Guilt By Degrees

31

The sun had long since set-now only the pale moonlight glowed through the expansive windows of the loft. Sabrina sat at her desk, heedless of the darkness, her gaze fixed on her computer, her face bathed in the cool gray light of her monitor.

Chase, who’d fallen asleep on the couch, stirred and opened an eye. In one swift movement, he stood up and walked over to her desk, the sound of his steps muted by the thick carpeting. But the moment he drew near, Sabrina minimized the screen. Without turning, she spoke to him over her shoulder.

“You ready to talk about the CEO case?”

“Yeah,” he replied. He moved closer and gestured to her computer. “You find anything on him?” It was a deliberate tweak. He had a feeling he knew what she was working on, and it wasn’t the CEO case. It worried him.

Sabrina turned and fixed him with a stare. An effective KEEP OUT sign. Chase knew better than to ignore it. He stepped back, literally and figuratively. “No girlfriends or boyfriends, as far as I can tell at this point,” he said. “No porn and no bad associates-now or back when. No kids out of wedlock and no early busts for anything. I was wondering whether you had any ideas…?”

Chase was a great wingman with great tech skills-though she was no slouch herself, both by training and by instinct. But the creative thinking was largely up to her. Unlike Chase, who loved only the money, Sabrina derived an erotic thrill out of gathering the information that would empower her to shatter a life forever. For her, the money was secondary. Though she admitted it was a close second. She leaned back in her chair and lightly drummed the armrests with her fingers.

“My sense is that our CEO has no sexual Achilles’ heel. He’s not the kind of narcissistic power junkie you get with politicians. But from what I saw, he made a lot of money in a relatively short time. Look into whether he got a little too ‘lucky’ with his investments.”

Chase nodded. Her instinct for the jugular was so unerring that it was almost bizarre. He stood to go.

“You can crash here when you’re ready to pack it in,” she said. Sabrina knew he never slept as well in his own bed as he did in her office.

“You staying?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll probably head home after I’m done, but thanks.” Chase left with a mock salute.

Sabrina turned back to the computer and clicked to reopen the window she’d been scanning earlier, but she’d lost focus. She closed the window and shut down. Neither she nor Chase knew how to sleep. For her part, she realized it’d started in very early childhood, with the fear of what she’d find when she woke up. What would she do wrong today? And what would be the instrument of choice-a broom? a shoe? a wire hanger? The latter was the worst. The wire raised ugly red welts, forcing her to wear long pants during the sweltering summer to hide the shame. And there was no one to appeal to. Her father saw none of it and didn’t want to know. He wanted only a playmate in his little daughter-a refuge away from the wife he’d married but never knew, and whom he now both loathed and feared.

So, in a way, going off to boarding school at the ripe old age of ten had been a relief. Or so she’d told herself at the time. Because it was obvious even to Sabrina that she was heading down a road that could only end in disaster. In the year before she was shipped away, she’d been busted for an ever-escalating series of misdeeds-from fights on the playground to shoplifting, and finally to arson. Her egg donor of a mother had gleefully agreed with the counselors that the change of scenery and enhanced discipline of boarding school would help to straighten her out. And so she’d been thrown away, a broken doll no one wanted to play with. Boarding school hadn’t been all bad, once she’d adjusted to the new order of things. But by the time she moved back home, in her sophomore year of high school, she was a “new girl”-a stranger in her own hometown. Tough as that was, after a few months, things seemed to be falling into place, she’d begun to feel like her life was getting back on track.

Until that one night. That night everything had changed.