Love Vs. Illusion

by MJ Rodgers

  Clarise took several deep, collecting breaths as she reached for her control, thankful that the phone line was between her and the hotheaded idiot who called himself her boss. It never ceased to amaze her that the incredible genius who had envisioned and built Fabulous Fantasies was also this emotionally stunted, narcissistic nincompoop.

  “I’m only trying to help, Lex,” Clarise responded in her most conciliatory tone. “I don’t want to see all the wonderful things you’ve accomplished jeopardized.”

  “Jeopardized how?” Linbow demanded, but Clarise could tell from the slight hesitation in his voice that her mention of jeopardy to his creation had gotten his attention.

  “You’ve accused him of attempting to suborn perjury. Justice has to fight the accusation. What happened between you two? I thought he had the case in the bag.”

  “He did, the fool! I don’t know what his problem is. Last night he just suddenly calls me and says he’s not going to be able to represent me anymore. No explanation. Nothing.”

  “Oh, God, it wasn’t—He didn’t find out about—”

  “Don’t go getting your psychological nightie all in a knot, Clarise. He didn’t find out about anything. I cleansed every file until it was sparkling clean before I sent it to him.”

  “But then why—”

  “Oh, who knows why? Look, I fixed that damn lawyer for pulling out. Now he’s in hot water. And we move on.”

  “Lex, that damn lawyer is Adam Justice. He is his reputation. He’s not going to lie back and allow you to—”

  “It’s my word against his, if he’s dumb enough to push it.”

  “But if he knows something and he talks—”

  “Even if he stumbled onto something, he can’t talk, remember? Everything he learned about Fabulous Fantasies was under the attorney-client privilege. He’s got to keep it zipped.”

  “He’s already made a statement by withdrawing as your attorney.”

  “And he got ninety days for his troubles, and I got Gordon Vermine and the biggest law firm in Seattle to replace him. Look, any jury with half a mind is going to see that I had nothing against Patsy Harper or Fran Temark and no reason to mess with their marriages. As soon as the new trial rolls around, Elling’s history, along with those two bozo clients of hers.”

  “It’s not Elling who’s worrying me.”

  “Well, then, who is it?”

  “Lex, I suggested you engage Adam Justice in the first place to represent you in this suit because he’s the best, remember? And now you’ve made him our enemy.”

  “Clarise, he’s in jail. What is he going to do?”

  “He may be in jail, but the other lawyers in his firm aren’t, and their reputations are solid. I’ve also heard he has a sister who runs a top-notch private investigation firm.”

  “So?”

  “So, we’re going to have to tighten security everywhere, particularly on the island.”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “Do you want to be the one to explain things to Woodson if somehow this all starts hitting the fan?”

  “All right! Do what you have to. Just stop bothering me with the details.”

  Bothering him with the details? Clarise took a couple of deep breaths and reminded herself she was a professional. “Maybe it’s time for me to walk away.”

  “Don’t make empty threats, Clarise. Where would you go? Who else is going to hire that fancy Ph.D. of yours for the money it’s worth? Or have you forgotten you’re persona non grata with the psychological community these days?”

  “Being poor is better than being in jail.”

  “Poverty may not bother you, but walking away from your work would. You’d never leave it. And we both know it.”

  Dial tone blared suddenly in Clarise’s ear.

  She gritted her teeth as she slammed down the phone. He was right, damn him.

  She would stay. For the work. And she would do her damnedest to keep him out of trouble. Because that was the only way she could keep herself out of trouble.

  She snatched up the phone again and punched in the security office. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Tripp, it’s me,” she said. “New security measures are going into effect immediately. One, hire no one new. Two, make sure the supply ship contains only people we know and trust. Three, cover staff vacations and illnesses with double shifts. Four, X-ray and search the luggage of all customers, old and new. Five, tap in on all guest-room phones. Got it? Good.”

