Free A Bad Day for Scandal by Sophie Littlefield Page B

crossed that one line that provoked Chrissy like nothing else.
    She’d questioned the girl’s competence. Unwittingly, perhaps; without judgment, perhaps; but she’d done it, and now there was a whole field of hot coals sizzling between them. Chrissy had taken up computer hacking a few months earlier while she was recovering from being shot up like a prize buck, and she’d spent enough of her growing-up years being told she was just a shade smarter than a stump, that she’d need to trade on her voluptuous good looks to get anywhere, that discovering her own innate technical aptitude was like a junkie discovering the powerful allure of crack.
    Chrissy wasn’t just good with computers; she was a tech goddess, a byte-whisperer, a cracker of codes, a bloodhound of networks. But on the inside, she was still dragging around the outdated self-image of a girl who barely graduated from Prosper High, who was more likely to be propositioned by her science teacher than expected to complete a lab report, whose own mother hoped only to marry her off to a boy who would support her while she started popping out babies.
    “A flash drive,” Stella said carefully, “is, like, a little old thing you stick into your computer that holds a bunch of documents on it. Or, you know, pictures.” Pictures of me beating the shit out of a scumbag in a barn, she didn’t add.
    “Uh-huh. Right. You still ain’t told me what it looks like. Bigger than a lipstick? Round? Square?”
    Stella knew she was being baited, but there was no graceful exit. She sighed heavily. “I don’t know. Um, like a, you know, plug or something?”
    “A … plug ? Stella, do you even know how to turn on your Mac?”
    “I. Uh. Well, see the thing is, you always have it on already when I come in and—”
    “Forget it,” Chrissy snapped, and started down the hall. “Once I look around in here, I’ll come back out and help you out, since you obviously don’t know your butt from your elbow.”
    Stella went to work with a smile on her face.
    They kept at it for nearly an hour. Stella worked the living room and kitchen and tiny foyer with the gloomy attention of someone who knows she is going through a pointless exercise. She didn’t want to admit it, but she felt in her bones that the drive wasn’t here. That nothing helpful, in fact, was here—no lingering trace of Priss’s presence at all.
    The beer stein that had been used to pummel someone in the head—that’s what Stella was assuming, given the hair and skin; knock someone over the head and you were going to get that particular kind of detritus—was sitting safe and secure up in Fayette, under the watchful eye of Detective Simmons’s crime scene staff.
    Otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Blooming smudges of black fingerprint powder surrounded the doorframes leading in and out of rooms, the light switches, objects on tables. A pair of chairs that looked as though they belonged on either side of the fireplace had been stacked next to the scratched old walnut hutch in the dining room. In lieu of the usual personal tchotchkes—framed snapshots, ashtrays, figurines—the tabletop surfaces featured wooden bowls of pretzel crumbs and empty beer cans and expired issues of TV Guide. Stella checked in drawers and behind the sofas and under the rugs, but the most unexpected thing she came up with was a ticket stub from a matinee showing of Lethal Weapon 2 . Which suggested nothing other than the possibility that Liman hadn’t cleaned under the rugs in two decades.
    She was about to declare the search a bust when she heard the crunch of tires on the drive outside. Chrissy must have heard it, too, because she came hurtling down the hall and grabbed Stella’s arm and yanked.
    “Tub,” she snapped, and dragged Stella into the hall bath. She tugged the door nearly closed behind them and led the way into the tub, which smelled of mildew. They stood close together behind the stiff plastic shower