Secrets in Stockbridge by Judy K. Walker

Author:Judy K. Walker [Walker, Judy K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Judy K. Walker

I didn’t want to get caught in Bran’s room, at least not until I knew how to spin it (tell the appropriate lie). That meant having a better understanding of what was going on. I left Bran’s room as I had entered—as if I belonged there—and headed back to my room to run the background check on Dana. Her last name was Thompson after all, and entering her date of birth had me looking at her report within a few minutes. There were a few variations on her name listed, not that uncommon even for honest people. Typos or odd misspellings go unnoticed and get entrenched pretty often, even where financial organizations are concerned. Of course, if you’re not an honest person, purposefully using a plausibly inadvertent variation on your name or birthdate can make it easier to hide what you do. Especially if you’re not dealing with professionals, people trained to distrust and verify. I made a mental note to run the other names, but first I wanted to skim the main report.

Dana had been hopping around Palm Beach County while James was living in Broward. That in itself didn’t mean much. A million or so people and their accompanying detritus spread like a spilled, sticky umbrella drink along the fifty-mile stretch of I-95 between West Palm and Fort Lauderdale. About eight months into James’s prison term, she showed up in the Panhandle in Panama City, then four months after that in Prattville, Alabama, just a few miles outside of Montgomery. There were gaps in time (maybe they’d show up under other names) but Dana continued to move about every six months. Where James had gone northeast, she’d worked her way toward the center line of the country. Five years ago, she made an abrupt shift and showed up in New York City, where she’d stayed for less than two years. Then she’d moved to Boston, gotten her current job, and remained there ever since. She had a lot of credit cards, most of them issued by upscale department stores. She’d missed a payment at the beginning of the year (perhaps too much Christmas), and then a few more payments several months ago. Otherwise, Dana seemed pretty stable now.

It was all pretty thin, which left me back at square one (but with added confusion and guilt, my favorite kind of square one), and back with James as my primary avenue of investigation. It was too late to check out the computer place where he worked, but maybe the police had finished up at his apartment. I looked around my room. It was just as easy for someone else to get in my room as it had been for me to walk into Bran’s. My laptop and files went into my shoulder bag, along with the baseball cap I’d removed on the drive back from Boston. Without the cap, you could pick out my flaming red hair at a hundred yards.

Heading downstairs, I felt another stab of guilt. I hadn’t spoken to Jeanette all evening.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.