Deadly Valentine Read online

  Taylor’s life had never been the same, but Heather’s father had gone gray practically overnight. And had turned into the now fifty-three-year-old man who had channeled his grief into his work and ended up a bigger success than anyone would have ever believed.

  She knew he’d give it all up in an instant to have his daughter back.

  It wasn’t something they dwelled on now, sixteen years later, but it made their relationship different than anyone else’s in the office. He was demanding of everyone, which was accepted because he pushed himself harder than all of them, and because he was also eminently approachable and reasonable. But only from her—and his wife, Claire, who was like a second mother to Taylor—did he accept concern and gentle suggestions that he slow down a bit.

  “I mean it, Taylor,” he said now, his voice quiet and almost grim, another oddity. “This cannot leave this room.”

  She waited just long enough to show him she understood that whatever it was, this was different, special, before she nodded. “All right.”

  “I need you to compile a list of every employee who’s left WhitSys, for any reason, and include those reasons.”

  Her first thought was that it would be a relatively short list; people were generally happy here. The pay was good, their work respected and their ideas listened to. Most departures were for other reasons, unrelated to any job dissatisfaction. And they were a small company, so that limited the number as well. But they had been in business for eighteen years, so if he wanted everyone who’d ever left—

  “Taylor?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking that there aren’t all that many, relatively speaking.”

  “I still need them all. Even the ones before your time.”

  She’d been seventeen when he’d taken her on as an intern. She had just finished her twelfth year, her third as his executive assistant, and had no desire to go elsewhere. She wasn’t a tech head herself, but she loved being around it all, watching innovation happen. And she loved the challenge of helping him run this place, and the satisfaction of taking as much of the administrative load off her boss as she could, freeing him to do what he did best, innovate.

  “The early records are on the old system,” she said, thinking rapidly. “I’ll have to pull the backups to search. That may take a bit of time.”

  “I need it as soon as you can get it. Everything else can wait.”

  The urgency was different, too. Unless he was hot on a new idea, he was usually more laid-back. She took her cue from that and stood up.

  “I’ll get on it immediately. You’ll have it before I leave tonight.”

  “Thank you. It’s nice to have someone I can wholeheartedly trust.”

  He sounded worried, and as she walked back into her own office to get started on his request, she was thinking that had been a very odd thing for him to say.

  She wondered why he would think there were people here he couldn’t trust.

  She wondered if he was right.

  That thought unsettled her for the rest of the day.

  Chapter 2

  “H ey, elf.”

  Taylor grimaced. And here I forgot to wear my pointy ears, she thought sourly. She knew her size, her slightly upturned nose, and her short haircut invited the comparisons, but that didn’t mean she liked it. Especially on an already challenging morning. And from people she barely knew.

  And, she admitted to herself, from people that made her uncomfortable. And the nerdy Angus Kincaid did exactly that.

  Normally she would just avoid him, but when his cubicle was directly opposite her office, and she had to pass it every time she came or went, that was impossible. She was just in no mood this morning. It had nothing to do with the Valentine’s Day; it had taken her until much later than she’d thought to compile that list of ex-employees. None of their current workstations liked the old software they’d once used, and she’d had to dig an old, discarded computer out of a back room and get it running in order to load the software and read the backups with the older personnel data.

  Although the list had been short, with some names she knew—including one she had her own unpleasant memories about—and more she didn’t, it had still been nearly nine o’clock when she’d finally finished. Oddly, J.W. had still been there himself; in the early days, he would stay until all hours, but for the past five years or so, he’d truly been trying to follow her and Claire’s advice and ease up.

  But no matter how he annoyed her, her weariness wasn’t Kincaid’s fault. Nor was it his fault she would likely have another late night to look forward to today; J.W. had the big meeting with several potential retailers scheduled, and while she wouldn’t be present in the room, she would be in her office in case he needed anything. Then again, it was better than sitting home alone on the detested Valentine’s Day.

  She paused by Kincaid’s cubicle, trying to think of a way to tell him to drop the nickname without coming off too harshly. He was new, after all, and she couldn’t expect him to learn everyone’s idiosyncrasies and preferences in less than a month.

  “Taylor will do.”

  He’d jumped up when she stopped, but now looked sheepish as he stared down at his feet, clad in scuffed work boots beneath baggy khaki tan pants and a baggier, grotesquely garish Hawaiian shirt. The clothes seemed to go with a certain slackness of face and jaw, which had been one of the first things she’d noticed about him. All in all, it wasn’t a pretty picture. The dress code was casual around here, but he’d tipped over into sloppy. Poor guy really was clueless.

  “Sorry, Ms. Burke,” he said, so apologetically she felt like an ogre. At least he seemed to be trying, getting here even before her most mornings. He just didn’t seem to manage to turn that time into anything useful. And whined about doing it, which irritated her no end.

  “Taylor,” she repeated. “Ms. Burke only if you must. Just not elf.”

  “Oh.”

  With an effort, she reached for some of the tact that was usually closer to hand.

  “You want to be called Kincaid, I don’t want to be called elf. Seems a fair trade.”

