Reunited with the P.I.

by Anna J. Stewart

  She cringed, her knuckles going white around her glass as she drank half its contents. “I want to hire you.”

  If she’d come in here saying she wanted to reconcile she couldn’t have surprised him more. “You need a bartender for a private party?”

  “I need an investigator I can trust.”

  For an instant, the desire for a beer overtook his power of speech. He shook his head and shifted his attention to the bar, keeping the memories—and the nightmares—at bay. “I’m out of that business.”

  The brief flash of sympathy that crossed her face had him gnashing his teeth. Of course she knew what had happened. Everyone in the whole valley knew what happened.

  “I heard about the Walker case. That you’d taken a break after...” Her soft voice hit his heart like a sledgehammer. “I didn’t realize you’d decided to make it permanent.”

  “Now you know.” Vince had made it permanent because it was the only way to save his sanity. A man could only witness the sickening things people did to one another for so long before he started to expect the worst. Not that anything would change the endless nights he spent wondering if he’d missed something, if anything he could have done might have stopped a young girl’s murder. If he’d been a day, hours, even minutes faster. “This is my focus now.” He indicated the polished wood paneling and brass fixtures, the tables he’d refinished himself. “The building’s mine free and clear. I’ve got a steady clientele, one that doesn’t expect anything other than a topped-up glass and a full plate. Best of all? I don’t answer to anyone other than myself and my employees.”

  “I really don’t want to be difficult about this,” Simone said.

  “Since when?”

  “I can’t take no for an answer, Vince.”

  He smirked. “Want to bet?”

  “Oh, for...”

  She scrubbed a hand across her forehead and only then did he notice the tired, dark circles under her eyes. He’d always worried that her job would eventually get to her. Clearly he’d been right.

  “If this is about Jason—” she began.

  “It’s not.”

  Her eyebrow arched so high it almost disappeared into her hairline.

  “It’s not just about Jason, Simone. But since you brought it up.” He rested his arms on the table and leaned toward her. “You sent my brother to prison.” It took all his effort to keep his voice down. “Without a second thought. You never once allowed yourself to consider the extenuating circumstances that happened during that robbery. To top it all off, you and I were barely back from our honeymoon when you advised the prosecuting attorney to throw the book at him, at a kid who’d gotten in with the wrong crowd.”

  “First.” Simone leaned far enough in that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face. “Jason always ran with the wrong crowd. Second, I can’t believe you’re still blaming me for doing my job. And, not to repeat myself, but at the time I had no idea what specific case they were asking about. I read the notes and gave them my opinion. I didn’t realize they’d use the strategy I came up with to prosecute your brother.”

  “Nor did you step in and try to stop it when they did. He’s family, Simone. He was your family.”

  “I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation.” She pressed her fingers into her temple and squeezed her eyes shut. She was trying to hide it under all that fancy makeup, but she looked as if she was doing more than burning the candle at both ends. It looked like she’d torched an entire candle shop. She took a deep breath and released it. “There was more to the case against Jason and you know it. He could have taken the deal he was offered and testified. And I’m sorry, but you’ve never been objective where your brother is concerned. You know this. You’ve told me so yourself.”

  “The line between good and bad gets blurred when your father beats the crap out of you and your mother lets it happen.”

  “And yet you turned out fine. It all comes down to choices. You made good ones. Jason didn’t. Funny how you’re all about consequences except in this scenario.”

  That Simone was right—had always been right about his kid brother—never did sit well with him. It didn’t matter how many times he’d gone to bat for Jason, tried to help him, detour him or get him a job, the kid was a wreck. If he didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all. Part of Vince had begun to believe he had to choose: his brother or his wife. And the more he dwelled on it, the more he resented it. And her. That the press had dubbed her an avenging angel hadn’t surprised him. What had taken them so long? “Okay, fine, but I’m making another choice now. Find yourself another investigator, Simone. I’m not your man.”

  He hadn’t meant to sound taunting, or cold, but he’d always seemed to say the wrong thing around his former wife.

  “Are you so determined to punish me for something that happened years ago you won’t even hear me out?”

  “You should have asked whose file it was.” And here he thought he’d set the resentment aside when he’d filed for divorce. He braced himself as she looked at him in silence. “You should have paid closer attention to whose life you were about to destroy.”

  “You’re right.” She drank the rest of her wine and cringed as if the admission burned. “I should have. If I’d known it was Jason, maybe I would have done things differently.” She hesitated. “If that’s worth anything now.”

  “It’s not,” he lied. Her personal learning curve was one of the qualities he admired most about her. Simone wasn’t one to make the same mistake twice. But she’d made one that put his brother behind bars for ten years for a crime he hadn’t technically committed, and it wasn’t something Vince would get past anytime soon.

  “Good to know you’ve moved beyond it.” She toasted him with her empty glass. “At least let me tell you about this case before you shut me down. Please.”

  “Nothing you say will change my mind.”

  “So long as you’re keeping an open mind.”

