82 Desire

leaned toward her, tapping his forefinger on her frog mat. “Now, here’s where it gets good. United Oil bought up our lease and drilled a great big, bodacious new well. Brand-new well. I should have known there was something funny about their offer—big oil companies can’t afford to operate mature fields. It just doesn’t pay ’em. So they already had information there was oil there.”
    “How could they possibly know that?”
    “Something called Three-D seismic profiling. You know about that? The offer came about the time the equipment was just becoming available—the rest of us were hardly even aware of it.” He leaned back, his wad shot. “So, what do you think of that, young lady? You’re a detective. Are those two things connected?”
    Skip hated it when people asked her things like that. She settled for a shrug, with palms turned up. “Do you remember who you dealt with at United?”
    “Sure. Man named Beau Cavignac. Nice little fellow. I liked him a lot.”
    Bingo , she thought. Wonder what’s in Beau’s computer?
    “Anyone else?” she said.
    “No. Just Beau.”
    “I’m going to ask you once more—did you have any connection with Russell Fortier?”
    “Well, maybe you could say I did. He refused to take about seventeen of my calls.”
    She smiled and stood. “I’ll get out of your hair, Mr. Newman. That was a very interesting story.”
    “Anything useful in it?”
    “Well, you never know.”
    As she drove back to the city, digesting the interview, it occurred to her that the old tyrant had been right to tell her everything. Though the one name was the key she needed to proceed, having the whole family’s life laid bare like that gave an outline of what United might have been up to. Cavignac evidently had something to hide. Maybe Russell Fortier did, too—the same thing.
    All she needed was an expert. And Wilson was always a pleasure to work with.
    He was a man evidently sent to Earth to improve the image of nerds. He was young, buff, tall, with neat brown hair and green eyes—frankly, more or less a hunk. Didn’t wear glasses, didn’t even have a goatee.
    Skip told him the problem. “Uh-uh,” he said. “No way, no how. If it’s encrypted, you gotta have cooperation—the days of codebreaker software are pretty much over. People use gibberish phrases for encryption keys. Unless it’s really amateurish, I couldn’t break it, not that I’m that great, but I wouldn’t even know who to send you to.”
    “So when you say cooperation, you mean within the company?”
    “Yeah, probably. From somebody who knows the code—and that could be an outside consultant, but if you ask who it is…” he shrugged “… you’ve already alerted them. They could just erase anything incriminating.”
    Skip said, “Damn. So I better go over there with a court order.”
    “Looks kind of that way.”
    She glanced at her watch—four o’clock. She could just make it. She had to get the order (for Russell’s computer)—plus a search warrant for Beau’s—and make a United-assisted sweep before she could properly question Beau.
    If she found what she thought was there, she was very close to a motive for Allred’s murder. A lot was riding on this.
    And yet nothing came of it. Absolutely nothing. She got both the order and the warrant, secured the cooperation of United Oil through its agent, Douglas Seaberry, and with Wilson’s help, searched both Russell’s and Beau’s workstations, and failed to find a thing.
    No Marion Newman. No “Skinacat.” Nothing at all incriminating, enlightening, or interesting in any way. Either she was barking up the wrong tree or they were onto her. Whoever “they” were.

Twenty
    SKIP WAS A wreck when she got home, in the mood to put up her feet and watch a movie, if she could get Steve to go down to Tower Video and get one. She was utterly unprepared for a courtyard confrontation. But as she was coming up the walkway from the street to her slave quarters, she heard Sheila shouting, “You are going to get fried!”
    Napoleon barked from inside the house, and Kenny answered, “Oh, come on. Everybody’s cool. They worship on the altar of cool. Nobody’s going to give me any shit.”
    Skip had to smile. Kenny was a perfect child in front of adults. She didn’t even know he knew the word “shit.” She rounded the corner to see Sheila in amazed contemplation of a kid about her brother’s age and size, wearing clown-legged shorts, a black T-shirt