He stared at his list of three probable passwords. The D and G were obviously her initials backward and forward. So she wasn’t averse to using personal mnemonics. D—Denise. G—Greenspan. 5k—like the race? So what were those two lowercase letters? He looked back at the three possibles they’d come up with. A lot of j’s, l’s, h’s and a c. What was she trying to spell with that alphabet soup?

He saw Jenn come out of the hallway and sit back down at the bar. hc—Hamilton College. Could it be as simple as that? he thought. He typed, “DG5khcG790GD.” The computer logged him in. People loved their alma maters. He plugged in the thumb drive and began to download the file from it to her laptop. Denise Greenspan kept an immaculate desktop, so she would see the folder the first time she went to open something.

It was still downloading when Denise came out of the bathroom. He saw her in the mirror but kept his head down. What was a believable reason for being on her laptop? Other than being a thief, of course.

“Stop her,” he whispered.

Jenn turned sharply and said something to Denise. Denise paused and then slowly turned her back on Gibson. The two women chatted amicably. He offered a prayer of thanks at the altar of Jenn Charles, unplugged the thumb drive, and traded the laptops back. He was packing up to pay his bill when Denise got back to her table.

“What did you say to her?” Gibson asked.

“I asked where she bought her head scarf. Said my girlfriend had similar hair, and I was looking for a gift.”

They leaned forward and clinked the necks of their beer bottles over the coffee table.

“Maybe a little premature on the celebration, huh?” Hendricks was sitting by the window, looking out the gap in the curtains. They’d found a single vacant room at a motel about forty-five minutes out of Atlanta and slept in shifts, with one of them always stationed at the window.

Gibson was doing a lousy job of not staring at the burner cell phone on the coffee table between them. Was a phone the electronic equivalent of a watched pot?

Come on, Grace. Just call, already.

Hendricks snatched up the keys, saying he was hungry. He was gone thirty minutes and surprised them by bringing back food for everyone. Pretty decent Chinese. Hendricks spread the plastic dishes out on the small Formica table, and they all tucked in to eat. Hendricks only ate egg rolls. He would cut the ends off them, empty the filling out onto the table, and mix it with orange sauce. Then, laboriously, he would repack the egg rolls with a fork and finally eat them.