AllFreeNovel
Share Us
• • •
He ordered in breakfast.
In case someone had followed them here, why go somewhere public?
He’d considered throwing away her cellphone—he was almost sure Bianca’s stalker had planted a GPS program in it—but it was too late for that. If he was right and her stalker already knew her location, it was too late to eliminate that knowledge. Besides, tossing the phone out would simply alert the stalker to the fact that they were on to him.
Besides, Chay had a better plan for the phone.
So he ordered orange juice, coffee, toast, scrambled eggs and bacon. The waiter set things up on the table in front of the window, and they sat down to eat.
Bianca said she wasn’t very hungry. He knew that all the talk of stalkers and stalking had probably taken away her appetite. It hadn’t done much for his, but experience had taught him that you ate when you could, so he downed some eggs and bacon, and encouraged her to at least have some juice and toast.
Then he got a pad and pencil from the desk and they got down to business.
He asked her to go through the last few hours of the rainy afternoon at her office.
“Tell me everything that happened as you best recall.”
She did, starting with the impending storm. When she got to the part about Lacey coming in to say she was leaving, he stopped her.
“Spell her name for me.”
Bianca did. Chay wrote it down.
“Do you know her number?”
“I have it in my phone… Chay. Surely, you don’t think…”
“I don’t think anything, honey. I’m simply trying to get all the pieces of the puzzle in one place. Maybe the receptionist saw something. Or somebody. She may have a bit of data that we can use.”
Bianca checked her contacts list and gave Chay the woman’s cell number and address.
“You say the power had failed before?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the building management said they’d had the electrical system updated after that.”
“Yes.”
“Do you happen to know the name of the company that manages the building?”
“Actually, I do.” To Chay’s surprise, she laughed. “It’s Avido Management. Avido means ‘greedy’ in Italian. Dr. Epstein once mentioned the monthly rental that East Side Associates pays, and the name was amazingly appropriate. It just stuck in my head.”
“Great. That makes things a little easier.” He scrawled a couple of words more on the notepad and then he looked at Bianca. “Have you given more thought to those names?”
“Patients and study subjects?” She sighed. “Give me a little more time, okay?”
He leaned forward, cupped her chin and kissed her.
“I’ll give you until we reach Santa Barbara. How’s that?”
“That’s fair enough, I guess.”
“How about the names of friends?” Family, too, he almost said, but he could only imagine how she’d react to that. “And your co-workers.”
She frowned. “Co-workers? Well, that isn?
