Third Degree. Greg Iles

silly, and the possibility of him coming after Danny even more farfetched. And yet … Danny had seen enough men under severe stress to know they were capable of wildly unpredictable behavior. He’d seen soldiers do things in battle zones that no one back home would have believed—some good things, but more of them bad.

      There was no question of taking Laurel’s advice. If she was in danger, he wasn’t about to cut and run. The question was, what could he do to help her? If he shed his anonymity as her lover, he would bring about the very thing he was trying to avoid by remaining with Starlette: he would lose custody of Michael. But if Laurel was truly in danger …

      He started to text her back and tell her that she wasn’t alone, that he would solve whatever problem had come up. But she was alone, at least in the sense that he wasn’t with her. And fighting with Warren, almost certainly. One call or text message from Danny might give away everything or hurt her in some way that he couldn’t guess at.

      He trotted to his four-wheeler, cranked the engine, and wrestled the Honda onto the track that led up to the house. His chest thrummed with nervous energy. The shock of her message had been profound. He’d been dreaming of the moment that Laurel would rush into his arms. After five weeks apart, she would melt under his hands. Hell, she’d started melting in her classroom. To be ripped from that fantasy into this reality had disconcerted him. But Danny knew how to shift neural gears in a hurry. Countless times he’d been roused from dreams by a klaxon calling him to battle, or to rescue men barely clinging to life, their limbs shredded, guts puddled in their laps like bowls of pasta. His ability to adapt quickly was one reason he was still alive.

      He jiggered the Honda into his garage, hit the kill switch, and jumped off. First he needed to know where Laurel was. The school? Home? Warren’s office? He started to get his car keys from the kitchen, but stopped at the door. Danny drove a 1969 Dodge Charger he’d restored himself. Warren knew the car well, so it was useless in this context. Climbing back onto the Honda, Danny drove down to the shed where he kept his lawn equipment. He’d bought an ancient Ford pickup to make runs to the hardware store and to the nursery. He and Michael used it to tool around the property together. Michael had steered it from Danny’s lap several times, an experience akin to flying over Baghdad on a bad night. Danny parked the four-wheeler, jumped into the cab of the truck, backed out of the shed, and drove across his lawn toward Deerfield Road. As he passed his house, he considered stopping to get his nine-millimeter from the bedroom. But that would be plain crazy, he decided. Serious overkill.

      “Hold on, babe,” he said, pushing the old truck toward the paved road. “I’m coming.”

      Laurel lay silently on the great room sofa, her comforter pulled up to her neck. Warren was sitting on the ottoman he’d dragged over to the coffee table and staring at Laurel’s Sony Vaio, which hummed in front of him like a willing informer. His forefinger slid steadily over the computer’s trackpad; he was working methodically through her file tree in Windows Explorer.

      Laurel’s computer posed several risks, some minor, others grave. She kept some files on it that, while they would not implicate Danny directly, would certainly make Warren suspicious. There were stored AOL messages that could cause her trouble, but he was unlikely to see them as significant unless he cross-referenced everything he found against a calendar. But there was one thing she absolutely could not afford for him to discover—the digital equivalent of an atomic bomb.

      Laurel maintained a secret e-mail account that Warren knew nothing about. Ostensibly, they both used AOL as their mail server, and Laurel did use AOL for her “official” e-mail life: notes to friends, school announcements, and the like. But her correspondence with Danny was run through a free Hotmail account protected by a password. Laurel’s Hotmail username was [email protected]. Corny, perhaps, cribbing a digital alias from Jane Austen, but what else was she going to choose? Agent 99? Hester Prynne? The Sony was programmed to “forget” her username and password every time she logged off, but she knew that these keys to her secret life must reside somewhere on the hard drive, as did her past e-mail messages. A forensic computer expert would doubtless be able to call up that data like a boy rubbing a genie’s lamp. What Warren could accomplish on his own was open to question. He knew how to operate most mainstream Windows programs, but he was no wizard. He was patient, though. And if he was willing to hack at the Sony for hours, who knew what he might uncover? If he stumbled onto that Hotmail account or, God forbid, somehow guessed her password, her secret life would be served up on a platter—a poisonous platter that would kill Warren even as he devoured it.

      His eyes glowed with feral hunger as his fingers flew over the keys, and his orbits, almost black from lack of sleep, gave him a desperate mien. Danny had said Warren would want to believe that she’d been faithful despite evidence to the contrary, but she saw no such desire in his face now. Warren wanted only one thing: the identity of the man with whom she had betrayed him. As he punched at the keys, she noticed how unhealthy he looked. Competitive cycling had sculpted Warren into a figure of toned muscle, prominent veins, and limber tendons, but in the past couple of months, she’d noticed an unusual puffiness in his face, his neck, and even on his body. He still had heroically defined leg muscles, but he was looking soft around the edges, with a womanly sort of fat accruing around his hips and upper back. She’d assumed this was due to age, or maybe even depression, but the truth was, she’d been too self-absorbed to ask about it. Besides, Warren had always been touchy about his body, and a question like that might offend him. Looking at him now, she saw a depth of fatigue that could not be explained by a single night of sleep deprivation.

      It’s got to be work, she decided. Kyle Auster must have finally gotten the practice in bad trouble. Kyle was capable of anything, in Laurel’s estimation. He’d made it clear from the outset of the partnership that he would dearly love to sample her physical charms. And Warren stayed so busy with his patients that he might easily be duped into anything. But what exactly? Warren wouldn’t get this bent out of shape over some tax penalties. What was the next step? Prison? Surely that was impossible. You had to commit outright fraud to go to jail, and Warren would never have let Kyle go that far. She wondered, though, if the senior partner could have committed fraud without Warren’s knowledge. If so, then today’s manic persecution made at least some sense. Warren might be displacing the anger he felt at his former mentor and venting it on her. What was Warren looking for when he found Danny’s letter? she wondered. Should I ask him? Or is it safer to lie here with my mouth shut and pray that my digital secrets remain inviolate?

      With a giddy rush Laurel realized that the blank spots in her visual field were gone. The Imitrex was working. She still had the dislocated feeling of a migraine aura, but the aura wasn’t metastasizing into a headache. That could still happen, of course, and at any moment. She wondered if the imminent danger, rather than the Imitrex, had shut down her headache. Get back on point, said a voice in her head. You’re drifting. The kids will be home before you know it, and then you’re looking at a real nightmare. Even the thought made her breath go shallow.

      It was well after noon already. She couldn’t know exactly how late it was without checking her cell phone, which was what she used for a watch these days, and that was buried in her pocket. She considered asking Warren the time, but asking questions would only emphasize that she wasn’t free to get up and walk into the kitchen. Trying to gauge elapsed time was tricky under stress (she remembered that from her labor with Grant), but she figured that in two hours, more or less, Diane Rivers would drop Grant and Beth off at the end of the sidewalk. The children would race up to the front door, unaware that their father was waiting inside with a loaded gun.

      I can’t wait for that, she decided. I can’t bank on talking Warren around to reason before the kids get home. Because I might not be able to talk him down. She stole another look at his eyes, which tracked across her computer screen with laserlike precision, sucking up every character on the screen. He’s not going to stop until he finds out what he wants to know. And he’s not going to accept innocence until he’s turned over every goddamned rock he can find. Even then, will he believe me? Once somebody begins to doubt your honesty, wiping away suspicion is almost impossible. That’s why people never survive public investigations. Some of the mud always sticks, justified or not. And in my case, it is. I’m