If so, he was in for a surprise. Bishop wasn’t the only one who could hotwire a car around here. She shoved the bed platform up and out of the way, refusing to think about the state of the sheets, and moved to the driver’s seat. One look told her she was shit out of luck—this wasn’t really a 1970s Winnebago, no matter what it looked like. The dashboard was a computerized nightmare, and while she was relatively good at technology, she was iffy when it came to upscale vehicles, never having been able to afford one herself. Besides, she could hardly drive off stark naked and wrapped in a duvet.
“Where’s your asshole friend, baby?” she asked Merlin, who cocked his head. “No, you don’t think he’s an asshole, do you? It takes a woman to appreciate his full asshattery.” She headed into the back of the camper to investigate. She hated using toilets in RVs—nothing could keep them from eventually permeating the living space. She hadn’t taken into account the space-age facilities someone, or something, had supplied Bishop, and she took a look at the tiny closet-like room with awed appreciation.
A quick shower went a long way toward restoring her battered self-respect, clean clothes helped as well; but most useful of all was Bishop’s absence. If he’d left her, and she only hoped he had, then eventually someone would come back to get them out of there. Maybe it wouldn’t take that long for her to walk for help, and she’d try that eventually. First, she needed food.
The kitchen was another marvel, and it didn’t take her long to cook up a frittata with fresh zucchini and mushrooms. She accidentally made too much, and she would have fed it to Merlin, but despite that asshole’s assertion, human food wasn’t good for him. She even found the high-end kibble she fed him, leaving the rest of the frittata on the counter while she continued her exploring.
She couldn’t believe her luck when she found a laptop tucked behind canned food, and she pulled it out with a cry of triumph. She slid onto the bench of the dinette and opened it. Password protected, of course, providing nothing but a blank screen. The damned thing would probably explode in her hands if she did the wrong thing; but she had no intention of giving up without trying, so she started with the passwords, including the obvious “user” and “guest.” The computer belonged to someone called Edmunds, which she assumed was either Bishop’s real name or another alias, so she went on with the slightly less obvious “B1sh0p” and “Us3r.”
No good, so she moved on to forms of Merlin interspersed with numbers, Winnebago, anything she could think of. In frustration she typed in “asshole” and “a55h0l3” but obviously it didn’t work.
“I can do this,” she told Merlin, who was lying peacefully at her feet. “I’m good at stuff like this.” The problem was, everything she knew about James Bishop was a lie, so she sat back, racking her brain for anything that could possibly be true. She tried “Claudia” and its permutations, and at last, in total frustration and fury, she typed in “Evangeline.”
“Stupid idiot,” she muttered to herself. If she was going to be an idiot, she might as well go all the way. She threw in numbers for every vowel, cursing herself, then finally tried “EvANGELin3.”
The screen opened. She stared at it in complete astonishment, then glanced down at Merlin. “He did this on purpose, didn’t he?” she said severely. “He made the computer easy to find and did this to keep me busy. Asshole,” she muttered.
That word was getting tiresome—she had to think of something new to call him, but right then she wasn’t feeling terribly creative. She turned back to the screen and let out a frustrated curse. The laptop was demanding another password, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be “Evangeline” again.
She could play with that later. The screen also offered a shining golden opportunity. You could sign on as a guest, which she immediately did, only to be confronted by a generic Windows interface. She spent an hour searching through every possible path to documents, hidden files, and Cloud files, but it was as if the computer were absolutely clean. She knew it wasn’t—getting past Bishop’s next password would open a world of answers, but that wasn’t going to happen. She could only make do with what she had, and she gave in to the curiosity that she’d always refused to indulge. Google was her friend, and she went back to the tiny village of Cabrisi, the hotel, Claudia and James, and at the last minute threw in the tiny church of St. Anselmo to see what she came up with.
She was so engrossed in her discoveries that she didn’t even hear Bishop return. The side door slammed, and suddenly he was looming over her, shoving the laptop closed and yanking it out of her reach. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded in a dangerous voice.
So much for morning-after love talk, she thought, eyeing him warily. “You didn’t think I’d just curl up in a little ball and hide, did you?”
“That’s what you wanted to do last night.”
She knew her face whitened. He was prepared to fight dirty, was he? What else could she expect? He didn’t know she could fight dirty too.
“It’s a new day,” she said brightly. “How do you happen to have Internet access here?”
“Trade secret.” He shoved the laptop back where it came from, then slid into the dinette opposite her.
“What trade, may I ask?”
“You may not ask. At least I know you couldn’t get anywhere on the laptop. It’s password encrypted.”
She looked at him directly. It was hard, staring into his sea-blue eyes that were so flat and expressionless. “I got through the first one,” she said.
She expected him to be defensive, angry, but instead his mouth quirked up in a tiny smile. “Bet you liked that.”
Asshole, she thought. “Of course that’s as far as I got. You must have two or three more levels.”
“Seven,” he said flatly. “So exactly what did you discover? I know you couldn’t have gotten anything off the computer itself, and the Internet wouldn’t be much more helpful.”
Ah, triumph, she thought, warming. “Oh, not much,” she said. “There was no trace of a man named James Bishop who resembled you in any way.”
“That’s not true. I know for a fact that there are at least five James Bishops in this country alone who are thirty-four, six feet one, and about one seventy-five. They have similar facial structures, and hair and eye color can be changed.”
“So it can,” she said. “But at one point I knew you very well, and I can tell the difference. Is that the reason you picked that name? Because you could have so many doppelgangers?”
He ignored her question. “So you didn’t learn anything, did you, Angel?”
Crap. She hadn’t tried “Angel” as a second password. Then again, he said there were seven layers of encryption, and it wouldn’t have gotten her very far.
She smiled at him sweetly. “Not a thing. Until I decided to look up the tiny chapel of St. Anselmo in the mountains just outside the town of Cabrisi. You remember that, don’t you? It’s where we first met. And what do you think I discovered? That nice old man, Signore Dimitri Corsini, was murdered up there. I have a good memory for dates, and just imagine, it was the very day you and I were there!” she said in a mock innocent voice. “I must have missed seeing his murder by just a few minutes.”
His cool expression didn’t change. “Less than that,” he said. “Claudia had just finished with him and we were leaving when you popped up.”