Despite her obvious nerves, Meredith was quick to extend her hand. “Hello.”
“Hello, Meredith. I understand you’re here to see me.” Camille’s handshake was cautious.
“I am.”
“Ms. Park arrived this morning from New York,” Paul added.
“Do we know each other?” Camille asked with genuine confusion.
“We’ve never met before. But you may have met someone close to me. He’s the reason I’m here.”
“Go on.”
Meredith opened her purse with unsteady hands. “As your father said, I’m from New York City. I run a boutique literary agency out there.” She gave Camille a business card for Park and White LLC.
A literary agency. The finely embossed card stock suddenly felt like a fifty-pound weight in Camille’s hand. She handed it back without saying a word.
Meredith took the cue to continue. “I represent a true-crime author named Jacob Deaver. He is in the process of writing a book and he may have attempted to contact you about it.”
Camille’s expression darkened. “So I have you to blame for that.”
Meredith seemed genuinely caught off guard by the sharp reply. “You talked to him?”
“Yes I did. No less than twenty minutes ago.”
A wave of relief washed over Meredith’s porcelain face. “Oh thank God.”
“It’s nice to know that you’re so excited about it. But I should inform you that I almost called the police on him.”
“What?”
“What do you mean you almost called the police?” Paul said in the pit-bull tone that Camille had come to know all-too-well.
“He’s been following me.”
Meredith shut her eyes as if she were struggling to process Camille’s words. “For how long?”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that this morning I went to a coffee shop two blocks from my apartment and from out of nowhere he approaches my table trying to pitch his book idea. I politely declined the offer and left. Then I get the call from my dad telling me to come over, and guess who I run into outside my apartment building?”
Meredith’s breath caught. “It just doesn’t sound like him to be that aggressive.”
“Trust me, he’s that aggressive.”
“What did he do?” Paul asked. His tone made Camille grateful that Jacob was nowhere in the vicinity.
“The same thing he did in the coffee shop. Only this time he wasn’t so quick to take no for an answer.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“No dad, it wasn’t anything like that.” She turned to Meredith. “But you need to know that your client is a certified creep.”
“I don’t know what to say about that. I’ve never known him to be that way.” She paused to blow out a deep breath. “I’m just happy to know that you’ve seen him.”
Camille’s eyes narrowed. “After hearing everything I just told you, how could you possibly be happy?”
Meredith waited a long beat before answering. “Because he’s been missing for almost three weeks.”
Unsure that she heard the words correctly, Camille turned to her father for clarification.
“That’s why she’s here,” he concurred.
Camille felt something tighten in her chest; the instinct that she had felt before but suddenly wanted to ignore. “The Jacob Deaver I saw looked pretty damn alive and well, so maybe you should explain what you mean by missing.”
Meredith looked at Paul. “Do you mind if I sit?”
“Absolutely,” Paul replied as he pointed her to the couch. Camille sat down next to her.
“Jacob has been working on a book about Daniel Sykes for the past few months. He-”
“Wait,” Camille interrupted. “Jacob is the one working on the Sykes biography?”
Meredith eyed her quizzically. “Yes. If you met with him I figured you would have known that.”
“He told me that someone else was writing the Sykes book.”
“Someone else? Who?”
“He didn’t offer a name. He only said it was a friend.”
“Well that’s certainly news to me.”
“And is it also news to you that the book is scheduled to be released in the next few months? Because your guy seemed pretty confident that it would be.”
“I can assure you that isn’t true.”
Camille let out an exasperated sigh. “And Jacob’s author friend?”
“As far as I know he doesn’t exist. Not as Sykes’ biographer anyway.”
“So he was lying to me the entire time.”
“I’m really confused,” Meredith confessed. “The entire purpose of him coming out here was to tell you about his work on Sykes’ book and to ask you to be a part of it. Why would he claim that someone else was writing it?”
“I don’t have an answer for that. All he said was that the book was going to be filled with inflammatory information about myself and the FBI and he wanted to write a book about me as a means of counteracting that. It all sounded perfectly noble. Unfortunately I had a difficult time believing it. Now I know I had good reason.”
“It just doesn’t sound right. None of it does.”
Camille noted the hint of panic that came across Meredith’s face as she rose from the couch and began pacing the room.
“Why don’t we go back to what it was that brought you here?”
Meredith stopped pacing long enough to collect her thoughts. “The last time I spoke to Jacob was the day after he arrived here. That was nineteen days ago. He told me that he had conducted a couple of internet searches and came up with this address as your last known residence.”
“A couple of internet searches?” a wide-eyed Paul cut in. “Please tell me it’s not that easy for a stranger to find out where I live.”
“I’m sorry to tell you dad, but it’s that easy,” Camille replied.
