Chapter 3
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E lizabeth looked over to see if Dolly was on her porch, but she wasn’t. With a grateful sigh, Elizabeth raced on by.
When she and Masters were in the sanctuary of her home, he asked, “So, you didn’t want anybody to see what we were carrying, or were you avoiding your neighbor?”
Surprised at his intuitiveness, she winced. “That doesn’t sound very good, does it?”
“Not necessarily, but you told her that you would go see her. Is that something you’re avoiding?”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “I just don’t want to be asked any questions right now.”
“And yet it’s a good time to ask questions of others,” he pointed out.
“I know. I know.” She raised her hands in frustration. “But all this has stirred up something that I don’t have any answers for, so it’s making me a little touchy.” She walked into the kitchen and put on the teakettle. “You can use my laptop right there.” She pointed to it.
And, with that, he turned it on and put the USB key in.
She stepped up behind him, waiting for the files to load, so she could read the contents too. It was only one file. As it popped up on the screen, it was labeled Evidence. “Ah, shit,” she whispered.
Masters double-clicked it, and it opened to reveal other files and a lot of images. Masters clicked on one of the images.
She sucked in her breath. “Oh my God, is that a dead man?”
His voice grim, he nodded. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I don’t have any ID. I don’t have any way to confirm that at the moment,” he explained. “I’ll get back to you on that.”
“Shit,” she muttered. “What was Nicholas into?”
“I don’t know.” Masters quickly copied the contents to her desktop and saved it and then shared, “I’m a little worried about your having this.”
“It’s my brother’s, and, if he’s dead, I get everything in his estate anyway,” she stated bluntly. “And you’re not taking a copy without my having a copy.”
“And I don’t have a problem with that, for sure,” he told her. “I’m just worried about somebody finding out that you have it.”
She froze as she understood what he was saying. “You’re thinking it’ll be dangerous for me.”
“Your brother’s disappeared, and he’s worth millions of dollars. We don’t know anything about where he’s gone or why he’s disappeared. Now we find he has a hidden file called Evidence. So I think it’s safe to say, Yes, if you have this info, you could be in danger .”
She sucked in her breath and stared at him. “I appreciate the honesty,” she began, “but, right now, it would be nice if you would say something like, Hey, don’t worry about it. This will all blow over, and you’ll be totally fine .”
But he stared at her steadily and did not give her that reassurance.
She sank into the kitchen chair beside him. “I should never have found this, should I?”
“It wasn’t terribly well hidden, was it?”
She thought about it, then shrugged. “Under a piece of plywood, atop the carpet at the bottom of his closet? No, yet, in a way, yes. It was all filed, very methodically, like he is,” she noted. “I would have expected him to have his things in order, one way or another. When he went missing, I called. I cried. I even got lawyers involved to get somebody to give a shit. The fact that Nicholas was one of the navy’s own investigators just meant that they had locked everything down.”
“And yet I’m getting the idea from you that maybe they didn’t lock anything down.”
Elizabeth added, her voice rising, “Look at how much time has been wasted, when they could have been actively looking for Nicholas. Maybe they didn’t do any investigation.”
Masters held up a hand and clarified, “That I can’t confirm. I just know that I don’t have full access to the investigation yet.”
She shook her head. “And that’s bullshit.” He smiled as if appreciating her fury, but she wouldn’t be appeased by something like that. “My brother deserves everything the navy can do for him,” she declared, trying hard not to rant in his face. “He’s a good man, and he needs help. He’s either alive and needs help, or he was alive and needed help, and nobody was there for him.”
“And you shouldn’t feel guilty for anything he’s gone through,” he stated firmly.
She snapped, “Of course I’m not guilty.”
His lips twisted.
“Yet somehow I still feel guilty. Right. I know. I know. I know,” she murmured, as she buried her face in her hands.
After a moment he grabbed her fingers and gently squeezed them. “Look. The files are transferred. I want you to hide them on your laptop somewhere or move them to cloud storage. Then delete this copy and restart your computer. Anybody who is any good with computers could still retrieve these files,” he explained. “You’ve got to understand that. But you don’t know anything about what’s on them, and you need to keep it that way, right?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I didn’t like anything about what you mentioned earlier. However, I will get a handle on his financials.”
“Good. You do that part,” he said. “And give me a heads-up when you get through it all.”
“I will,” she replied. She watched as he got up to leave.
Then he turned and suggested, “Hopefully you’re having a nice cup of calming herbal tea right now and not more coffee.”
She looked over at the teakettle. “If I was doing coffee, somebody should just shoot me now,” she muttered. “Coffee is my absolute favorite all-time drink, but maybe not right now.”
He smiled and nodded. “Just checking.”
“I’m not that far gone,” she muttered. She got up and walked him to the door, knowing that he had the USB key in his pocket, and she had the rest of the physical documents. “Do you think the documents are safe here?”
“No. My suggestion would be to put it all in a safe deposit box. At least until we can get through this. If we ever get his body, or we find him, you’ll need those documents just to make your legal case,” he explained. “So, be safe and take care of everything.”
“Got it.” She sighed. “You do realize I won’t sleep tonight now.”
“Neither will I. Neither will I.” He turned to face her. “I know you don’t need my number because you’ve got it in your phone already, but please make sure you’ve got a way to find my card in case you lose your cell or something,” he suggested. “Call me if there’s any problem.”
“And when you say, any problem ?” she asked, letting her voice trail off, studying his face.
“Any kind of problem. For all I know they’re watching you right now, and now that they’ve seen me come here twice, they’re wondering why.”
“Maybe you should take everything then,” she offered suddenly.
He frowned. “Are you that nervous?”
“You’re certainly not doing anything to relieve that nervousness,” she snapped.
“True,” he muttered. “Do you have a safe deposit box?”
“I do, but I would have to get through the night in order to get this paperwork somewhere safe tomorrow,” she explained, trying for humor, only to have it fall flat.
He hesitated. “So, how nervous are you about staying here alone tonight?”
She winced. “I wasn’t before.”
“And now you are,” he noted, with a nod. “Okay, so how do you feel about an overnight houseguest?”
She stared at him. “Seriously?”
“You tell me. I’m fully prepared to stay here and to sleep on the couch, so you can get a good night’s sleep. Then we can get those documents to the bank first thing in the morning,” he shared. “I also think you should be quick to put it all into a digital format, so you have that proof too. It’s quite possible that, if Nicholas did invest in some of these companies, and he did make that money, maybe he also owns shares in those stocks, and people want his shares back. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it, except that, right now, we’ve got a problem. Thus I would feel a whole lot better if all this was backed up somewhere.”
“Well shit,” she muttered, staring at him.
He nodded. “So what’s the decision?”
She didn’t even know what to say.
He nodded. “And your silence then is a decision.”
“What decision?” she asked, with a note of humor.
“The decision is, I’m staying, so you need to put more water in the teakettle.”