Digging for another picture of her husband with the dark-haired beauty was now more out of curiosity than anything else. After reading the hidden note she had found from Evan, she knew the woman had been a girlfriend, accidentally killed in the crossfire during a shootout in which Evan was involved.
But why did he keep only that photo—the photo of the two of them—hidden in the safe deposit box? Why not here with the others?
After spending a couple of hours methodically pouring over the contents of a few of the boxes, she realized it was time to take Maggie and Molly to the airport. As she was sticking some files back into one of the boxes, a small, black-leather notebook slipped out from between a couple of the folders and smacked onto the cement floor.
“How did I miss that?”
Emily crouched down and picked it up. She flipped through it, recognizing the handwriting as Evan’s. It was an address book with cryptic names and numbers written in it.
She read a few of the names, but then her gaze landed on an entry that said, Handler, Izzy, with a phone number. Was Handler someone’s name or was it someone’s position?
Izzy.
Suddenly, she recalled Evan referring to Isabel as Izzy. Was Isabel’s maiden name Handler? Or was Evan noting that Izzy was his CIA handler, writing that information in the book as if that was the person’s full name—Izzy Handler—to throw anyone who got possession of this book off the track. Or was it an alias? Or code?
Maybe she should take the boxes back to her house? Then Emily’s breath caught in her throat. The person in the black sedan, possibly a BMW, could very likely be the one who had broken into her home, and maybe they were looking for something in these boxes, like this book.
Giving her head a shake for being temporarily oblivious to the mysterious stalker, Emily peeked out of the storage unit to see if anyone was watching her now. She glanced around but saw no one.
She didn’t have any more time to look through the black book at the moment. Maggie and Molly would be waiting for her. So she tucked the book, and the flashlight, in her purse for later. She’d have to give the Izzy question some more thought.
CHAPTER 3
While Maggie and Molly were winging their way to Hawaii, Emily returned to the storage unit, keeping an eye out for any tail. Page by page, she again foraged through each box, reading about her late husband’s exploits as a secret agent at the CIA. Though some of the comments were abbreviated, she found she could decipher most of the text, but she wondered when she kept seeing orders for him to handle someone with extreme prejudice. What exactly did that mean?
He appeared to have been in some very dangerous situations. She didn’t know he could be so bold and cunning, so physically aggressive. The Evan on those pages was not the man she had fallen in love with.
She had grieved for him, mourned the loss of their love and life together, for more than six months when the series of accidental discoveries led her to realize the man she had married was not who he said he was. So she really shouldn’t be surprised now. She was grateful, though, that she hadn’t uncovered these things earlier on. It would have been more than she could handle, piled on top of the shock and sorrow of his death.
These discoveries, as painful as they were, forced her to dig down deep and become a stronger woman, which presented her with the opportunity to follow in his footsteps as a private investigator. The things she had learned as she had covertly helped Evan on various cases had given her the skills.
Her thoughts drifted back again to the note he had left for her, folded and concealed in the center of one of the bundles of cash he had secreted away in the safe deposit box. He had to have known she would eventually find his hidden stash, because the note was addressed to her. In it, he explained who he really was and why he did what he did.
Studying the case files, reading about the operations, Evan’s face came to her mind—his sandy blonde hair, his piercing blue eyes, that sexy off-centered smile that she loved so much. Even though that note said his real name was David Gerard, she knew she would always think of him as Evan