  There it was. The sarcasm. The passive aggressive mind games she excelled at. “Why me?” He sat back and kept a steady gaze on hers. “Those expensive investigators at the DA’s office not cutting it? You need to slum it with us mere mortals?”

  “If you must know I’m having some trust issues with the people I work with, and by the way, I never thought of you as a mere anything, Vince. Not once.”

  If she meant the statement as a peace offering, it was a pretty good one. Hating himself, fighting that stomach-clenching dread that his world was about to open up under his feet again, he gave in to her. “I assume this has something to do with Paul Denton?”

  Her brow furrowed. “You’ve been following things?”

  More like he’d been following her. Just because he’d ended it between them didn’t mean he wasn’t proud of Simone’s accomplishments. He knew she’d blown through college and law school in record time, landed at the DA’s office weeks after graduation and won her first case a month after that. Her ambition and determination were what had attracted him to her in the first place. Until he’d realized that same ambition and dedication to the letter of the law didn’t leave much room for him.

  “It’s been difficult not to,” Vince told her. “Front page headlines for the past few weeks. Corporate kickbacks, shell companies, money laundering. Sexy stuff.”

  “I’m convinced it’s the tip of an iceberg,” Simone added as she pulled out a file folder and set it on the table. She flipped it open to show a small photograph stapled to the top of a report. A pretty, dark-haired young woman. Green eyes. Green eyes... Vince forced himself to look. Did they always have to have green eyes?

  “Mara Orlov was fresh out of college when she started in Paul Denton’s private office as his record keeper,” Simone continued. “She’s smart, Vince. Like supersmart, with an eidetic memory, and she picks up on everything. So wh
en she came across a pattern in his books, she dug deeper and uncovered Denton’s fraud. Money that should have been dispersed was getting moved from business to business and then it would vanish. She wrote out a detailed report, photocopied all the records and brought everything she had to a friend of hers in my office who brought it to me.”

  “Why you?”

  “The DA was in the hospital. Gall bladder surgery and then complications,” she explained. “Luck of the draw meant he was out of the office for weeks.”

  Vince smirked. “Luck? You never take a day off and were there, ready and able, to assume control.”

  “She’ll be a star in the witness box.” Simone’s eyes narrowed as she plowed on. “She’s unshakable, actually. Or so I thought. We hit a rough patch a little while ago and she got spooked. She thought someone was following her. So after some convincing, I assigned two deputies to watch her. She was back on board, until this morning.” She was staring at him, hard. “She took off, Vince. Poof. The deputies guarding her were drugged and when they went up to her apartment to get her, they found she was gone—her car, too. Now they’ve been suspended pending an investigation that shouldn’t even be open. I need someone completely unconnected to law enforcement. This could be good for you, Vince. Maybe you need this. I need you.”

  If only that were true. “You’re certain she took off?” Vince purposely flipped the pages over to obscure the photograph. The facts and details blurred, got lost behind the past, locked away by sheer will. “You sure she wasn’t bought off?”

  Simone inclined her head and frowned; he recognized the move. “Bought off? You mean bribed?”

  “You didn’t think of that?” he asked. Could his ex be that naive? He wouldn’t have thought so.

  “No.” She sagged in her seat to the point he wanted to reach over and gently erase the lines of concern between her brows. “No, honestly, it never crossed my mind. She’s not that kind of person, Vince. But you thought it immediately, which proves I’ve come to the right person. Maybe she got scared again, or...”

  “Or maybe someone got to her.”

  “I can’t let myself think that.” He heard a hint of desperation in her voice, one that had slipped through her defenses. “Not yet.”

  Whatever sharp retort Vince considered throwing at her became stuck in his throat. He might know what buttons to push when it came to Simone and her devotion to protecting people—especially women. But he wasn’t so callous as to use the unsolved murder of her childhood friend as a verbal weapon against her.

  “Will you please take the case?” she pleaded.

  “Based on what you’ve told me?” Despite his instincts, his mind was already ticking off avenues to pursue: the girl’s address, her friends, family. He still had contacts at various phone companies to trace the girl’s cell phone. Wouldn’t take much to get a feel for things. “No.”

  “If it’s money—” His eyes narrowed and she held up her hands in surrender. “Sorry. I know. Touchy subject.”

  “Only where you’re concerned.” Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined he’d end up marrying a woman with a trust fund larger than a small country’s national budget. She hadn’t lorded it over him, but her too-generous offer of spousal support had left a giant hole in his ego. As if he needed or wanted anything from Simone other than...Simone. “There has to be more to this than a simple missing witness, Simone. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “A lot.” Her lips were pinched. “But nothing I can prove. Yet. I only have ten days before I’m back in court. If we can find her by then—”

  “What do you mean we? You hire me, I do the job and report to you. I don’t play well with others. And you definitely don’t play well with me.”

  “Right. It said that on the divorce decree.”

