It begins with a job like any other. A wife in distress rings the door to Lyla Marina's Private Detective Agency and spills her life story. Lyla tracks the wayward husband to a motel in the middle of nowhere, expecting to find the usual suspects. Except she doesn't find anything of the sort.
The husband locks himself in the motel room and does nothing, so she does the logical thing.
She waits until he leaves and breaks in.
There's no woman, no secret fetish or shameful tale for her to uncover.
Instead, she finds a book that is unlike anything she's ever seen before. The story should end there. It's just a book, after all.
But things are never the easy. A few days after that, she breaks into a home for a job. Theodore is a doctor, a man of considerable prestige and power, a man whom she has never met before. And yet, she finds in his home a room from the ceiling to the floor, drawn and painted in vivid detail with different media, charcoal and pencil sketches, oil and watercolor paintings… of her.
~~~~~ PG Excerpt ~~~~~
There's nothing here incriminating in the room for her to find, no sexy lingerie that he puts on when nobody's looking, no camera equipment, no numbers for hookers, not even an extra shirt for him to change into. There's just a singular laptop on the desk with the power plugged in. He doesn't have a laptop and she did not see him bring it in, which means someone has left this laptop in the room for him.
Curiosity piqued, she settles into the seat in front of the desk.
It's locked from idling too long, but his wife had given her a list of all the passwords that he uses. He is one of those old school sort who writes down all of his passwords in a little booklet that he keeps in the drawer of his desk.
It takes a few wrong attempts, but she's lucky the computer does not try to lock her out for too many wrong guesses.
