Three days later Joseph fell asleep amid a tornado of papers and things. The papers, financial, personal and otherwise hadn’t yielded anything relevant to the accident. He’d found some receipts that confirmed that Tory was keeping track of expenses that were related to unusual travel and other expenses that seemed to confirm that she was a secret agent, but none of them were recent. If she had been a CIA agent or spy, there seemed to be no evidence that she had been active after their first child was born. Still that revelation alone had been enough to cause Joseph’s new obsession to completely take over.
After what may have been five minutes or five hours Joseph woke. He knew he wouldn’t be able to voluntarily fall asleep again so he momentarily gave into hunger eating a few bites of takeout that had been in the fridge for at least two weeks. He almost welcomed the idea of becoming sick from the disgustingly cold noodles as he slurped them down mechanically. At least getting sick would allow his body to physically express the feelings that bubbled inside him.
Next Joseph turned to the most daunting task, Tory’s laptop. He knew without guessing her password he would have no chance of recovering significant information. Surely any sensitive information especially top secret kind of stuff would be encrypted so a standard forensics disk would only find unreadable data.
Suddenly the phone rang.
Joseph didn’t recognize the number but answered it with hope and suspicion. “Hello?”
A garbled voice responded. “We need to talk. I don’t feel right about what the agency did. You will find a post card in your mailbox with information on how to reach me.” With that the caller hung up.
His heart racing, Joseph thumbed through the numbers on the handset and called the number back. A generic recording responded “This number has been disconnected.”
