Free The Enemy Inside by Steve Martini

to ask you, one of the lawyers handling Olinda’s estate at the firm asked me if she kept a spare key to her house anywhere at the office.”
    “You mean her place in Georgetown?” said Vicki.
    “Yeah. She didn’t own any other property, did she?”
    “No. She stayed in town almost every weekend, unless she was traveling on business. A key, let me think. . . .” Preebles put a finger to her lips, the long shapely nail against the red gloss of her lips a little smeared from their recent antics.
    “We’ve looked but haven’t found one,” said Proffit. “They need to gain access in order to inventory the property at the house.”
    “Of course. I understand. If she had one, it would be in the big partner’s desk. The oak antique against the wall in her office.”
    “We’ve looked there. We didn’t find anything.”
    “You wouldn’t,” said Preebles. “There are hidden compartments all over that thing. It’s like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes. You know, the kind with sliding wooden compartments and hidden drawers.”
    “Yeah,” said Proffit. “I had one of those when I was a kid.”
    “Anything she didn’t want you to find she put in that desk.”
    “Really?”
    “Emm. You know you need a secretary,” she said. “Why can’t you just assign me to do that? After all, you are the boss,” she said.
    “You’ve seen these compartments?”
    “I have.”
    “How many are there?”
    “I didn’t count them.”
    “How big are they?”
    “Big enough for a key,” she said.
    “But not papers?”
    “I thought you were looking for a key?”
    He gave her a look as if to say, “Stop with the bullshit.”
    “I suppose it would depend,” she said.
    “On what?”
    “On the form these papers were in.”
    He looked at her, a big question mark.
    She chose not to read it. “Tell me you don’t need your own personal secretary and I’ll stop bugging you.” She stirred under the blankets and rolled away from him as if she were about to get up.
    “OK, I could probably use a secretary,” said Proffit. “I admit it.”
    She stopped with one naked thigh already out from under the covers, settled back down, looked over and gave him the smile of victory. “If the papers were on a thumb drive they’d easily fit in one of the little hidey-holes in that desk.”
    “Did she use a thumb drive?”
    Preebles nodded. “She wore it on a lanyard around her neck, hanging down her top where you couldn’t see it. I saw her hide it in the desk on a few occasions when she was dressed in something where she couldn’t conceal it in her clothing. But never overnight and never when she left the office.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I checked,” said Preebles. “That’s why you hired me, wasn’t it?”
    He nodded.
    “I noticed that she used it mostly after certain phone calls and never on the office line. Only her cell phone. She’d talk and then take it off from around her neck, plug it into her computer, save whatever it was she was typing to the thumb drive. Then she’d take the drive out of the machine and put it back around her neck. Mostly it was like columns of numbers. She never let the little drive out of her sight. I assume it probably went up in the flames with her out in California,” said Preebles.
    Proffit couldn’t afford to make that assumption. “How is it that she allowed you to see all this?”
    “She didn’t know I was looking.”
    “What were you doing, hiding under her desk?”
    “On the bookshelf behind her,” said Preebles. “What they call a pinhole camera. It’s wireless. They sell them at the spy shop here in Washington. It showed up in a little box in the upper right-hand corner of the monitor to my computer outside her office. It had pretty good resolution. If you expanded to the full screen you could read the monitor on her computer. But I didn’t want anybody to catch me doing it.”
    “Good thought,” said Proffit. She’d gone way beyond the call of