  Clarise disengaged the line but held onto the phone. The island was of paramount importance. But there was Lex’s Seattle office to consider, too. Who knows what that fool might be keeping there? She dialed the second number.

  Chapter Four

  Zane saw A.J. among the midnight cleaning crew entering the hallway that led into the Seattle offices of Fabulous Fantasies. He stepped behind the stairwell door at the other end of the hall just in time to keep her from seeing him. He continued to watch her through the small slit at the edge of the doorframe.

  She was well camouflaged in overalls and horn-rimmed glasses, her hair drawn up into a bandanna, a thick utility belt at her waist. But the graceful quickness of her movements and the intensity of her focus gave her away.

  After being her shadow for the past two weeks, he’d memorized all those small but significant mannerisms that characterized her and her alone.

  The way her body moved with the disquiet of a dancer, never quite at rest, always eager for the next step. That fluid pivot when she turned to check behind her, as though her spine was fused from the waist up. The way she talked to herself when she thought she was alone. The soft, pensive curve to her mouth in that rare unguarded moment when she smiled.

  He was certain he could find her now in any crowd, beneath any disguise.

  It had been a hectic two weeks for her, and him. When he’d followed her home four hours before, he’d thought she was in for the night. It wasn’t until Vanack called soon thereafter to say she had left again and where she’d gone that Zane got an inkling of what she was up to. And where he’d find her.

  He watched and listened as A.J. exchanged inanities with the other two members of the crew over the dusting and vacuuming, fitting in easily, attending to her cleaning tasks like it was something she did every night. But as the crew finished on the floor, Zane saw A.J. slip her hand around the door to the offices and surreptitiously unlock it. Then she quietly closed the door and rolled the cleaning cart after the others on their way to the next floor.

  Zane walked over to the door, opened it, stepped inside and closed it quietly behind him. He took the flashlight out of his pocket and looked around. He found himself in a good-size reception room, nicely appointed with healthy plants and wildly colorful wallpaper, a large oak secretarial desk and half a dozen beige leather chairs. The adjoining office door had a Private sign on it.

  Zane tried the door and was not surprised to find it had also been left unlocked by the cleaning crew. He stepped inside, closed it behind him. The large brass nameplate on the edge of the enormous oak desk read Lex Linbow.

  Zane made himself comfortable in Linbow’s large executive leather chair. He knew A.J. would be stepping through the door into this office after the rest of the cleaning crew left.

  She was in for a surprise.

  A.J. WAVED GOODBYE as the night-crew van drove away. She had told them her lover was going to pick her up in front of this building. None of them gave the lie a second thought.

  It had been a night of lies. Convincing one of the cleaning crew to say she was sick and to introduce A.J. as her substitute for that shift had been easy—considering the tantalizing inducements A.J. was offering of a night off with full pay and an added hundred dollars to sweeten the deal.

  A.J. knew she should feel relieved. Everything had gone just as planned.

  But she didn’t feel relieved. She felt uneasy. She looked around, scrutinizing every shadow. Zane was not there. She was certain of it. But she still
felt uneasy.

  Was it the tension of knowing Adam was locked up that was making her overly sensitive? Or was it that she was about to commit a felony?

  As the van swung out of sight, A.J. resolutely put both concerns out of her mind as she circled to the back exit. She had purposely left it unlatched as she’d filed out with the cleaning crew moments before.

  The smells of chemical cleaner still stuck to her gloves. The muted sounds of sporadic traffic reached her from a street away. The booming sound of a bass drum from some hole-in-the-wall nightclub echoed through the alley. Like all big cities, Seattle was awake, even at this hour.

  A security van suddenly rounded the corner, headed her way. A.J. ducked behind the building, flattening herself against the cold concrete. She checked her watch. The van was a couple of minutes early.

  She waited until it made its pass and drove off. Someone had seen to it that the security van doubled its passes over the past few nights. Someone was getting nervous.