Meredith continued. “He said that he had seen you and your father loading some moving boxes into your car. He was going to approach you then but he didn’t feel it was the right time. He said he would wait a day or so and get back to me with an update. That was the last time I heard from him. I must have called his cell phone fifty times since. He never answered. When I called the hotel he was staying in, the clerk told me he had checked out after one night. He isn’t married, he doesn’t have a girlfriend that I’m aware of, and I didn’t have any family contacts. So all I could do was sit on my hands and wait to hear something.”
“You didn’t think to call the police?” Camille asked.
“I called them, along with practically every hospital in the state. There was no sign of him and the police told me that without any evidence that he had been here beyond his one night stay at the hotel, there wasn’t anything they could do.”
“So after not hearing from him for nearly three weeks, what made you come out here now?”
Meredith took a labored breath as she reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. After scrolling through it for a moment, she handed it to Camille. “Because last night I received this.”
Camille took the phone. The email message on the screen had been composed yesterday afternoon at 2:42 P.M. The subject line consisted of only two words: Camille Grisham. The body of the message consisted of three short sentences:
Meeting at Grisham residence tomorrow at 10:30 A.M. Closing the deal. Need you there.
“Jacob wrote this?” Camille asked as she continued studying the perplexing message.
“Apparently so,” Meredith answered without much confidence. “I don’t recognize the email address, but most people I know have more than one.”
“Did you write back?”
“Several times. No response. Then I tried his cell phone.”
“And?”
“Disconnected.”
Perhaps that explained why Jacob offered the number to his hotel instead of a personal one. The tightness in Camille’s chest returned. “You realize there was no meeting scheduled here today, righ
t?”
“I realized that before I left New York.”
“So why do you think he sent this?”
Meredith let out a nervous chuckle. “Since you were apparently the last person to talk to him, I’m hoping you can tell me.”
“I don’t know much beyond what I’ve already told you. Before we ended our first meeting he told me he was staying at the Brown Palace and tried to give me the phone number to his hotel room in the event I wanted to discuss his proposal further. But I didn’t take it.”
“The Brown Palace?” Meredith said with mild surprise. “As far as I knew he had been booked at a Doubletree near the airport.”
“I’d call that a fairly significant upgrade,” Paul chimed in with a light smirk.
“Considering his fledgling author status, I’d say the same thing,” Meredith added.
“So you don’t hear from Jacob for the better part of three weeks, then out of the blue you receive this cryptic message telling you to fly out here to meet him.”
“On the same day he approaches you for the first time,” Paul said to Camille. “That obviously isn’t coincidental.”
“Then what is it?” a visibly concerned Meredith asked.
Camille hesitated before answering. The tightness in her chest, the intuition, told her exactly what she needed to say, but she knew how dire the consequences would be once she said it. She had only known Meredith Park for a short time, but she wanted nothing more than to spare her the pain that she knew was an inevitable consequence of a truth only she was willing to give voice to. But there could be no hesitation. Just like there would be no sparing of pain.
“Do you happen to have a picture of Jacob?”
Meredith once again reached inside her purse. “I brought one in the event I would have to show it to the police.” She handed over the wallet-sized photo.
As Camille stared at the bright, smiling face of a man whom she had never seen before, the tightness in her chest began to subside. In its place came a surge of adrenaline that both fueled and frightened her. “We have to go to the Brown Palace. Right now.”
“Why? What’s the matter?” Meredith asked in a voice that was riddled with shock.
“We have to find Jacob Deaver. And the man I met this morning might be the only person alive who knows where he is.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DELIVERY
After an intense round of negotiations that bordered on hostile, Paul reluctantly agreed to remain on standby at the house while Camille and Meredith made the drive to the Brown Palace. He imagined the trip would be made in record time, given the HEMI V8 engine that powered Camille’s car and her penchant for using that engine to exceed every posted speed limit that she came across.
This would mark the second time in four months that he waited behind while she made a dangerous trip. The first instance resulted in her being shot. Though the circumstances of this instance appeared to be very different from that one, the sense of dread that coursed through his veins was just as potent.
Unlike last time when he was completely powerless to help, Paul made sure this time that he was prepared should his services be required. The twenty-six-year DPD veteran knew a thing or two about running backup and had all of the required tools at the ready, from the address of the Brown Palace Hotel, to Meredith Park’s cell phone number, to the signal of the GPS tracker that he had installed on Camille’s cell phone before she moved out of the house. The moral implications of secretly installing such a tracker on his adult daughter’s cell phone were not lost on him, and he long ago resolved to access it only in an emergency situation. As far as this protective father was concerned, every moment she was outside his immediate field of vision qualified as an emergency situation, but he had yet to give in to the instinct to turn it on. Someday he would feel comfortable enough to deactivate the tracker altogether.
But this was not that day.
A trip to his gun safe provided the last and possibly most important tool he would need. The Glock nine had been a holdover from his department days. It was easy to carry, had a minimal kickback, and rarely ever missed its target – even if that target had never been anything more formidable than a paper bulls-eye.
