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I smiled as I booted up my laptop and sat down at my desk.
I had several emails in my inbox, but it was the one from security I opened first.
Dear Mr. Crawford,
As requested, please find a list of employees with access to Mr. Luke Crawford’s office.
I opened the attached file and scanned the names. There were probably a dozen on this list. Not too many. We could easily question most of them in a day or two.
My eyes caught a particular name.
Peter Stevens.
Is that a coincidence? Had to be. Laura had never mentioned knowing anyone at Crawford Corp.
But that familiar feeling stirred in my gut. This time, I pushed it away.
Don’t fuck this up again, Ryan.
She isn’t hiding anything.
I repeated these words as I entered Peter Stevens’s name into my research database.
I got a hit.
I clicked on the profile, and a picture popped up. Staring back at me was a man. He had Laura’s wide mouth and her eyes.
What the fuck?
Furiously, I opened another browser, this one a police background check. I have a few friends in the department and they set me up with a username and password.
I typed in the name Peter Stevens and held my breath. But the list of priors started rolling in.
He had been arrested more than twenty times. Breaking and entering, drug possession, drug dealing, and battery, all several times over for nearly fifteen years. Reviewing the dates, I realized that the last offense was more than ten years ago.
Crawford Corporation has a strict hiring policy. But if there’s been no criminal activity for at least ten years, we do not hold a potential employee’s past against them.
Maybe this was all just a coincidence.
But wasn’t Laura holding a brown paper bag when I saw her earlier? And she was just outside the janitorial staff room. Was there cash inside the bag? Drugs?
Christ!
She didn’t appear to be on drugs, but I’d been fooled before.
God, not again. This could not be happening again.
I called security.
“Hello?”
“This is Ryan Crawford. There is a brown paper bag on the seventh floor near the staff room. I need someone to bring it to me. Do not open the bag, as it may be evidence.”
“Got it.”
I paced my office, my breathing erratic, as I waited for security to fetch me the bag. I didn’t trust myself to go. In the temper I was in, if I ran into this Peter Stevens, I didn’t know how I would react. Push him up against a wall? Threaten him? Either action would land me in a jail cell, and I needed to sort this out.
I would not be fooled again. No fucking way.