  “Simone—”

  “If you take the job, you work for me,” she said. “My terms. Not the DA’s office. And not officially. I’m paying you. Off the books. In cash. Up front if you want. But I need to be involved, Vince. Especially when you find her. I need her to verify on the stand where those books of Denton’s came from. Without her, my case falls apart and Denton—and whoever he might be connected to—will get off.”

  When he found Mara, not if. Did she honestly expect to find...no! He couldn’t go down this road again. Except that deep chasm opening moments before hadn’t been despair, he realized; it had been Simone’s rabbit hole of a conscience. Mara was one of Simone’s crusades; one of those “I’m going to save her and fix her” situations his ex kept getting involved in.

  When was she going to accept that no matter what, she couldn’t go back and save Chloe Evans?

  Vince tapped his fingers against the file. It didn’t matter how long Simone spent in the criminal justice system, she clung to that optimism of hers like a life preserver. In Vince’s experience, cases like this rarely ended well. But he also knew Simone well enough to admit that telling her would only make her dig her heels in.

  He honestly didn’t know what she’d do if he didn’t take the case.

  “Well?” Simone asked. “Are you going to help me?”

  “Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  Vince’s eyebrows shot up. Did she just whine? “Depends if you’re honest with me about when was the last time you ate.”

  “What’s that got to do with—?” There it was again, that tightness in her voice, as if it was a rubber band about to snap. When she pushed her hair behind her ear—her telltale sign of nerves—her hand trembled. “All right. I ate part of a croissant after court this morning.”

  Vince chuckled. She might excel at taking care of other people, but when it came to taking care of herself, she was last in line. “That’s what I thought. Stay here. Decompress for a few minutes. I’ll fix you something in the kitchen. And no,” he added when she opened her mouth. “It won’t be anything you’d usually have. You need some protein. I’ll have Travis bring you coffee since we know what happens when you’ve had too much wine on an empty stomach. We’ll eat, we’ll catch up a bit and then maybe discuss Mara’s situation.”

  She grabbed his wrist as he stood and squeezed hard enough to make his heart skip a beat. “Thank you, Vince.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t said yes.”

  But even before he left the table, he knew he would.

  Chapter 3

  He’d help her.

  Simone saw it in his eyes, beyond the reluctance, the suspicion. The grief. The distrust and betrayal that had come between them years ago wouldn’t matter. When all was said and done, Vince Sutton was too honorable a man to say no when he could do something to help someone. Even her.

  With Vince in play, with her feet on more solid ground, she called her boss.

  “Would you like to guess how many times I’ve thought about firing you today, Simone?” Ward’s tense voice made her cringe. “It’s not like you to run and hide, not to mention dodge my calls.”

  “Damage control takes concentration.” She dug her fingernail into a groove on the table. After her Deep Throat conversation with Russo, the last thing she felt comfortable doing was confiding in people she wasn’t sure of. And if whoever was behind this was going after Russo and his partner, she had to be on someone’s hit list, too. “I needed to regroup and I couldn’t do that surrounded by a dozen voices yelling at me.”

  “No one was going to yell at you,” Ward said. “I run a civilized office.”

  “Tell me you didn’t have at least half the office offering to replace me on the Denton case?”

  “A little less than that, actually,” Ward replied. “Look, Simone, we can both agree that your hinging the Denton case on one witness seriously backfired. I’m sure the pressure got to Mara, but without her and now this postponement—”

  “The postponement is so I
can find her,” Simone interrupted in the hopes of derailing any deal-making he might be considering with the defendant. “Please issue a material witness warrant for her, Ward.” The more people they had looking for Mara, the better. “At least give me until Monday before you concede. You know me. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it.”

  Vince was an exceptional investigator. Sure, he’d had some bad luck and she could understand his reticence about opening closed doors, but this could end up being good for him. He needed to come to terms with what had happened with the Walker case.

  Her boss’s silence pressed in on her. She counted off the seconds, half expecting to be updating her résumé before the end of the day. “Are you still there?” she asked the DA.

  “You really think you can find her?”

  “I do.” Simone bit her tongue to avoid admitting out loud to having a secret weapon. “If you genuinely believe the case is already lost, Ward, there’s no more damage I can do, right?”

  “There’s always more damage that can be done.” He sighed. “But, okay. However, I’m only giving you until Monday to make some progress. Cal’ll be unhappy about this. He’s already pushing me to settle this Denton business now on your behalf.”

  Simone’s stomach clenched. Cal Hobard again. “I don’t get this obsession he has with my case.” She couldn’t repress the concern any longer. In fact, she should press for more information about Ward’s newest employee. “He has no vested interest in Denton, right? Besides, I thought he worked for you.”

  “I have to let him have a say in some things, especially where public perception is concerned.”

  So Ward had definitely decided to run for AG, which put Hobard in charge of damage control if this case spiraled out of control. Was that what he’d been doing at the police station with Russo and his partner when they were being questioned? Protecting his candidate? Or was there more to it? “I appreciate the extra time. I’ll see you on Monday.”