LITMIR.BIZ

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quiet space, and Jan shuddered in reaction, as though he’d said something vile.

      “In the office.” She led the way across the floor to the small room in the back that, for someone else, would have been the bedroom. Two glass-topped desks filled the space; one laden with monitors and decks, the other at a right angle to it, holding only a laptop and a three-level filing box that was stuffed to overflowing with papers.

      The security guy went over to the first table and started unplugging one of the decks from the monitor. She watched him, making sure that he only was interested in the ones with the university’s name stenciled on the side, and then went over to the laptop.

      The rest of the tech was for work. The laptop was where he’d done all of his personal stuff. If there was a message for her, or some clue she was supposed to follow, it would be here. She put her pack down on the floor and sat down in his chair. And then she didn’t move, staring at the fifteen-inch silvery square in front of her.

      “All right, that’s it. Thanks for your help.” The guy had the deck under his arm and was having trouble meeting her gaze. “I...hope everything works out.”

      She stared at him, not quite able to parse his comment, and then just nodded absently. “Yeah, thanks.”

      She heard him leave, the door closing firmly behind him, while she stared at the laptop. Taking a deep breath, she lifted the lid and woke it up.

      The wallpaper was the same it had been the last time she’d seen it: the two of them, heads together, trying to fit in front of the webcam while he hit the button, smiles bright and about to break into giggles. If he was going to break up with her, he would have changed his wallpaper, right?

      “Dammit, Ty....” The security guy’s pity was like salt in the wound she’d been trying to ignore, and her worry ignited into anger again. “What the hell are you up to? If you’re secretly working for the CIA or something and went off on a top-duper-secret mission, I’m so going to kill you myself.”

      The idea of Tyler—gawky, geeky, gentle Tyler—as a CIA anything made her close her eyes against sudden tears.

      “You’ve been reading too many thrillers, Jan,” she said, trying to channel some of Glory’s tartness into the scold. “This is real life. In real life, the CIA doesn’t recruit quality assurance tech-heads who can barely handle English, much less any other languages.”

      Although, yeah, he could have been hiding a facility for Arabic and French and Chinese from her...but she didn’t believe it. Tyler could strip down a webpage and rebuild it to be fabulous, and put together a gourmet three-course dinner out of whatever was in his kitchen, and he was pretty damn inventive in bed. But sneaky? Sneaky wasn’t in him.

      “So, then, where is he?” He wouldn’t have gone without a word, unless he was hurt, maybe had been injured somewhere else? But he always carried his ID with him, his photo ID and emergency contact, ever since he’d gotten hit on a bike when he was a kid, he’d said, so if he were in a hospital the cops would have known....

      She was dithering. Jan straightened her back, aware that she’d fallen into an uncomfortable slump over the laptop—she was five-six, he was five-ten, so his desk was the wrong height for her comfort—and opened the most obvious place to look: his personal calendar.

      Typical organized Tyler: work events in blue tabs, social in green, and their dates were in red. Her finger traced the weeks, stopping when she came to the day he disappeared. Then she backtracked one. There was a yellow tab.

      A doctor’s visit, maybe? Tyler didn’t like doctors, hated going to the dentist.... Maybe he’d not told her because he was trying to avoid thinking about it, and something had gone wrong....

      No. If he walked away from his job, that wasn’t...

      The thought stopped her again, as if someone punched her in the stomach. He’d left his job. Without a new one being offered? Another thing that wasn’t like Tyler: he worked remotely because that’s how the job was, but he liked the familiar aspects of it, the steady paycheck and security. He wouldn’t just walk away without a new job in-hand.

      Had he gotten another job and not told her?

      Thoughts of the CIA surfaced again, and to push them away, she clicked on the yellow tab.

      Stjerne, 10pm, l’coffeehouse

      She didn’t know any Stjerne. She hadn’t known he’d known any Stjerne, either. Not that that meant anything. It was an odd name—Norwegian, maybe?

      “Steh-gerne,” she said out loud, and shook her head. She didn’t remember Tyler mentioning anyone like that, either.

      Still, working remotely the way they both did in the tech field, they met a lot of people from around the world; maybe it was a coworker who was in town, and they’d met up for a late-night coffee when he’d gone off-shift? That would be the kind of thing he wouldn’t mention until after the fact. “Oh, met this guy, Stjerne, works for an outfit in Holland. Drinks beer for breakfast...” Yes. That made sense. And maybe...

      What had happened, when he’d had coffee with this guy? What if this Stjerne was a serial killer? Had other people gone missing recently? Had the cops been alerted? Would they even notice, or care?

      Even in her worried state, that was too much for Jan. “If there was a serial anything in town, the cops would have paid more attention when you called about someone going missing—and every local newsfeed would be screaming, and the university would have held a press conference, or something. Get a grip. Losing your boyfriend is no reason to become an idiot.”

      Switching tabs, she went into his email program, scanning for anything from someone named Stjerne. A contact point, she needed a contact point. Who was Stjerne?

      There. A dozen or so of them, all recent, the past week or so. Probably a coworker then, arranging a meeting while he was in town...she clicked on one at random, calling it onto the screen.

      I want to feel your hands on my skin, gripping me, pulling me, holding me like you’ll never let me go. Your mouth on me, moving lower, until my legs open, helpless, as you lap at me, tongue and fingers making me writhe and moan, calling your name to stop, never stop, Tyler, oh Tyler, until I fall over the edge...and then come back to return the favor for you, my mouth red and wet against the darkness of your skin, taking the length of your....

      Jan closed the email with a hasty jab of her finger, and closed her eyes. No. She hadn’t just seen that. It was a mistake, or someone had forwarded porn—she had nothing against porn, as a general rule, although it didn’t do much for her. That was it. He’d forwarded it to himself, maybe, or...

      His name had been mentioned. Specifically, and with lurid detail.

      That punched-in-the-gut feeling came again, harder this time, and Jan thought she was going to throw up. She fought it and stared at the laptop’s screen, the photo of the two of them, laughing like nothing in the world could ever be wrong. Her mouth worked, and she was finally able to voice her reaction.

      “You son of a bitch.”

      Chapter 2

      Jan left the keys to the apartment on the desk, right next to the still-open laptop. When Tyler the son-of-a-bitch finally wandered back from whatever had kept him three days with his online porn-partner, he’d be smart enough to figure it out.

      Or not. Right then, she didn’t give a damn. Rage and betrayal made her body shake, and once in the elevator she reached for her inhaler out of habit, although the pain in her chest was nothing like an asthma attack.

      “Son of a bitch,” she said again. “You slimy, sneaky, no-good, two-timing son of a bitch.”

      The man in the elevator with her gave her a sympathetic look but didn’t say anything, and Jan clamped her own jaw shut, determined not to let that son of a bitch get one more outburst from her.

      When

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