t a woman he was dating, although he’d like her to be. But she was working for him. Off-limits. He wouldn’t get the answers to those questions.

Walking beside her, watching her head swivel back and forth, looking for trouble, he forced himself to focus on his surroundings. Another set of eyes, exactly what she’d told him to be. Nothing looked off. Out of place. Unusual.

He clicked the car open and waited for her to do her search. A couple minutes later, she nodded at him. “We’re good. Hop in.”

She chose a different route home this time, but he saw her white knuckles on the steering wheel. She was expecting an attack.

His own hands tightened into fists. When he realized it, he deliberately relaxed them. Pressed his palms to his thighs, then kept his gaze out the window. Searching, just like Bree was doing.

To his surprise, they made it back to his garage without any signs of the black SUV. As the armored car rumbled, waiting for the door to rise, he studied the alley, looking for anything out of place. Nothing.

By the time they stepped into his kitchen, his shoulders ached from the tension in them. He flopped down into one of the kitchen chairs. “Why didn’t he come after us today?” he asked her.

Bree shrugged one shoulder. “Who knows? Maybe he was doing another job. Maybe whoever hired him told him to back off for a couple of days. Lull us into complacence.” She nodded toward the front of the building. “We’ll see if he shows up in front of the place tonight.”

“You wanna bet on it?” he asked.

A tiny smile curved her mouth. “You anxious to lose another ten bucks?”

“Can’t lose them all,” he said.

“Then what’s your bet?” she asked.

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