Free Hiding in Plain Sight by Valerie Sherrard Page B

quite happy with him. They’d broken up once before, around my birthday, which was on June 11, but that hadn’t lasted twenty-four hours.
    On a selfish note, it was great for me, too, because Greg and I double-dated with them sometimes. You know how it is when you have a best friend and aboyfriend and you want to spend time with both of them but you can’t always work it out, and then some-one feels left out? That’s never been a problem since she’s been seeing Derek.
    We talked for a few more minutes and she said she was going to wait for a few weeks to see how things went before making a decision. She left for her place then, and I hurried home to have a good look at the file.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    T here wasn’t much in the file that was new information to me. Mainly, the evidence repeated the things I’d already been told, like that the window was broken from the inside to make it look like someone had come in that way and that Mrs. Thompson was the only one (at that time) who had keys to get into the offices, as well as the only one who had the safe combination.
    I dialled the Thompsons’ phone number. It rang three times.
    â€œHello, Mrs. Thompson?”
    â€œYes, dear. Did you want Betts?”
    â€œNo, actually, I wanted to ask you something.”
    â€œOh. Well, go ahead.”
    â€œLast summer, when you went on holidays, some-one must have had the keys, right?”
    â€œYes. Darla would have had them, just as she does this year. She always fills in for me.”
    â€œWhat’s to have prevented her from making a second set?”
    â€œOh, I see where you’re going with this. No, I’m afraid that won’t work. You see, we have the main lock changed every three months for security reasons. The locks are always changed within a week of my return from holidays. On top of that, they would have been changed again several times since then. The keys in use right now were almost brand new when the robbery occurred and no one other than myself had them at any time.”
    â€œYou never leave them anywhere that one of your staff could just pick them up casually and go somewhere quickly to have a copy cut?”
    â€œAbsolutely not. I know this probably doesn’t help me, but that’s one thing I’m particularly careful about. Those keys are on my person all day. In fact, I wear them on a key belt. First thing I do every morning is clip them on to that. For someone to get a copy, why, they’d have to take me along, too.”
    â€œDo you keep a spare set somewhere that someone might have discovered?”
    â€œThere
is
a spare set, but no one knows where it’s kept, and accessing it without me finding out about it would be almost impossible. It’s not even kept at the office.”
    â€œOkay, well, I just thought I’d check on the whole key thing.” I did my best to keep my voice neutral, but I admit I was feeling pretty disappointed. I’d thought I’d hit on something important that might help clear Mrs. Thompson, but it was more likely to help the prosecution!
    â€œWhat about the safe combination?” I almost did-n’t want to ask, in case it further strengthened the case against her. Still, I had to know.
    â€œThe safe combination … oh, I guess you want to know if someone else has it while I’m away, and so forth. Well, actually, no. When I’m on holidays, anything that needs to be locked up is kept in Darla’s filing cabinet in a small, fireproof lockbox. It’s not nearly as secure, but in spite of the measures we take to protect our data, theft isn’t really all that usual. A person would have to know what was in development and when it was functional before they’d know which disks would be worth stealing.”
    â€œWhat if you
forgot
the combination to the safe, or…?” I hesitated, not really wanting to say what I’d been thinking.
    â€œI keel over and