LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 4

      On Friday Liv was late for work and caught the stink-eye from Paul de Fore as she hurried through Zuma Software’s front door. She’d almost parked her car in front of the building instead of the employee lot on the west side, just to save time, but she sensed that might come back to bite her somehow, so she backed into her usual spot and walked around to the front, taking the heat from Paul as she strode quickly to her desk. Paul had no serious authority to admonish her, but that never stopped him. She listened with half an ear for his footsteps, expecting him to follow after her to give her a good tongue-thrashing, but he got tied up at the door when Jessica Maltona slipped outside for a coffee on an unscheduled break.

      “Hey,” he yelled after her. “You can’t leave without authority! Mr. Upjohn will hear about this!”

      Definitely a tool.

      Liv ducked down below the half-wall of her cubicle, switching on her computer and locking her purse in the drawer as she settled into her rolling chair and wheeled up to the desk. She laid down the package from her mother, eyeing the manila envelope thoughtfully as she waited for the machine to click and burp its way to “ready.”

      It was the envelope that had made her late, or more accurately, the contents within. She’d pored over the pieces again this morning while she was drinking her coffee and the time had swept by so quickly that she’d looked up at the clock and gasped, and then raced to the office.

      Was the stalking, angry man in the photo Hague’s zombie, and therefore the person the police had dubbed Deborah Dugan’s Mystery Man? Was he her mother’s friend? Her lover, maybe? Why was he in the photos? And what was its meaning to Liv?

      What did she know about her mother, really, she asked herself now. Only vague childhood memories that had been tainted and colored with time.

      About lunchtime Aaron came around her partition and rapped his knuckles on her desk while she was on the phone with a supplier missing an invoice. She shook her head at him, and he motioned for her to meet him outside. Nodding, she waved him off, and as soon as she finished her call and hung up, she grabbed her purse from its locked cabinet, got up from her chair, straightened it, threw a glance at the package which she’d now stuck in the slot of the message holder at the side of her desk, then turned—and nearly ran smack into Kurt Upjohn, owner of Zuma Software.

      “Hi,” Liv said in surprise.

      “Are you leaving?” he asked.

      Upjohn was a short man with a tight mouth, a smoothly shaved head and one earring. He wasn’t all that bad looking, but he was always filled with tension, like a coiled spring, and it invariably made Liv feel uncomfortable.

      “Just . . . getting ready for my lunch break.” She picked up her mother’s package and stuffed it into her purse, deciding she didn’t want to leave it at her desk after all, then slung the purse strap over her shoulder.

      “Kinda late for lunch.” Upjohn frowned. He liked his employees to take their meals at noon and be back at one P.M. sharp, one of his personal quirks that didn’t seem to be grounded in anything that made sense.

      “I’ve been running late all day,” she admitted.

      “Phil said he gave you the financials from last quarter. . . .” He sounded cautious, his brows pulled together.

      “Um, no. I don’t think so. I haven’t seen them.” And why would he give them to me, anyway? Liv thought. Phillip Berelli was Zuma’s internal accountant whereas she was an inputter, not an analyst.

      “Okay.” He seemed relieved. “Maybe he said something else.”

      Liv lifted her shoulders and after a moment Upjohn walked off. She’d heard rumors about Zuma, about how they could be in financial trouble, but if they were she didn’t know anything about it. She had pieces of the financial mosaic, but getting the whole picture was way above her pay grade.

      She’d heard other rumors as well, though. Like how Zuma’s war games were so accurate and well thought-out that there was some military connection—the think-tank guys upstairs being secret government employees—and that Zuma Software itself was merely a cover.

      Even with her paranoia, Liv didn’t buy that one. She’d seen the guys upstairs when they came out of their locked room, walked down the stairs, and passed by her with barely a look as they headed out the front door. Invariably, their conversation made her feel like she was listening to the goings-on inside a thirteen-year-old boy’s mind; mostly they talked about other games and popular movies and their eyes darted quick looks at Jessica Maltona’s breasts when they thought she wasn’t looking. Jessica was the only other woman on the main floor with Liv. Count in Aaron, Paul and Kurt Upjohn, and that was the extent of the business staff, except for Phil, the accountant, whose office was upstairs with the game builders.

      Aaron was just stubbing out a cigarette when Liv opened the unlocked exterior door and met him on the side patio. “Man, this place is boring,” he said, punctuating his statement with a yawn.

      Liv merely nodded. Her mind’s eye wouldn’t stop going over the papers from inside the package whenever she had a free moment. The birth certificate named her biological parents. She’d never known who they were. Hadn’t really cared. But now she wondered if she should make an attempt to meet them . . . like maybe that was important to Deborah? Did that sound right? It was much more likely that her mother had just wanted Liv to have the information in case anything happened to her. . . . Maybe she was toying with the idea of suicide when she’d made up the package? Or, maybe she’d sensed something else . . . something coming toward her . . . something—

      “Hey.”

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