Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) by Diane Vallere

desk chair and went down the hallway to Nancie’s office. The portable wall dividers were slightly crooked, but that wasn’t what alerted me that something was wrong. It wasn’t until I reached her doorway that I saw what caused my sense of alarm.
    Unlike my office, that appeared to be in much the same state that I’d left it in, Nancie’s was the polar opposite. It was empty.
    File cabinets had been yanked open, their drawers cleared of information. Closet doors hung wide, showcasing bare shelves. The laptop, docking station, mouse pad, and wireless keyboard, all gone. Even the waste paper basket had been cleaned out.
    I left Nancie’s office and checked the boardroom, the coffee corner, and the supply closet. By the time I came to Pritchard’s cubicle, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. It was empty, just like everything else.
    Despite the fact that my office had remained intact, it appeared as though Retrofit had left the building.
     

Chapter 12
    FRIDAYNIGHT
    I returned to Nancie’s office and double checked the cabinets. All signs that this office had recently been in use were gone. Even the carpet had been vacuumed. What had caused her to leave? My note? Or something more ominous? Had she been threatened, too? Or had she befallen an even worse fate than threats?
    Or maybe it hadn’t been fear that chased Nancie out of the office but a need to disappear.
    Four months of working with Nancie had put her outside the scope of my suspicions, but she could have been the one on the other end of Pritchard’s phone call. I’d seen her level of dedication when it came to the success of Retrofit , and I’d experienced her drive in the face of the challenges of growth. Another person might have been happy with our accomplishments in such a limited time. But Nancie wanted more. The idea of the magalog had come from left field.
    She’d been so gung-ho about bringing Pritchard on board and had cautioned me to stay put in the office while he did his thing in the field. Maybe they were working together. I’d bought into Nancie’s passion about Retrofit when I first came to work with her and I didn’t want to believe that she had a hidden agenda, but to ignore the possibility in light of the ransacked office and the theft at Jennie Mae Tome’s house felt obtuse. I backed out of the office slowly. When I’d entered, I hadn’t paid much attention to the clean desks out front that the interns used. They’d been taught to clear them each night, and the revolving door of unpaid help kept anybody from making their space overly personal. In fact, I remember Nancie instructing a few of the college students to respect the fact that the desk was only theirs for the time that they occupied it.
    But someone had gutted us of our files. Who? And why had they left my cubicle untouched? If it meant something, I didn’t know what. Except that whoever had cleared out the Retrofit offices had gotten away with everything—everything but the bible that I’d taken the day Tahoma was there. Aside from my office, the interior was as empty as Jennie Mae Tome’s attic. Whoever was responsible had expected me to come back and find it like this. They’d been watching me.
    They were probably watching me right now.
    Any instinct to make myself visible vanished. I grabbed my handbag from my office and ran out the front door to my car. I left rubber tire tracks in the parking lot in my haste to get out of there.
    New plan: be invisible all the time.
    I pulled the car into my garage and slammed the door down behind it. I found a half empty can of spray paint on the work bench and sprayed it over the glass panes of the mechanical garage door, blacking them out from the inside. My hands shook and the paint splattered on the inside of the door, leaving graffiti-like fuzz and, where I’d had a heavy hand, drips that looked like thick, black tears. The chemicals caused my eyes to water, mimicking the paint that ran down the inside of the door.
    I