Page 14 of Escape Girl

“You had your laptop open?” I asked. “Would the waitress or anyone else in the near vicinity remember what you guys were looking at or discussing?”

“No. We were in a booth the whole time, the screen facing only us. The bar was really crowded, so the waitstaff was slammed.” She looked down and bit her lip. “Anyway, about thirty minutes before we left, Taggert shut my laptop and the conversation shifted.”

I nodded briskly and flipped another page. “You two began to talk less about your product and more about your personal lives?”

“Yes.” Bella’s face was a steady deep pink now, but she kept going. “Sort of. I mean, he asked a lot of questions about me, my life. I realize now that when I tried to reciprocate and ask about him, he was kind of evasive. He would always turn the focus back on me.” She paused. “I know it sounds shady as hell when I say it like that, but in the moment his interest was flattering.”

I made a note to myself to return to this piece of the evening with Bella later, to dive deep into the kinds of questions that he was asking. If he’d already been planning a theft, he may have been trying to ascertain what sort of adversary she’d be: How much had she shared with others about her product? Had she shown it to anyone else? What kind of financial situation was she in? Did she have family money or power via other high-level connections in the industry?

As they left the conference hotel, Taggert suggested they get dinner. He took her to a small French bistro in Bucktown. It was dark and romantic and the wine flowed freely. “I definitely had too much to drink,” Bella said bluntly. “But he kept ordering things for us to try, and I felt like I was in some sort of dream. I didn’t want to say no to anything. He was handsome and charming and funny. I wanted to match him.”

Ooof. That was a tough phrase to hear. I’d always wanted to match Bobby too. Talk about futility.

“Did you speak about your product at all during dinner?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“After dinner?”

Taggert asked Bella if he could make sure she got home safely. When the Uber arrived at her walk-up, Taggert asked if he could walk her to her door. “Then you invited him in?” I prompted.

She gave me a wry glance. “Not verbally, but we were kissing. A lot. So it was assumed when I unlocked the door and led him in.”

I cleared my throat. “Consensual sex followed?” She nodded, blinking hard.

Bella slept unusually hard, probably because of all the wine. When she opened her eyes around 6:00 a.m., the bedroom was quiet.

“How did you feel?” I asked.

She scrunched up her face. “Kind of embarrassed? I mean, I’d enjoyed the evening. He’s older than me, and it was exciting to be wined and dined by someone so sophisticated. The sex was fine. Not bad, but sort of…perfunctory? When I woke up, I wasn’t feeling ashamed or anything. But I was a little weirded out by how fast it had gone. Like, one minute we were discussing the intricacies of my code and the next, he was telling me howbeautiful my eyes were and how he wanted to take me to his favorite restaurant.”

He was also gone when she woke up, which didn’t feel great. “There was no note or text or anything. Almost no evidence he’d been in my apartment at all.”

“Almost?”

Her eyes went dark, lips thin. “Later that morning, I sat down at my desk to work. I’m really anal about my workspace. I could tell that things weren’t in their proper place. Like, cords were askew and the back-up drive was a few inches to the left of its normal place. When I went to get my laptop, it was not in my bag the way I normally place it. It was turned in the reverse direction.”

“What did you think about all of that?”

She flushed again. “Ridiculously, I was almost excited. I thought Taggert might have been up in the middle of the night and he was so interested that he wanted another look at the stuff I’d shown him.”

I made another note. We’d have to dive into this later too: Did she say or type in her password in front of Taggert? How could he have accessed her files?

“When did you hear from him again?”

A harsh laugh escaped her lips. Light reflected off of her glasses. “I never heard from him directly again. No texts, calls, or emails. No contact on any of my social media—and believe me, I checked! I felt ridiculous for weeks. I’d acted like a groupie instead of a professional woman.”

I restrained myself from offering more pointless reassurances. She’d had sex with a guy and bad shit happened. Nothing I could say would make that better.

She sighed and went on. “In the meantime, I decided I was ready to hire those testers. I put up an ad on a few local tech job boards. The next day I received a cease-and-desist letter in myemail from an expensive firm. Another copy followed by certified mail two days later.”

The next day? I jotted three exclamation points in my notes. That was unusual—way too fast. Like someone had been watching and waiting. “Can I see the letter?”

She handed it over, and I scanned the letterhead on the first page. I’d heard of the firm, Bird & Dreyer, but didn’t recognize the name of the attorney who’d signed the letter, a James A. Hill.

The letter was six pages long and used unnecessary legalese, but the gist was easy: Cole Taggert’s attorney was ordering Bella to cease and desist because they were claiming copyright infringement on the code of the TowerWizard. They claimed that TowerWizard was the intellectual property of Cole Taggert and included a copyright registration number.

Well, that wasn’t good. I looked up at her. “He has a copyright on TowerWizard?”

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