Angelina Bonaparte Mysteries Box Set Nanci Rathbun (i love reading books txt) 📖

work closely with someone who was too close-minded to do less.” I rubbed my hands together. “Let’s go see what Spider can make of this.”

Chapter 7

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows. — Robert Frost

The drive to Delafield from downtown Milwaukee took us along I-94, past the distinctive retractable dome of Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, and on to the suburbs, exurbs and, eventually, the small towns and villages that would one day be swallowed up in the Madison-Milwaukee urban corridor.

“Angie, what are you going to tell Marcy?” Bobbie asked. “About the Beltran alias, I mean.”

Tell the truth and shame the devil, Aunt Terry always said. “I made a personal oath when I started my business to adhere to a strict policy of openness with clients. They hire me, I tell them the facts. Then they learn to deal with them. She deserves to know, although it won’t be an easy conversation. Not to mention, she might know something about Beltran. Where Hank came up with the name. What significance it might hold for him.”

I turned into the long driveway of Spider’s home. “People who disappear are often found because of things they’ve held onto from their past. Names, photos, even old IDs. That’s one reason why I considered enticing Hank to come out of hiding with a rare Star Wars item for sale. He was such a fan, Marcy told me. In the end, though, I didn’t want to be accused of fraudulently advertising something I didn’t have. Reputation is everything in this business.”

We approached a farmhouse with a huge six-bay garage and parked on the circular drive. Spider greeted us from the doorway and ushered us into the kitchen, a charming blend of glossy granite, stainless steel and dark wood. “Angie, Bobbie, this is my wife, Magdalena, and our son, Joey.”

Magdalena’s smile revealed a charming dimple on the right side of her face. She stood about five-five, and despite an advanced pregnancy, her bone structure indicated she was normally petite. Her long, dark-brown hair framed startlingly green eyes. “Welcome to our home. Please, come in.” She turned back to Spider. “Len, querido, I have coffee prepared and some cookies.”

Spider’s legal name was Leonard Aloysius Mulcahey, a good Irish boy. He put his hands on her belly and said, “She’s supposed to stay off her feet, but guests must be fed.”

“Pfft. Baking cookies is nothing.” Looking toward Bobbie and me, she said, “I know you are here to work, so I’ve placed things in the office.”

Joey, a miniature Spider, with his spiky dark hair and moving eyebrows, jumped up from a Legos play table and approached us, clutching a Lego Batman. “My mommie’s cookies aw the best. She uses weal sugah and buttah, ’cause you don’t skimp on dessuht.”

I smiled. Joey obviously had a little problem with his Rs. Hunkering down to his eye level, I said, “I agree, Joey. Dessert should definitely be made with all the real ingredients.”

He nodded, suddenly a little shy. Returning to his Legos construction, he placed Batman in the Batmobile and vroom-vroomed it around the table.

“Thank you, Magdalena, for going to all that work,” I told her. “It smells delicious.” Bobbie nodded.

Spider hung our coats on a large wooden coat rack. “Let’s head upstairs,” he said.

At the end of a long hallway, he leaned down to look into a small rectangular box, mounted on the wall outside a door. “Iris scanner,” he said. “Knows if you’re alive, so pulling a Demolition Man won’t work.”

I shuddered, remembering the scene where Wesley Snipes escapes from a futuristic prison by gouging out the warden’s eyeball and holding it up to a retinal scanner. The door opened and Spider ushered us into the windowless room.

‘High tech’ was not high tech enough to describe Spider’s office. Electronic equipment was stacked on shelving on two sides of the room. Locked cabinets lined the other two sides. A large desk with a massive natural-plank top, sanded and finished to a glossy shine, dominated the middle of the room, with two smaller workstations flanking the desk and its tryptic of display screens.

We gravitated to cookies and coffee, placed on a small rolling stand near the door. Joey was right. Magda did make delicious cookies!

Spider pulled a couple of side chairs over for us and settled in the executive desk chair. “So let’s look at this email,” he said.

I showed him the phone image of the password.

“I guess he did love her,” he said.

Huh? “How do you get that from this password?” I asked.

“It’s Leet, Angie. Computer geek-speak, where you substitute symbols and numbers for letters. Like L-zero-V-three for ‘love.’ But this is a step up in complexity.” He typed the password into an empty text file and then, symbol by symbol, showed us his interpretation:

0

O

//

N

1

L

’/

Y

u

YOU

^^

M

@

A

|2

R

c

CY

“‘Only you, Marcy,’” I read aloud. “You can look at that more than one way, Spider. ‘Only you,’ as in ‘you’re my only love,’ or ‘only you,’ as in ‘you’re the only one who should read this.’”

He rolled back in his office chair and grimaced. “I should have seen that. Jeez, is all this domesticity turning my nasty, suspicious brain to mush?”

Bobbie laughed. “Don’t worry about that, Spider. I took it the same way you did. Angie has a bit of a trust issue.” I raised an eyebrow and he hurried to add, “But that’s a good thing when it comes to the business.”

While we waited, Spider accessed S-Mail from a search engine called Duck Duck Go. “It doesn’t track your searches, so no one can find out where you’ve been online. Of course, it’s a little irritating to have to retype favorite sites, but that’s the price you pay.”

The S-Mail site resembled Gmail. Spider entered Hank’s supposed username and password and we held a collective breath until the inbox displayed. One message waited, with a Subject line of “For My