  “Uh…yeah.” He gave her a sideways look, or at least she thought he did; it was hard to tell through the thick lenses. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

  “What I’d like,” she said, “is—” she stopped herself before she told him exactly what she thought of his job performance so far “—a large dose of caffeine,” she finished wryly.

  “You should try the Big Cup over on Front Street. They have a great caramel macchiato with enough espresso to wake you right up.”

  Her nose wrinkled. She’d never gone in for things that took longer to order than to drink. She was sure some of them were luscious, but she preferred to stick to simpler tastes and use the money she saved for other things. She got teased about it, but she stuck to her guns. And now she wondered how you afforded such extras if you’d been perennially out of work, as Kincaid purportedly had been.

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said neutrally, and hastened to get to the safety of her office. She definitely should have stopped for that coffee, she was clearly in a mood beyond snarky this morning. She didn’t hate the guy, but something about him bugged her. Seriously. And it wasn’t just his geeky exterior and slacker attitude.

  She had her hand on her office doorknob when something she’d seen out of the corner of her eye belatedly registered on her not-yet-fully-awake brain.

  She whirled back around and looked. But the paper she’d seen on his desk wasn’t there, and Kincaid was industriously working at his keyboard. Or pretending to, unless he was the fastest typist known to mankind.

  She walked back to his cubicle.

  “What was that list you had?”

  He didn’t look up for a moment, as if she’d gone from worthy of deference to not mattering as much as whatever he was typing. His pace slowed, though. She stepped sideways to get a look at his monitor, to see what he’d been doing. She caught a glimpse of a program screen she didn’t
recognize before it was replaced with the company logo.

  Hiding some computer game? she wondered. While J.W. was okay with a certain amount of that—they were a tech company, after all—Kincaid was hardly on the creative side of things.

  “List?” he said when he finally looked up at her. Odd, she hadn’t noticed until now his glasses were slightly tinted. Most who needed them wore antiglare styles, for the computers, but this was more. She could barely see that his eyes were blue.

  “The page that was on your desk a moment ago,” she said, wishing again she’d stopped for that hit of caffeine on her way in. She thought she had said it kindly enough, yet something flashed in his eyes and changed in his demeanor. She’d noticed it before, that quick instant of focused alertness that seemed at odds with the rest of him. But it was gone so quickly she thought she’d imagined it.

  “Oh.” The sheepish look again, this time accompanied with a nervous gesture she’d noticed before; he jammed his fingers into his hair and rumpled it even more. No wonder it looked like it had been cut with a weed trimmer.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s a list of people for a party I’m having. Am I in trouble? I know I shouldn’t do that here, but my computer at home is screwed up, and—”

  And again he managed to make her feel uncomfortable.

  “You’re in early. Not like it’s company time. Yet.”

  “My…Mr. Whitney, he said I could. But I know you’re the enforcer around here, so if you say no, then—”

  “Never mind,” she said, turning on her heel.

  Boy, he was…something, she thought as she headed once more for her office. She wondered what a party he’d throw would be like. Would people come in costume, like the Goth bashes Carrie occasionally went in for? Dress as their favorite comic book or video game characters?

  At least they’d be out at a party, more than you can say, she muttered inwardly.

  She shut the door behind her, chastising herself for making assumptions based on appearance. Hadn’t she just gotten upset with him for doing the same thing to her?

  Enforcer?

  Better than the Terminator, she supposed. With a sigh she dropped her purse on the desk and reached to boot up her terminal. She could only hope he would eventually be better at his job than he seemed now. Their distribution process needed some work, by somebody who could find and fix the glitches. And that section was one of her responsibilities, so she had a vested interest in seeing it running at top efficiency.

  J.W. must have hired him for a reason, she told herself. It had to be her fault she couldn’t see it.

  And she was sure she’d just imagined that the paper on his desk had looked exactly like her very confidential list of former employees.

  Chapter 3

  “M ay I ask you something, sir?” Taylor said as she added his last assignment to the priority list she kept on her smartphone. She’d already finished the biggest task on the list—putting together the individual presentation folders for the big meeting later this afternoon—so adding another wasn’t a problem.

  J.W. smiled, as he always did when she called him “sir.”

  “Sure, pixie.”

  She didn’t grimace at that one. She didn’t mind it at all from him. Because they had history. He’d pinned the teasing nickname on her long ago, when she’d been the never-still child who spent nearly as many days in his home as in her own. Since Heather had spent the other days in Taylor’s home, it had worked out about even. He and her father had even put a gate in the backyard fence between their houses, they were back and forth so often.

  He didn’t use the old nickname often here in the workplace, only when she got formal with him, a subtle reminder of their long-shared and marred-by-tragedy history.

  The memory of live-wire, bright-eyed Heather, the one who was going to be her best friend forever, tightened her throat. They had been as close as sisters, in fact in some ways much closer, and had promised to stay that way for life.

  And in a way—a sad, awful sort of way—they had. For Heather’s life, anyway.

