The Shadow Hunter

“Okay.” He teased a strand of hair off her forehead. “You’re stubborn, you know.”
    “It’s a quality I pride myself on. Now, have you ever heard of a company called Western Regional Resources?”
    “Should I have?”
    “Probably not. They don’t seem to do a lot of advertising. I traced the phone call Hickle received, then tracked down the number with a reverse directory. The call was made from a cell phone registered to Western Regional Resources. I couldn’t find it on the Internet or in Lexis-Nexis. Needless to say, they aren’t in the Yellow Pages either.”
    Travis looked away toward the view of the canyon framed in the deck’s glass doors. “We can find them.”
    “Could be tough. My guess is, it’s a dummy corporation.”
    “That’s my guess too,” Travis said softly, still staring into the distance, and then he felt Abby’s gaze on him.
    “You know something,” she whispered.
    “I might. Follow me.”
    He led her to the rear of the house, detouring to pick up his notebook computer from the study. When he ushered her into the master bedroom, Abby shook her head in mock dismay. “You’ve got a one-track mind.”
    “Not today. This is all business.” Travis opened the hinged double doors of a walnut entertainment center, revealing a TV set with a thirty-inch screen.
    “There’s nothing good on at this hour,” Abby said.
    “Watch and learn.” He picked up the remote control and pressed the channel buttons in a seven-digit sequence. With a metallic snick, the front of the TV swung a few inches ajar on hidden hinges. “A safe,” he explained unnecessarily. “State of the art.”
    “Very clever, but what if you want to watch Letterman?”
    “The TV is fully functional. It’s a flat-panel screen, four inches thick, with the circuitry imbedded in the frame. The rest of the unit is hollow.”
    “So what’ve you got in there? The family jewels?”
    “I believe you know where I keep those.” Travis opened the safe door fully, revealing racks of CDs in plastic sleeves. “What I store here are files. Highly confidential files.”
    “Background checks,” Abby said quietly.
    “How’d you guess?”
    “I wondered about it sometimes. It seemed like a reasonable precaution. TPS is hired to protect people from a variety of threats. Not all stalkers are strangers. Routine background checks might come in handy in some cases. Anyway, it seemed plausible to me that you would cover that angle. Why not? You cover everything else.” She smiled slyly. “You’re basically an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive perfectionist.”
    “Flattery is cheap.”
    “So TPS digs up dirt on its own clients and the people in their lives.”
    “We prefer to think of it as gathering intelligence.”
    “Whatever. You investigate a client’s spouse, business partners, personal trainer—anybody in a position to deliver harm. But you never tell them, because they wouldn’t appreciate having their pals and loved ones put under a microscope.”
    “That’s why these files are confidential and why they’re kept in my home.”
    Abby approached the safe and peered inside. “CDs,” she said. “Four dozen or so. That’s, what, thirty gigs of data?”
    “Not all the disks are filled to capacity.”
    “Even so, it’s a lot of info.”
    “As you said, I’m thorough.”
    “Actually, what I said was that you’re an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive—”
    “I think
thorough
captures it adequately.” He thumbed through the disks until he found one labeled “BARWOOD,” which he lifted from its sleeve. “You’re right, though. You can store a lot of information on a CD. All seventy-five thousand articles in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, for instance.”
    Abby nodded. “Or every detail of Kris Barwood’s life and the lives of her friends, her relatives…her husband.”
    “Yes.”
    “Good old Howard.” Her voice was low and thoughtful.
    Travis frowned. “Once again you don’t sound surprised.”
    “I was up most of the night reviewing the possibilities. And the husband is always a possibility. Please tell me that Howard Barwood set up a company called Western Regional Resources.”
    “I wish I could. That would make everything easy.”
    “And things are never easy. It would take all the challenge out of life. If he doesn’t own that company, what made you think of him?”
    “Let me show you.” Travis placed his notebook computer on the bed and inserted the CD, bringing up its