I don’t know how much perfect gentleman I can stand. He wasn’t asking for nearly as much as I was willing to give!
2:00 p.m.
I’m back at work, meaning I’m Peg and I’m digging through Georgia’s dirty laundry. Literally. It was so tempting to try to pump Tom for information about Georgia’s death, but he would want to know how I knew he worked on that case and what interest it was to me. For example, what was Georgia wearing when they found her? I’m afraid to ask.
I know… About my date.
I got to the hotel and checked in about 4:30. It was barely enough time. I had to peal off all the latex and makeup, steam in the shower for half an hour in order to clear my pores of all the pollutants, and reapply my Deb look. Tom said he liked it at the game last week. I hope he still thinks so. I brushed my teeth and gargled about 20 times to get the butterscotch phlegm out of my throat. I put my new brown wig on, puffed up my curls, and dressed for a night on the town. Then I went downstairs, caught a cab, and was home by 6:30. Tom was there to pick me up at 7:00 on the nose.
He looked great. His detective clothes are nice—you know, sports coat, chinos, and open collared shirt—but when he puts on his own clothes its like he walked out of a Nordstrom’s ad. The guy can wear clothes. The first thing he said after “Hi, you look great!” was “I love those red peep-toed pumps.” I almost swooned. What guy notices a girl’s shoes? We drove to SoDo and he took me to a funky little restaurant near the stadium. Dinner was great, but a live band played at 9:00 and we danced until midnight. He dances! And not just polishing his belt buckle. He’s got some major moves and even when we were dancing apart from each other, he connected. Everybody could tell we were dancing together.
We talked all through dinner about favorite movies, music, sports, and even politicians. It was great to get to know him better. I mean, face it, our first two outings were with big groups of friends. This was really the first time we’d been out together where it was just the two of us. He opened my car door for me then scooted around to drive me home with some nice jazz playing on the radio. When we got to my place, he opened my door for me again and escorted me to the house. My heart was going about a mile a minute and I knew I was about to make a huge blunder and say come up and stay the night with me. But just as we got to the door he said, “I’m sorry the night has to end so early, Deb. I have to work. We’re on a case and I can’t be late.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Cops start their days in the morning, don’t they?” I almost screamed. I shouldn’t have said that! He said that to Peg Chester. Do not cross characters! Ack! How could I be so stupid?
“On weekends, even earlier,” he said. “We’re watching a club in Belltown we suspect is a front for a prostitution ring. It closes at 2:00 and I need to be there.”
“Wow! You’re not going to get any sleep at all. You poor thing. I shouldn’t have kept you out this late.” He didn’t notice. Thank God he didn’t notice.
“I had a great time tonight, Deb. I wouldn’t have missed it for a dozen stake-outs.” And then…
He leaned forward and kissed me softly on the lips. And said “Good night.” And left.
I ran upstairs and Maizie came bouncing up after me and I hugged that little pooch for all she was worth. Well, I didn’t have anyone else to hold and I took Maizie to bed with me and cuddled with her all night long. I missed her. I’ve been gone a week since she last saw me. She wasn’t upset to be invited into the bed for the night—though I suspect she might have been sleeping here regularly while I’ve been gone.
I dragged myself out of bed at 7:00, had coffee at Tovoni’s with Maizie and walked down to the office. Cinnamon met me and we went over the next phase of the work. She was a little doubtful when I asked her to start checking webcam sites to find out if there was anyone who looked like Georgia in the local directories. She said she’d check around with some of her other contacts who might know more about the scene than she did. She knew that one or two girls had “flunked out” of the Condo and instead had taken jobs in shadier parts of the industry. She’d find out what they knew. By 10:00, she dropped me off at the Sheraton and I went back to my room to reconstruct Peg. I called the front desk to ask for a late check-out and now I’m back here doing Georgia’s laundry.
7:00 p.m.
I connected my laptop to the network in Georgia’s house. It dawned on me that she had so many computers running webcams that she probably had everything networked so she could manage it all from the little office off the kitchen. No one protects a home network, and I bet every computer was shared.
As soon as I hooked in, I got the familiar message asking if I’d like to join a workgroup. I just said yes and the only workgroup available was named originally, “Home.” That hasn’t given me complete access to all that I want. I can’t see what programs are running yet, but I can access data stored on the drives of the computers. I spent the afternoon trying to map the hard drives and pulling backups so I don’t disturb anything. That gave Cinnamon a thrill. I needed hard drives. I only had a couple with me and they were nowhere big enough to back up the data on these computers. She made an emergency run to Fry’s to pick up four 500 gigabyte drives for me. We met at QFC where I bought a few things and walked out with an extra bag holding the four drives. With my nosy neighbors, I couldn’t risk having Cinnamon just bring me hardware to the house. But she is interested in seeing if she can get some kind of delivery outfit. We decided that pizza would be a good choice, so if I need anything else we’ll try that out.
Speaking of the nosy neighbors, they’ve insisted that I come down to The Circle bar tonight and I suppose the sooner I go the sooner I can get back here and check my drives. It looks like it will take an hour or two to back up each drive via the network. It’s kind of an awkward way to do it. I’m on the network and I simply copy everything from the documents folder of a computer onto the hard drive attached to my laptop. It works, but—like I said—it’s slow.
So, what does Peg Chester wear to a bar to meet friends of Georgia’s? Nothing in Georgia’s closet, that’s for sure.
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