Page 3 of The Beachside Cafe 2
Tommy had pulled his laptop out and set the briefcase on the booth seat next to him. He opened it and pushed the flash drive in the side. Then he spun the laptop around and pointed with his finger at the keyboard, his eyes on Jaymee.
“You know what you’re looking at. You pull open that file and see why I think he might have disappeared on purpose.”
Chills lit up Jaymee’s skin as she stared at the laptop screen. Her finger hovered over the mouse pad before she touched it, sliding the cursor to the flash drive and clicking on it.
The folder that opened up revealed six internal folders of their own. They were labeled with a first name and last name initial. Jaymee glanced at Cameron, who was leaning over to see the laptop screen. He turned his eyes to her, looking apprehensive.
Jaymee moved the cursor to the first folder, which was titled Martin G. She clicked on it and a new box popped up with varying documents, all very small icons with the name of the document next to it.
Clicking on the first document of the four that were there, she brought up on the screen a list of numbers in a word document. One column appeared to be dates. Another was a series of numbers with dollar signs in front of them.
After that, there were several columns with what appeared to be a code as it was random numbers and letters that made no sense to Jaymee.
“Ugh,” Cameron said. “That doesn’t look good.”
Jaymee looked up at Tommy over the laptop. “What do you make of this?”
Tommy shook his head. “If you went into the first folder first like I did and brought up that first document, I’m here to tell you I have an idea what that looks like to me.”
“It looks like payments of some kind,” Cameron said. “Was he doing business with this man?”
“Not that I knew of,” Tommy said. “But then again, I know most of his business associates through last name, not first name. This seems more intimate than that.”
Cameron looked thoughtful. “And by intimate you mean…”
Tommy looked from one to the other and said in a low voice, “I think it was something else… something personal. Like blackmail.”
Jaymee felt a thud in her chest. This was the nail in the coffin. If Tommy could suggest such a thing about the man he’d been working with for nearly the last decade, it was all the proof she needed to make her decision. She wasn’t pursuing Doug to put their family back together now. She was pursuing him to put him behind bars.
She wondered how deep he was in the criminal world. She wondered if he was guilty of crimes much worse than blackmail.
It gave her chills to think about it. He was a very wealthy man. He could do almost anything he wanted. Maybe he had a life she didn’t know anything about.
Her thoughts became overwhelming. She couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. She clicked on other documents and looked at pictures of people in labs and close-ups of vials that looked similar to the one she’d found under the dresser. None of it made sense to her.
The other five folders were labeled
Brian O
Dylan L
Amanda D
Carmine R
Daniel C
Cameron looked at her. “Any of these names sound familiar to you?”
Jaymee thought about it for a moment, trying to remember if she’d been introduced to anyone by these names but she eventually shook her head. “No. If I was ever introduced to someone he worked with, I wasn’t given their first names. He just wasn’t a close man who would reference people by their first names. Everything was formal and upper class.”
Cameron nodded.
For some reason, Jaymee felt ashamed. What kind of man had she married? How could she have been so blind?
She pulled in a deep breath and kept clicking, taking in all the folders, all the documents and videos and pictures. The only thing that was missing from each folder was an actual picture, address or contact information for the person whose name was the folder label.
“We’re going to have to find these people on our own. But how?” She gave Cameron a desperate look.
