Her Secret Service (Jane Roe 1) by Jason Letts (sites to read books for free TXT) 📗

easy way to dispose of it at hand, Jane had absolutely no other choice but to read it again for what had to be the tenth time. Some of the disclosures made her embarrassed on behalf of Alex, but no matter how poorly Hodge tried to paint him Jane couldn’t help but get the sense that what really happened was not nearly as bad and she’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

A tiny voice in her head whispered a note of jealousy that this woman had had such an incredible evening with a man as handsome and powerful as Alex and yet was completely ungrateful about it, using the experience for nothing more than tabloid slander.

Her annoyance growing, Jane flipped back to the page with the quote from Oliver Ip, part of a who’s who of the president’s critics parading through the text. Simply seeing his odious name got her hackles up, as did his nagging insinuations about what Alex’s divorce meant. The clock was ticking and her work wasn’t going to do itself, but the masochistic mood she was in to seethe at the president’s critics seemed insatiable.

Shifting to her computer, Jane went to the Washington Post website and was surprised to see that Oliver Ip hadn’t yet posted one of his trashy screeds that day. A click to his history of articles told her he hadn’t published a story since the previous Friday, an oddity as he pumped out another chunk of words every weekday. For him to go three days without writing anything…was he sick? On vacation? Her luck wasn’t good enough for him to be fired.

A lack of current material didn’t stop her from beginning to read his old articles one after another, and she glowered at each new petty rumor the journalist trotted out and every nobody from Facebook with a vile opinion that Ip evidently felt everyone needed to know about.

Eating up time in a way Agent Trice wouldn’t at all approve of, she made it back to Ip’s video interview with Alex, the article about the death threat the president had received online the day she’d met him, through so many articles between the inauguration and the transition, all the way back to the day of the election, a day that Jane now had personal reasons to remember bitterly.

In Ip’s first article following when Alex was declared the winner and the previous president was sent packing, Jane read his woeful pity party with an excessive dose of schadenfreude. The sorrowful laments and the bitter, resentful remarks Ip made were fun to read, but Jane found herself stopping when she got to a quotation from a woman named Elizabeth Dumpkins from Manchester, New Hampshire, who wrote that she “wept for the soul of our nation now that a force of pure evil has taken the helm.”

There was something about it that Jane found off-putting, and it wasn’t that calling Alex pure evil seemed a tad extreme. What kind of person would actually say that? And it seemed too perfect in the context of the article, an encapsulation of everything Ip was trying to get across conveniently packed into one sentence.

Opening up Facebook, Jane began searching for this Elizabeth Dumpkins and eventually arrived at a profile that seemed to fit how Ip had described her, location and all. The picture of a middle-aged woman with puffy cheeks and braided hair over one shoulder made her seem like a normal enough person, but there weren’t many details about who she was or what she did. Only two dozen friends. All the account posted were news articles once a week, many of them Ip’s, with no accompanying text in a way that seemed automated. Before long she’d gotten all the way down to when Dumpkins had created the account the previous March.

Staring hard at the page in front of her, Jane had to wonder what made this woman want to get onto Facebook for the first time right around when the presidential primaries ended in order to share political articles and nothing else. The suspicion hit her that this wasn’t adding up, and a Google search for this person from that place brought up nothing but the Facebook profile.

Clicking to another one of Ip’s articles at random, she began researching another supposed source and discovered that the account stopped being active at all only two weeks after the individual had shown up in the article. The next one she looked up seemed safely like a legitimate person, but the realization that she was finding something strange made her need to look up everyone to determine the extent of what she was really seeing.

Jane had done some tedious things in her life, but spending virtually the entire afternoon scrolling through Facebook profiles of random people after matching them to news articles had to be the most grueling.

It was the end of the day when she got up from her desk, the work she needed to get done barely started, and rushed over to the Investigative Division to crash into Nathan’s office. He was sitting and staring at the computer while rolling a baseball around on the desk, but he instantly turned to her with a smile.

“I’m about to go to dinner, if you want to come with,” he said, leaning forward and setting his arms on the desk.

Jane rubbed the bridge of her nose, feeling strangely manic and excited.

“First of all, I don’t know how things are done in Atlanta, but around here we don’t end sentences with prepositions. And second of all, you’re not going to dinner. There’s something I need you to look…at,” she said, biting her lip.

Nathan squinted at her.

“Alright, what is it for?”

“Now you’re just doing it on purpose,” she said, rolling her eyes and knowing she’d just asked for it. “But forget about that. Open a bunch of browser windows to Facebook. I’ve been trying to figure this out and I need someone to tell me I’m not crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” he