Page 88 of Shadow
“Morning.”
He handed her a cup of coffee and motioned for her to sit with him on the end of the bed.
“How long have you been up?” she asked as she inhaled the delicious scent of her morning caffeine.
“A while. Peter called in the middle of the night. I was going to wake you, but nothing he said seemed urgent enough for that. I crashed again for a couple of hours but then got back up to do more research.”
Olivia waved her hand at him. “So... what did he say? You said it wasn’t urgent, but he gave you something.”
“He’s still digging into Fiona’s communication history, but she was in the bar’s vicinity that night. It started getting hard to track her at around six blocks away.”
“She lives like two blocks from Liv’s Place. There was no reason for her to be near Olivia’s.”
Ripley handed her a plate of food, but she suddenly wasn’t hungry. The thought of someone betraying her like that was too much to handle. Why would Fiona do this? It made her question her ability to read people.
Ripley put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do this to yourself, Liv. None of this is your fault.”
Olivia closed her eyes and sighed. “I know. It’s just hard not to think I’m an idiot for not seeing it before.”
Ripley took the coffee out of her hand and set it aside, then pulled her closer. “Really? Because from everything I can tell she didn’t give you any reason to look for anything. What kind of background research do you do on your employees?”
“Just the basic background check, and I called a couple of her references. Everything checked out.”
“Exactly. Peter and I are trained for this and even we’re having a challenging time. You wouldn’t have had any reason to go looking into her online history.”
Olivia laughed. “My policy has always been that your internet activity is none of my business but if you do something idiotic and get yourself in hot water on the internet, I’m also not going to save you.”
Ripley kissed the top of her head. “Good policy. I’ve never been a fan of supervisors snooping on their employees. Even if snooping was my job.”
“Yeah, but you snoop to stop human trafficking and terrorism. That’s different.”
“Exactly.”
Olivia sat up straighter and turned to face him. “Wait. Why are we talking about her online activity? What else did you find?”
Ripley pointed to the plate she had abandoned. “Breakfast first and then I’ll show you.”
“But I’m not hungry.”
“Eat, Liv. Even just a few bites. If you don’t, all the stress hormones your body is producing right now will suppress hunger cues, and you’ll forget to eat the rest of the day.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “Where do you learn this stuff? That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing they would teach you in spy school.” She stabbed a bite of cheesy scrambled egg and shoved it into her mouth. It made her smile that he’d added cheese to hers.
“It’s exactly the kind of thing they teach. Stress is ever-present in a job like that. We have to manage it, and blood sugar dropping in the middle of an op because our bodies decided not to tell us we were hungry isn’t a good thing for anyone.”
“Wow. I never thought of it that way.”
The food was still unappetizing, but it wasn’t hard to force herself to eat a few bites.
When she pushed the plate away again, Ripley slipped off the bed and picked up their dishes. “Stay right here. I’ll be right back.”
He returned a few minutes later with a laptop, and they settled against pillows.
“Turns out Fiona was quite taken with me when I was working undercover. She even wrote a blog about me and two men I was tracking during that op. Everything was positive—if not a little creepy—until I disappeared and Corbit Upwood was sent to prison.”
Olivia whistled when he pulled up the online journal. It wasn’t just an infatuation Fiona had with Ripley. It was an obsession. But at some point, the posts turned ugly. The later entries read like something a bad guy off of Criminal Minds had written, or something from one of her true crime documentaries. Olivia felt like her breakfast was going to come up.
“This is sick, Ripley. I hesitate to even ask this but...”