  After a last careful look around, A.J. replaced her cotton cleaning gloves with surgical ones, slipped inside the building and latched the heavy steel door behind her.

  She took the stairs two at a time, eager to get to the Fabulous Fantasies offices. She was a little out of breath when she finally burst through the stairwell door on the eighth floor. Despite the resumption of her aerobic and weight-lifting exercises after her release from the hospital, she knew she was not at her peak.

  It irritated her. She had no patience with physical limitations. She never had.

  All was dark and quiet in the hallway. An emergency light overhead illuminated the glass entry door to the Fabulous Fantasies offices. She turned the knob and let herself inside, closing and locking the door quietly after her.

  The reception area was lit sufficiently by the hall’s emergency light. But when A.J. let herself into Linbow’s office, it was pitch black. She felt a sudden discomfort as she stood on the edge of the room. It felt as though someone or something watched from within the darkness.

  She shoved the discomfort aside. She had no time to spare for formless fears.

  A.J. dug inside her baggy sweats for the flashlight she had hidden there. She flipped the switch and traced the narrow beam over the walls and furniture to the drapeless windows that opened out to the deeply overcast night. She focused in on the one item that interested her. Linbow’s desk.

  She made her way to it.

  When she had dusted this desk an hour before, she had noted that there was no sign of paper files, and even more important, no sign of a computer in either this room or the reception area.

  It had struck her as strange—and very unlikely—that the president of a company that marketed sophisticated computer programs wouldn’t even have a terminal.

  She circled the desk and pushed Linbow’s chair out of the way. She’d already tried pulling out the desk’s two drawers. Neither the large right-hand drawer nor the much smaller middle drawer had budged. There was no sign of a key lock. There had to be another way to open them.

  She ran her glove-clad fingers over the wood, feeling for a hidden lever or button. Jimmying the drawers open would be faster, but she wanted no evidence of her being here to remain after she was gone.

  She had taken every precaution, carefully planned every step. Still, it was risky letting herself into Linbow’s office this way.

  Not that she didn’t take risks. Risks were all part of the business. Only those risks normally didn’t involve stepping out of the legal bounds.

  But this was not a normal case. And after two weeks of stonewalling by Scrater and Elling, A.J. had learned that staying within the law just wasn’t working. For while she was playing it safe, Adam was in jail.

  The very thought chilled her.

  To his law partners, to all those who knew him, Adam was the legal machine—honest, dependable, clearheaded, correct, cool. A man in control. A law unto himself. A loner.

  But she knew the other Adam.

  The Adam who had given her the nickname of A.J. when she was eight, because he said Ariana wasn’t tough enough for his sister who was defeating the cancer that was trying to claim her.

  The Adam who had visited her in the hospital every day after school, insisting on telling her outlandish stories to make her laugh when the treatments that were supposed to help her get well made her want to scream.

  The Adam who patiently held on to the back of her bike day after day, yelling encouragement, despite her wobbly legs when she’d finally got out of the hospital and was determined to learn what it was like to be a normal kid.

  It was Adam who had always been there for her.

  It was time for her to be there for him. She was through playing it safe. She was getting Adam out of that cell. She was going to get results in whatever way it took.

  Her fingers found a tiny raised nodule in the upper corner of the large right-hand drawer. This had to be it. She pressed the nodule, and sure enough the right drawer silently slid open.

  A.J. smiled, encouraged by her success, and shone her flashlight inside the drawer. A shallow shelf on the top held some writing paper and pens. She pushed them impatiently aside to see what lay beneath.

  The flashlight illuminated a couple of unusual-looking goggles and earphones and two pairs of leather gloves surrounded by wires and metal joints. Each pair of gloves was connected to a pair of goggles and a set of earphones.

  A week ago, this unusual apparatus would have perplexed her. But since then she had done her homework. She knew these goggles and earphones and wire-rimmed gloves were all part of the gadgetry that helped the human senses enter a world created within a computer—a world of virtual reality. Finding them convinced her that a computer existed around here somewhere.

