Page 21 of Tiger on the Prowl

Fox tossed him a curious look. “Do I wanna know what and why?”

“No, you don’t.”

Fox smirked. “You horndog!”

Jay flipped him the bird and left the computer room.

In the kitchen, Jay was surprised to see that Phoebe was already up. She wore a nightgown and a bathrobe over it. It was open in the front, her pregnancy belly too large for the bathrobe to fit her. For a moment, he just looked at her belly and envied Ace. He would have a family soon.

“Morning, Phoebe.”

She turned her head and smiled at him. “Good morning, Tiger. You’re back.”

“Yeah.” Jay walked to the coffee machine and started making coffee.

“Didn’t go well, did it?”

“More like the opposite of well,” he confirmed.

“Hmm.” Phoebe seemed to understand that he didn’t want to talk about it. She went to the refrigerator, took a bottle of water from it, and left the kitchen.

Jay took his time to make coffee. He poured two cups and went back to the computer room. Fox wasn’t alone anymore. Michelle sat at the computer station next to his and was typing on the keyboard. When Michelle tossed him a regretful look, he knew that Fox had filled her in.

“Hey,” Jay said and handed one cup to Michelle and the other to Fox.

“But that was meant for you,” Michelle said.

“No, no, take it. I’ll get myself another one,” Jay said and went back to the kitchen again. When he returned with his cup of coffee, Fox motioned him to approach.

“Got something?”

“Yes,” Fox replied. “I first checked Olivia Morikawa’s tax returns. And her only income stems from a K-1.”

“A K-1?”

“Yes, it’s a form that a partner or member gets from an LLC. So I looked into the LLC. The only money the LLC makes comes from payments from one company, a publisher named Clarendon Press. One of their biggest authors is T.R. Harland. But I wanted to make absolutely sure that the payment was indeed for Harland. I was able to hack into their accounts. Honestly, they have really crappy online security in place. And I found the disbursements they made to Harland. They match the checks that the LLC received. So, yeah, Olivia told you the truth. She is T.R. Harland.”

Jay sighed, relieved that she wasn’t a psycho killer, but annoyed that he hadn’t checked her out more thoroughly before he’d initiated contact with her. “Thanks, Fox, Michelle.”

Michelle forced a smile. “And you can’t really blame her for reacting the way she did when she saw you going through her stuff. There really are people out there who’d pay good money to leak her manuscript. From what I’ve read, some of the more established authors in her genre are annoyed that a newcomer is bumping them off the number one bestseller slots. She’s pumped out six books in three years, while the others only publish one a year. I think there’s a lot of jealousy going around. They want her to fail.”

“I get it, I do. I just wish I’d known earlier. These are mistakes I can’t come back from.”

“What now?” Fox asked.

Jay shrugged and walked to the computer with the surveillance videos. “We have to keep watching the cottage. My premonitions are never wrong. Smith will show up there. In my premonition it was daytime, so let’s concentrate on keeping an eye on the live feed during the day, and as long as we have the manpower, at night too. We have to be ready for it so we can figure out who he really is. Once the cameras in the house record his face, we can run it through facial recognition. Maybe we’ll get a hit.”

But first, Jay had to erase part of the recording. He found the spot where he entered the cottage the night before and had sex with Olivia in the foyer. Seeing himself and Olivia kiss and touch brought back every second of the previous night until the moment when she’d tossed him out of the house. His finger hovered over the delete button, but he hesitated. Erasing the recording of what he now knew was the last time he’d ever get to touch Olivia was harder than he’d thought. The tape kept replaying until the living room camera captured Olivia’s face after Jay had left. Tears were streaming down her face, and the sobs made her chest heave.

Jay stretched his hand out toward the monitor wanting to console her. But he couldn’t. He pressed the delete button, and wished that he could erase Olivia’s pain just as easily.