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She rose and turned toward the door. “I think I’ll just go home, Nora. Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder.” She eyed the damp spot on her friend’s pajamas. “Literally.”
Nora walked her to the door. “Remember, nothing is impossible with God. Don’t count him out when you’re trying to make your decision.”
Savannah nodded and hurried toward her car. She couldn’t think about it tonight. Hez had been so final. And maybe he was right.
Chapter 22
Who was Peter Cardin, and what was he up to?
Hez stared at his office wall, mind whirring. He’d spent every free minute trying to answer that question. He’d told Savannah he would wrap up the investigation by the end of the semester, and he intended to keep that promise. Also, staying focused on the investigation kept him from thinking about her. He was lucky he’d managed to deliver his rehearsed speech, hand her the papers, and get out the door without falling apart.
Work helped him hold it together this past week. It kept his mind off the memory of her hand in his, the tropical scent of her auburn hair as she sat close to him on the sofa, the surprise in her green eyes when he handed her the papers. What else had he seen in her face? Not the relief he’d expected. Had he glimpsed something more tender? Or was he just projecting?
He shook his head and muttered, “Focus!”
He needed to keep his mind on the investigation. Thinking about Savannah was a black hole that kept trying to suck him in. He couldn’t let it.
Cardin was the key. Hez was sure of it, and his certainty grew as he worked. The personnel file Jess sent over contained a very interesting résumé. Cardin had an accounting degree from Northwestern and three years’ experience in PwC’s education group—one of the best accounting practices focused on colleges and universities—but his employment there ended two years before he started at TGU. Where had he spent that time? Prison, as Hez soon discovered. Searches of a couple of legal databases revealed that Cardin pled guilty to embezzling from clients and spent a year and a half behind bars.
Hez had asked for access to Cardin’s email account, but Jess refused. She said his emails probably contained confidential financial information about TGU students and employees, which Hez wasn’t authorized to see. She agreed to run some searches herself, but Hez almost didn’t care what the results showed. Cardin probably wasn’t dumb enough to leave anything incriminating in his work email. The important fact was that he had access to confidential financial data, which meant he could be responsible for the suspicious transactions Beckett found.
Next, Hez turned to TGU’s security cameras. He couldn’t just ask for clips for particular times from a particular camera, like he had with the Willard Treasure warehouse. He wanted to track Cardin’s movements around campus, a massive job of reviewing thousands of hours of video from over a dozen cameras scattered around Tupelo Grove. He couldn’t do that on his own, of course. He needed help, and he knew exactly who to call: Bruno Rubinelli.
Bruno was a semiretired San Francisco software genius who had founded and sold two companies before he was thirty. He spent most of his time skateboarding now, but he sometimes took on criminal cases that interested him. Hez managed to hook Bruno with the words “Willard Treasure” and reel him in with tales of Willard’s exploits and Abernathy’s murder. By the end of a thirty-minute call, Bruno had agreed to run his custom facial-recognition software on the TGU security camera video, culling it down to only clips that showed Cardin.
Two hours later, Hez had ninety-three minutes of video to watch. It mostly showed Cardin entering and leaving Jess’s office suite, but he also made a lot of trips to the history building after hours, which seemed odd. Hez jotted down a note to ask Jess about that.
His stomach rumbled, and he checked his watch: after three and he’d worked through lunch. Again. And he’d gone through all the protein bars in his desk while skipping earlier meals. Maybe Savannah had a point about him working too much.
Another rumble. “Okay, okay,” he told his abdomen.
He stretched and reached for his mouse to pause the video. Time to stretch his legs and get something to eat. The student-run café had good shrimp gumbo, and they only charged $3.99 per bowl.
He froze with his hand on the mouse. The video showed Cardin arguing with a man in the parking lot behind the history building. The time stamp was July 27, 7:34 p.m. The same day Hez arrived on campus—and the day Savannah unwittingly picked up the forged provenance documents. He didn’t recall the exact time, but he remembered the hot late afternoon sun on his back as he walked out of the building alone, and he’d had dinner reservations at Billy’s at 7:00. Had Cardin accidentally left the documents, realized his mistake a few hours later, and come back looking for them? The biggest piece of info in Hez’s view was that Cardin was wearing a gray hoodie. A strange thing to wear on a humid summer evening. Was he the man who’d attacked Savannah in the warehouse?
And who was Cardin arguing with? The man’s back was to the camera, but he looked vaguely familiar. He had light hair and broad shoulders and was tall—probably a few inches over six feet.
Cardin talked almost nonstop, and he seemed twitchy and nervous. The video quality was too poor for lip reading. He pointed at the building a couple of times, then shrugged and held his hands palms up. The other man took a step forward and Cardin cringed back.
Hez was sure he’d recognize the man if he could only get a glimpse of his face. “Turn around. Come on, turn around.”
Almost as if he’d heard Hez, the man turned abruptly and stalked off, with Cardin trailing after him, mouth still going. It was Erik Andersen.
* * *
There he was. Savannah caught her breath at the sight of Hez waiting for her in the hall outside Jess’s office. He stood studying the trophies in the display case and hadn’t seen her yet, so she let her gaze linger on his features and strong jaw. The divorce papers still sat unsigned on top of her desk, and she looked away every time she spotted them.
She should have been glad he’d taken the decision out of her hands, but she wished she’d been able to tell him how she felt.
He turned from the display case and spotted her. The skin around his blue eyes crinkled in a warm smile that curled her toes. “Good morning.” Heat flooded her cheeks, and she checked the impulse to press the iced caramel latte to her face.
He took a step toward her. “Do you have some papers for me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want all our savings, Hez. You’ll need a down payment on a house at some point. It’s not a fair division of the money left from the sale of the house.”
He shrugged. “I don’t plan on buying a home anytime soon. I don’t know what the future holds yet, now that . . .” His gaze shuttered, and he looked away.
She heard the rest of his unspoken sentence in her heart. Now that we aren’t ever going to be together. The end of their marriage was something she thought she wanted, but now that she faced the finality of a divorce decree, she couldn’t bear it. Her eyes burned with the effort to hold back tears.