  Taylor gave herself a mental shake. “Sorry,” she muttered.

  “Don’t be,” John said, his voice so soft that she knew he realized exactly where her mind had gone. “It’s important to me to know she’s not forgotten.”

  “Never,” Taylor said vehemently.

  Heather had been Taylor’s first experience with death, and the fact that it had been her best friend had made it all the more horrific to her fourteen-year-old mind.

  “I was so young,” she said, “I never realized until years after it happened how painful it must have been for you to be around me.”

  “It was,” Heather’s father admitted, “in the beginning.”

  “You must have hated that I was there and Heather wasn’t.”

  “I can’t deny Claire and I floundered for a while. But we never blamed you for being alive, Taylor. And it wasn’t long before being around you was the only thing that gave us any peace at all.”

  They left it at that, both knowing that to go further would likely result in a breach in emotional walls that would disrupt the whole day. They reserved that for Heather’s birthday, when her family and what was left of his gathered in her honor and shared the happiest memories they had of the lost girl. Just as happy, bright Heather would have liked.

  “Now what did you want to ask?” John said, moving on before Taylor could.

  “Angus Kincaid,” she said.

  “Oh.” He looked, for him, ill at ease. Even wary. He seemed to hesitate before going on. “Problem?”

  “Not really. It’s taking him a while to get up to speed, but…”

  She trailed off, not sure how to ask what she wanted, not sure if she should. But the memory of that piece of paper on his desk nagged at her. If it had been some list of his own, why had it had a note in green ink in one margin? The same green ink she used for notations, to differentiate from J.W.’s red?

  “Not everybody can take off from the starting gate like you did, Taylor. You’re one of a kind.”

  She was flattered by the compliment, but had the oddest feeling he’d said it to distract her from the subject of the new hire. It didn’t sit well with the even odder feeling she had; he almost appeared guilty about something.

  But she went along, for the moment. “I had the advantage of having practically grown up here.”

  “That, too.” He smiled at her. “Smartest thing I ever did, taking you on as an intern all those years ago.”

  “Smartest thing I ever did was asking you to. I love working here, always have.”

  “It shows,” Whitney said. “You’re my good right hand, Taylor.”

  “Thank you. But about Kincaid…”

  John sighed. And when he spoke, he didn’t look happy about it. “He’s…my nephew, Taylor.”

  She blinked. “He is?”

  She thought of all of Heather’s cousins she’d met at various times. She thought she’d met them all, but she certainly didn’t remember an Angus Kincaid. A name like Angus would have stuck in her mind.

  “He…he’s on Claire’s side.”

  She was sure of the guilty look now. Not an emotion she normally would ever associate with him. But he hadn’t been acting normally for weeks, and now she was more worried than ever about him.

  Brow furrowed, Taylor said, “I never met him. And Heather was always talking about her cousins. I don’t remember her ever even mentioning him.”

  “He lived back east. Didn’t visit when you were a kid.”

  “But he’s here now.”

  “Yes.” He sighed, took a breath and, still looking unhappy, went on in a rush. “He needed a fresh start. Had some trouble finding a job, and keeping it.”

  Great, Taylor thought. The office joke was true. He had been hired because he was a loser related to the boss. So much for the idea she’d had that there was something else, something sharper, something deeper behind his apparent geekhood. Apparently he really w
as just an office drone. And a not very efficient one at that.

  “I need you to cut him some slack, Taylor, at least for a while.”

  She didn’t protest, she wouldn’t. “All right,” she said simply.

  He smiled, clearly relieved. “Just like that?”

  “You’re the boss.” The relief faded, and Taylor hastened to soften the words she hadn’t meant to sound like a criticism. “Maybe he’ll get there. And besides, you gave me a chance when I was too young to know anything. I’m sure I was no prize when I started.”

  “You’ve always been a prize to me, Taylor. I’m not sure I, or Claire, or our marriage, would have made it after Heather if not for you.”

  They had long ago reached a comfortable peace with their place in each other’s lives. Taylor could never replace Heather, they all knew that, but she still held a place for them, a special place no one else could fill. As they did for her.

  “By the way,” Whitney said, in the tone of one moving off a painful subject, “I need another favor. I know you’ve not been here since the beginning—it just seems that way.” She smiled, and waited. “I need your best recollection about anybody who’s still here who was also close friends with anyone on that list you made up for me.”

  Taylor’s brow furrowed. “I’ll try,” she said, “But I don’t know—”

  He waved a hand at her. “I understand. But you’ll have a better idea than I do. Just give it your best shot.”

  She thought a moment, gave him two names that came to her right away and promised to keep thinking about it.

  He nodded. “And, Taylor? Same rules apply.”

  Meaning don’t ask anything or say a word, she thought. “All right,” she said, having more trouble at the moment with the no questions asked than the confidentiality. Keeping something a secret had never been a problem for her, but working in the dark was. Only her trust in her boss kept her from asking at least some of the many questions rattling around in her mind.

  After lunch, she’d been back in her office less than an hour when a discreet tap on her office door pulled her out of the project chart she’d been working on.