Now all Paul needed to do was sit back and wait. Camille had assured him that if anything about the situation felt uneven, she would contact him. He was also instructed to call the police if he didn’t hear from her within a specified time frame. His executive decision to provide artillery assistance came when Camille refused his offer to take the Glock herself. Paul understood her reluctance, given her recent history. Fortunately his draw was still quick, and his hesitation was non-existent.
Of course he tried to convince himself that it would never come to that. If he thought for a second that such a scenario were truly possible, he would never have let Camille and Meredith go without him, despite his daughter’s ability to convince him that she didn’t need a watchful eye on her every moment of every day, and the preternatural instincts that told him otherwise.
His nervous pacing began the moment they left the house and hadn’t slowed in the hour since. There were attempts to occupy time with one or another of the DIY projects that he had undertaken in the two weeks since Camille moved out. But he couldn’t focus on anything other than her for more than a few minutes.
You can’t protect her from everything evil in the world, Paul silently reminded himself; the same as he always did when the thoughts became too overwhelming to manage. Even if you could, she doesn’t need it.
It was with this mantra repeating itself in his mind that he heard the first knock on the front door. It was a single knock. Easy to miss had his senses not been on heightened alert. His mind instantly went quiet as he heard the second single knock, this one softer than the first. The third knock caused his heart to skip. The fourth, a heavy thud that shook the walls of the foyer, made him reach for the Glock.
A near deafening silence followed as he slowly walked to the door.
Paul listened before reaching for the doorknob. He heard nothing but the sound of distant cars and barking dogs and immediately took in a deep breath of relief. The sound of shuffling feet on the front porch cut off his air supply before he could let the breath out.
He held the Glock behind his back as he opened the door. The only thing he saw was the UPS truck parked in front of his house. The driver sat behind the wheel, making a notation in his clip board. When he spotted Paul he gave a quick wave, then drove off.
The air returned to his lungs in short, quick bursts as he set the gun down on the foyer table. The eight by ten inch photo-sized box that the driver left behind rested against the screen door. Paul looked at it for a moment before making a move to retrieve it. The plain white shipping label was addressed to Camille. No return label or additional markings.
The box was light, weighing next to nothing in his hand. A quick shake gave no clue to the contents inside.
The sigh of relief that began two minutes ago was finally completed.
“Guess I’d better warn Rich to use the doorbell next time.”
Paul chuckled as he put the box down next to the gun, a gun he was now thoroughly convinced he didn’t need.
He left it behind as he walked into the kitchen to use the phone. It had been over an hour since Camille left and he figured the time had come for a status update. He would save the story about his near-fatal run in with the UPS driver for another conversation.
He was just about to dial the last digit of her cell phone number when the front door opened.
That was an awfully quick trip, Paul thought as he promptly stopped dialing. Oh well. Better to get that status report in person anyway.
In the two seconds it took for him to hang up the phone and turn around, the light smile on his face had morphed into something much, much darker.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CATALYST
The massive Brown Palace Hotel lobby was teeming with afternoon guests. Some of them were checking in an
d checking out, some of them were enjoying tea and gourmet scones in the opulent dining area, some of them were complaining that their towel warmers were set too high. All of them were very eager, very wealthy, and in Camille’s mind, very annoying. The only thing she wanted was to get to a desk clerk to ask for Jacob Deaver’s room number, but after a full twenty minutes of waiting, there were still six people ahead of her.
Meredith’s naturally elegant air helped her fit right in with the elite crowd surrounding them. But as each dreadfully long minute bled into the next, the cracks in her graceful armor began to show.
“This is absolutely absurd. We can’t stand here all day.”
Camille eyed the three desk clerks working feverishly to process the heavy traffic flow. She knew they were doing their best and hated the fact that she was about to add significantly to the stress of their day.
“We’re not standing here a minute longer,” she declared as she grabbed Meredith by the elbow. “I just hope you don’t embarrass easily.”
“What are you talking about?”
Meredith’s question was quickly answered as Camille pushed the two of them to the front of the line.
The glares and hisses were immediate and forceful.
“Are you out of your mind?” barked the silver-haired man at the front of the line who was obviously the master of some corporate universe. “Just what do you think you’re do—”
Camille’s death stare quickly ended his protest.
The young female desk clerk was quiet but clearly flustered as they approached.
“We’re really sorry about the disruption here,” Camille said with genuine contrition. “But this is something of an emergency.”
“You’re gonna have an even bigger emergency if you don’t get back in line,” a random voice yelled out. Camille pretended not to hear it.
“Ma’am there are other guests ahead of you,” the clerk said in a firm but professional tone. “I understand the wait is unusually long today, but we’re doing the best we can to—”
“I don’t think you understand,” Camille interrupted. “There may be someone very dangerous staying at your hotel right now. And it’s imperative that we talk to him.”
The Other Daniel - A Camille Grisham Novella Page 4
