Page 157 of To Have and to Stalk
Her words echoed in my mind as I looked out of the office and down the hall where boxes and boxes of Andrew’s failing operation took place. I slammed the drawer shut and sprinted back down the hallway. I ripped open the boxes, searching for the date stamps.
Then I found it, the earliest paper, just a few months old. Like around when Shay ended things with her fiancé.
“Fuck,” I said out loud.
Graham had targeted Shay because of her computer.
I was annoyed to say it was brilliant. She was in academia, which was a clusterfuck of bureaucracy with very little security. Because, as Shay had said, the only apparent value was to another astrophysicist.
He’d probably planned to use her until he could ensure the operation, then leave.
And instead Shay broke up with him before he could.
This was why he’d broken into her office, why he was coming unhinged.
Why Shay was in very real fucking danger.
“Fuck.”
I pulled out my phone, dialing.
“Hey!” Shay answered on the second ring. “I was just thinking about you?—”
“What’s your ex-fiancé’s name?”
“I told you…Graham. Why?”
“His full name.”
There was still a small part of me that thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe that wasn’t Shay in the photo.
“Graham Andrew Hayes,” she answered.
My blood turned to ice. “Shay, listen, you have to?—”
“Oh, sorry, hold on, someone’s at the door,” she said.
“Don’t open the fucking door,” I said, but the sounds on the other side of the phone were muted now, softer, as if she had it at her side.
Fuck.
I gripped my phone in a vise, listening to the clicking sound of a lock unlatching, the creak of a door.
“Graham?” Shay asked.
“Shay!” I yelled, just as the line went dead.
chapter
fifty-three
CALDER
One heartbeat.
I opened up Shay’s location.
Two heartbeats.
