I slam the door shut.

“What the hell are you doing here? Where’s Lynette?”

Ronan takes a second to study my expression before turning his attention to Lynette’s laptop, which is open on her desk.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he says calmly.

“But I asked first,” I point out. “And why are you looking at Lynette’s computer?”

Ronan rubs the back of his neck. “When I got here, Lynette was in the process of walking out the door. She was with another gentleman and they were making lunch plans.” He glanced down at his watch. “That was a little less than fifteen minutes ago.”

I grimace. “Why didn’t the girl at the front desk say anything when I told her I was here to see Lynette?”

“Maybe she didn’t know Lynette left. She didn’t say anything to me about it when I said I was a new employee and had to work out some issues regarding Northwest depositing my check and my bank.”

“And you’re snooping in her computer because?”

Ronan pulls his gaze away from Lynette’s laptop and meets and holds my gaze. I can practically see the wheels turning inside of his head.

“There’s something fishy going on with Northwest,” he finally says. He speaks slowly, like he’s not entirely sure of his decision to share.

I nod. “I’ve been saying that ever since they hired me, but I don’t see what that has to do with you snooping in Lynette’s computer.”

“Since she’s the head of the finance department, I figured her computer would help me understand just how Northwest managed to go from being a wildly lucrative airline to one that is practically knocking on bankruptcy’s front door.”

“So you hacked her computer?” Noticing that my voice has shot up a full two octaves, I take a deep breath and tell myself to be calm. “You know how to hack a computer?”

I struggle to figure out how to run the word processing program on the five-year-old laptop I have at home. I can’t begin to imagine being able get into private files and discover all the dirt a person has saved on their computer.

Ronan shakes his head. “I don’t know the first thing about hacking, but I have a cousin who does. When I realized that Lynette was going to be out of her office, I gave him a call, and he walked me through the process. It was surprisingly simple, not that I’d be able to do it again without him walking me through it.” His eyes meet mine. “How come some people have such an easy time working with computers, and I’m always surprised when one doesn’t blow up the second I touch it?”

I shrug. “I guess it’s not all that different from how we can fly a plane and others can’t.”

“True,” Ronan agrees. “You’re here because of missing paychecks?”

He turns his attention back to the screen and moves his fingers around the touch pad.

Brimming with curiosity and unable to stop myself, I round the side of Lynette’s desk and stop beside him so I can see what he’s doing.

“This is the third time this has happened,” I tell him as I brace a hand on the desk. “The other two times, she swore there was a problem with the bank. She managed to correct it on her end, but it always took a full pay period to do so. I can’t afford to wait that long this time. I need the money now.”

“I can give you some money,” Ronan says as he clicks on an icon.

“You have money? I thought this was your first flying job.” I think back on a conversation we had while flying from Barcelona to London. “Didn’t you say that you signed on with Northwest because they were the first airline to offer you a job right away and you were desperate to start flying, so you took it, even though you were pretty sure they paid new commercial pilots about ten percent less than the other airlines?”

Ronan stiffens and winces. “I’m not completely destitute. I have a little money set aside to live off until I’m making a regular paycheck. And I live cheap. If you’re in a bind, I can give you a little to help tide you over.”

He’s lying. The thought shoots through me. I don’t know how I know, or what he’s lying about, but I’m certain he’s keeping something big from me.

Before I can push, he clicks on another icon, reads through the columns of information that appears on the screen and lets out a low whistle.

“You’re not kidding about how you didn’t get paid.”

I lean closer. The scent of his spicy aftershave tickles my nose.

“What did you find?”

Ronan uses his index finger to point to a long list of numbers. They’re all identical except for the last two.

“This column shows the account number your paychecks are deposited into every two weeks. For whatever reason, the last two checks were sent to a different account.”

“There was a banking error?”

Ronan is scrolling upwards, his eyes quickly reading through the information. “The last time you had problems with a check, it was last July?”

“Something like that.”

“It looks like the same thing. A payment was made, but it went into a different account, not the same account as your last two checks were deposited into. This one has a few different numbers.” Ronan opens Lynette’s center desk drawer and removes a small pad of paper. He copies the account numbers onto it. “How long did you say it took this Lynette woman to straighten things out?”

“A full pay period,” I say. “Two weeks.”

“She lied to you.” Ronan nods at the screen and keeps writing. “According to this, she wrote another check just two days after depositing the other one in the wrong account. If I’m reading this correctly, you actually got paid double.”

“What?” I lean so close, my shoulder bumps into his. The sudden, unexpected contact sends sparks shooting up and down my arm. I suck in a deep breath and try to ignore the reaction. “That can’t be right. I didn’t get paid double.”

“It’s all right here.” Ronan draws his finger down the computer screen. “It looks like she wrote out a paper check the day you came to the office and complained, followed by a check deposited directly into your bank account two weeks later.”

“I was only paid once. There was never a paper check.”

Ronan closes down my payroll file and starts clicking on others. He quickly scrolls through the information, occasionally stopping to write something down.

“You’re not the only one this happens to,” he finally says. “It looks like it’s happened to just about every other pilot on the payroll at least once and it’s the exact same thing. The original deposit goes into the wrong account and Lynette makes up for it by paying them twice.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Money.” Ronan closes down the payroll file and clicks on one labeled ‘Repairs’. “She’s embezzling from the company. Which goes a long way toward explaining why Northwest is in such a financial pickle. What I don’t get is how she’s managed to get away with it for so long. Someone should have noticed.”

He finds the repair file for the plane he and I spent the better part of a month in and opens it. Row after row of information appears. Not only does it show every repair my plane has had, it also shows how much each repair cost.

“Is there a printer in here?” Ronan asks.

I straighten and scan the room. My eyes finally land on a large black printer that’s balanced on the top of a short filing cabinet. “Yeah, it looks like a wireless one.”

“Perfect.” Ronan hits a button and the printer springs to life.

I hurry over to it and collect several pieces of paper that the machine quickly spews out at me. I skim through them. “Why do you want the repair history of our jet for the last three years?”

Ronan’s fingers fly over the touchpad. “I want to compare the records of how the cost of those repairs were calculated and compare them to what is in the plane’s maintenance book. If Lynette is playing fast and loose with the payroll, chances are pretty good that she’s taking money from other places as well.”

He leans closer to the screen. “What the hell?”

The printer springs to life again. I remove the papers from the printer’s tray. I can’t even begin to understand what’s written on them.

“What are these?” I ask.

Before Ronan can answer, I hear the sound of footsteps in the hallway and a faint but familiar nasal voice, the same one that belongs to Lynette, the very woman whose computer Ronan and I are stealing information from.

My eyes lock with Ronan’s.

“Lynette’s back from her lunch,” I hiss.