Chapter Eighteen

“Hey, Fitch, it’s Jill.”

“Ah, Miss Snoop and Tell, I’ve been missing you. So sorry about your dad, babe.”

“Thanks, and I appreciated those flowers at the funeral. I felt your support all the way over here.”

“No problem. You know I love you, but I have a feeling you called for something else. You have that ‘I got a job for ya’ tone.”

Fitch and I had been friends so long we didn’t waste too much time on small talk. She was also my extraordinary research geek. Frances Ingrid Czech, name shortened over the years to Fitch, could find more information in one day than the entire FBI in one week. And she did it all from her bizarre office in the bowels of her huge house on Mercer Island east of Seattle.

In the 1980s, she was one of the primary computer techs to help launch what is now a multinational software corporation. She got filthy rich filthy fast. By the mid 1990s, she was bored and unchallenged in her profession, feeling she couldn’t possibly stuff another dollar into her myriad accounts. So she dropped out and went underground. That’s when we met, in a bar, eying each other for the night’s meat entrée.

She was in leathers, her hair black and spiked like it remained today…the black now occasionally revived from a bottle. Sex between Fitch and me couldn’t really even be called sex. It was terrible. While I’m not opposed to a little kink in sex, Fitch wanted to take it to a place I’ve never been and don’t aspire to be: her well-equipped, soundproof dungeon across the hall from her basement office. I declined her bind and gag offer; she pouted for a few minutes, then brought out a bottle of 1972 Gattinara. We bonded over wine and never broached sex again. It was the beginning of a lovely relationship.

Fitch and I spent the entire night discussing my career and her discarded one. It was then our collaboration started. During that time, I had become aware of the burgeoning Internet and all its possibilities for research. I didn’t have the patience to sit and sift through the information attainable online, but Fitch was born to it.

Together Fitch and I hatched her new career as a researcher. Not just any researcher, but a researcher who had the knowledge and people connections to stretch her fingers deep into cyberspace. She didn’t want money; she wanted information. Not only for power but for the sheer lust for knowledge. I paid her a fee, but she donated it to some cause or another. I’m pretty sure she had other clients who bought her “information services.” And I’m also pretty sure she was the money behind several fetish Web sites I’d come across during my own Internet ramblings. They had particular Fitch fingerprints in their construction. I never asked about them and she never told. A perfect relationship.

“So who or what are we looking for today, O’Hara? A philandering politician or a corporation using unsuspecting human guinea pigs?”

“Nothing so dramatic or interesting, unfortunately. It’s a cop, the Taft County Sheriff, to be exact. Her name is Rae Terabian. There’s more to her story and I want to know what it is.”

Fitch snorted. “In northern Montana? How interesting could she be? She was born out of wedlock and her daddy was really the married-with-six-kids preacher down the road? She’s a closet Democrat? No, no, I know what it is; she’s a vegetarian and worried she won’t get re-elected when folks find out.”

“Quit being an asshole and help me out, would you? Look, she doesn’t fit, not on the Hi-Line, anyway. And any information about her is for personal curiosity, not journalism.”

“You mean she’s a babe.”

“And she’s a babe who knows something about my father and my land. Something’s off and I want you to find anything you can about her. It may help me know how to play my hand.”

“You mean the one sliding into her pants?”

“Would you stop? Damn, you have a dirty mind.”

“Why, thank you. And my ‘dirty mind’ is wandering to my little room across the hall.”

“You have a date? Why didn’t you say something? How long has she been waiting?”

“In her current position? Let’s see. About ninety minutes. Not long enough. Give me all the information on your sheriff so that I can return to my little project across the hall. She’ll start screaming soon. I don’t want to miss that part.”

“Please, don’t tell me anything more. Your activities give me nightmares.”

“You know flattery will get you everywhere.”

I used to feel sorry for Fitch’s submissives until several years ago when I decided to interview a few of them. It changed my worldview when I learned they adored her, craved and begged for her rough treatment. Sex and personal proclivities are a mystery, and I’m not one to question them.

I gave Fitch all the pathetically little information I had on the sheriff and told her to only spend a few hours on it. After all, she was just the Taft County Sheriff. What could Fitch find?