“Long story,” Ella says.
Looking through the back window, I turn to see a burly guy in a full suit run outside, bark something into a phone, and gesture wildly at us.
“You better turn quick,” I say.
“Okay,” our young driver bellows, turning at a corner and nearly hitting a bread truck.
“Keep going,” Ella says. “Now go left. Now go right.” She gives the poor kid directions, and he follows every time, seeming to have fun. Finally she leans forward and taps his shoulder. “You can stop here.”
I look around. “I don’t know this area.”
“I do,” Ella says.
The car stops, and Ella slaps the back of the driver’s seat. “Thanks, dude. She already pay you?”
“She gave me a hundred bucks,” the driver says, smiling. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
I scoot out of the taxi and land on a clean-swept sidewalk. “If anybody asks and if they scare you, you can tell them exactly where you dropped us off, okay?”
“Like who?” He pales.
I don’t answer him and shut the door.
“Come on,” Ella says, hurrying around the back of the taxi. “This way.”
We’re near several car dealerships in a nice area of town. I follow her, twisting and turning around blocks and several businesses. “You know we’re on camera?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”
We jog for several blocks, and I’m wishing I had worn tennis shoes and not new kitten heels, when we reach an area replete with nice bars and restaurants.
“Out back,” she says.
She finally leads me to the back of a place called the Morning Diner to a small parking lot. She motions at a white Buick. It’s dented, old, and small. “This is mine. There are no cameras back here.”
“All right.”
We get into the car, and she starts it immediately. “Duck.”
I duck. I have to admit, I’m having fun.
She turns onto a main street. “You didn’t bring your phone, did you?”
“You told me to leave it at the office.”
“Good. You can be traced via your phone.” She drives sedately onto the street, and we continue for a good fifteen minutes. “All right. You can sit up now.”
Grunting, I push myself off the floor and sit. “Where are we?”
“I have a safe house a couple blocks from here.”
I brush hair out of my eyes. “You have a safe house?”
“Yeah, don’t you?”
I shake my head.
“Everybody needs a safe house, Rosalie.” She reaches in her bag and hands over the evidence disc from Alexei’s case. “I managed to decrypt part of the Fairfax evidence disc this morning. Whoever corrupted it introduced a virus right around the time of the murder, and so far, that part of the disc is fried. The virus continues through the day, but it weakens. I engaged in a multi-step remediation process by first implementing a robust heuristic-based antivirus scan. Then I reconstructed some of the corrupted sectors by employing an error-correcting code to restore data integrity.”