  She pulled out the gloves, goggles and earphones and set them on the desk. She pointed the flashlight into the depths of the drawer. She was disappointed when it revealed the only item that remained—a TV remote control.

  A TV? She had seen no TV.

  A.J. scanned the room once again with her flashlight. She verified that the only furniture were Linbow’s desk and chair, a couple of guest chairs and a long beige leather couch in the corner. She focused on the walls.

  Just behind the desk and to the right was the same wild wallpaper she’d noticed in the reception area. To the left were the floor-to-ceiling windows opening out to downtown Seattle. But on the wall straight across from the desk there was nothing at all.

  A.J. pointed the remote control at the blank white wall before her and pressed the on button. A four-by-five-foot section of the wall obediently lit up and hummed to life.

  A.J. smiled. It was not a television. The white words flashing on a vibrant blue background were about system capacity and drive testing—and looked a lot like what her computer monitor showed her every morning when she turned it on.

  “So, Linbow, you embedded your computer monitor in the wall itself,” she said out loud. “But where’s the system unit?”

  She fiddled almost absently with the handle on the drawer. It came off m her hand. While she was trying to fit it back into place, she stopped as she realized that the two holes the handle fit in were exactly the size and distance that would accommodate the two data jacks swinging off the goggles.

  Her excitement grew as she fitted the data jacks into the holes and they clicked into place.

  “The computer is built right into the desk!” she said aloud. She hoped there was a conventional keyboard somewhere. She certainly wasn’t ready to put on the paraphernalia and try out the VR.

  But when an extensive exploration of every inch of the surface and sides of Linbow’s desk revealed no more raised nodules or anything else, A.J. found her hope waning.

  “Damn, where is it?” she said as she pounded her fist on the surface of the desk in pure frustration.

  She jumped back in surprise when out popped the middle drawer, displaying the sought-after keyboard.

  A.J. smiled in relief. “Ju
st goes to prove a little anger can come in handy sometimes.”

  She scooted Linbow’s chair into place and sat down to get to work. She had more than a winking acquaintance with computers, although she knew she was way out of Linbow’s league. If he had devised some type of sophisticated password lockout, she doubted she had a prayer of getting past it. But she was prepared to give it all she had.

  But surprisingly, as soon as she pressed the enter key, a menu appeared with no apparent restrictions barring selection. As she read through the list of items, she could see that most were fantasy programs. A.J. selected the only option that related to the business end of the amusement park, Patron program selections.

  The list was organized by the type of program selected, not by patron name. She scrolled down the second column, which listed the customers for Femme Fatale.

  She found Patsy Harper’s name beside customer number thirty-nine. She found Fran Temark’s name farther down the page, as customer number forty-eight. But other than that both women had paid for their fantasy weekend by credit card, the computer record revealed no other facts. She slumped in the chair, disappointed.

  “Now what’s a nice private investigator like you doing in a place like this?” a drumroll baritone suddenly boomed behind her.

  A.J. sprung out of the chair and spun around, her heart punching into her throat like a fist.

  The man facing her was enormous, and so was the gun in his holster. The light from the computer screen reflected off the security guard’s uniform, the powerful arms crossed over his chest, the scowl on his face and the very distinctive gleam in his anthracite eyes.

  “Coltrane,” she said, her heart whipping against her rib cage, her voice barely a whisper. “How did you get in here? The door never opened.”

  A raven eyebrow swept up his furrowed forehead. “Didn’t it?”

  “I didn’t hear-”

  “I’m not surprised. You were a little too busy breaking into the computer to notice, weren’t you?”

  Zane uncrossed his arms and leaned over to switch on the desk lamp. He then picked the remote control off the desk, flipped off the computer monitor, replaced the items she had removed from the desk in their respective compartments and closed the drawers.