It was a beautiful night. The air was warm and smelled of saltwater and hyacinths. I turned on the jets in the whirlpool and settled into the steaming water. A cool breeze was coming in off the ocean, and the contrast of its feel across my face and the hot water on my body was a strange and invigorating sensation. I tilted my head back and looked at the moon, then closed my eyes and listened to the gentle thumps of the waves hitting the beach. I wondered what Joe was doing back in Cleveland and whether he and Kinkaid had been able to make any progress with the Russians or Hubbard. I wondered if they’d be disappointed in the utter lack of progress I’d had so far today. Probably. I thought about John Weston, and Randy Hartwick, and then flashes of Betsy Weston’s smiling face and her beautiful mother slipped through my mind. It was easy to forget about them as I sat in the whirlpool with a refreshing night breeze bathing my face and the sound of waves in my ears. I didn’t want to think about them. It was too nice a night.
I’d been in the whirlpool for about twenty minutes when I heard the door to the hotel open and close. I opened one eye and saw a woman with dark hair standing in the shadows, unwrapping a towel from around her waist and placing it on a lounge chair. Even from the side and in the shadows, it was obvious she had an amazing body. For a moment she looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered briefly if it could be Rebecca, the desk receptionist. Then I realized the hair was too curly. I closed my eyes again, disappointed. Maybe Rebecca would be back behind the desk in the morning.
The wind picked up off the ocean, cooling my face and neck and sending a chill down my spine despite the steaming temperature of the whirlpool. In the distance, someone was playing soft jazz music on one of the balconies. It was a fitting and welcome addition to the night. I heard the water splash beside me as the woman stepped into the whirlpool, and I reopened my eyes and looked at her. She gave me a shy smile and then did as I had done, leaning her head back, glancing at the moon, and closing her eyes. I kept mine open this time, though. There had been something familiar about the woman, all right. She was Julie Weston.
CHAPTER 14
THE JAZZ music kept playing, the waves kept crashing, and the wind kept blowing. Julie Weston kept her eyes closed, and I kept staring. I don’t know how long I sat. My brain had caught up to the realization that Julie Weston—a woman sought by police across the country, a woman most people thought was dead—was sitting within feet of me, but it hadn’t figured out what to do with this information. Eventually, I took a deep breath and looked away, out at the sea. I closed my eyes, took a few more deep breaths, and opened them again. She was still there. So much for the mirage theory. Now I’d actually have to deal with her.
I sank lower in the water, the breeze more chilling than refreshing now. Julie Weston seemed content to remain in the whirlpool for a while, so there was no reason to rush into action. That was a relief, because I hadn’t decided how to handle the situation yet. I was too caught up in trying to process the facts.
Julie Weston was in Myrtle Beach, staying at the hotel where Randy Hartwick had worked. Hartwick was in a morgue in Cleveland. He’d been alive and in Cleveland for a few days prior to being murdered. Where had Julie Weston been during that time? Here? Then why had Hartwick left? And where was Betsy Weston? I’d tried to enter into the case without preconceived ideas of what had transpired the night of Wayne Weston’s death, but deep down I’d always believed he’d been murdered and the wife and daughter abducted or killed. Betsy Weston’s diary entry had given me more hope they were alive, but I’d still anticipated finding them in a situation of danger or crisis. I’d certainly never expected to find one of them here, lounging in a resort whirlpool. For the first time, I wondered if Julie Weston had murdered her own husband. But why? To run away with Hartwick, who then ran away to Cleveland? And where the hell did the Russians come into play? None of it made any sense. But none of it ever had. Tonight, though, I sat across from a woman who could finally make some sense of it for me.
As if detecting the intense focus of my thoughts upon her, Julie Weston opened her eyes and looked directly into mine. I would have expected it to be impossible to distract my thoughts from the questions swirling through my mind, but she did it with one shy smile in my direction. The woman was breathtaking. Her fine-boned face was perfectly proportioned; her dark eyes were enchanting sparkles against smooth skin; her full red lips looked as if they could chase all the troubles in the world away with one soft touch. Her dark brown hair seemed almost black as it fell around her bare shoulders in curls that were wet from the steam of the whirlpool. The water hid her body, but I’d seen it once already, and that brief viewing had been enough to leave it permanently etched into my memory.
“Nice night,” she said. I didn’t speak. She smiled again, seeming slightly awkward now, and I realized belatedly it was from my lack of response.
“Beautiful night,” I said, and I tore my eyes from her with an effort and looked up at the moon, which seemed to hang almost within reach above the palm trees, as if maybe by climbing to the top of the fronds and stretching to your fullest you could pull it down. She followed my eyes and sighed softly.
“The moon’s gorgeous, isn’t it? It seems so different here.”
“So different from where?” I asked, and with that simple question the carefree attitude vanished from Julie Weston. Her eyes narrowed slightly, her shoulders tensed, and she shifted on the whirlpool bench.
“Chicago,” she said, her voice clipped and cold. “I’m from Chicago.”
She hadn’t changed her appearance since she left Cleveland. Her hair wasn’t cut in a different style or dyed to another shade. She’d made no effort to change her complexion with makeup. Maybe that was what surprised me more than anything. She’d vanished from Cleveland more than a week ago, and now she was here, apparently unharmed. If she wanted to hide, why had she not attempted to alter her appearance? Since she hadn’t altered it, how had she avoided being spotted? Her face had been on national news stations. Someone should have recognized her by now.
“Chicago,” I said, and she nodded. “Nice town,” I told her. “I’m from a lake city, myself.”
“Really?” Her bored voice implied a complete lack of interest, and she slid down into the whirlpool and leaned her head back again, closing her eyes. It was forced, though, an act designed to end any questioning.
“Uh-huh,” I said, pretending to be oblivious to her signals. “Similar city but a different lake. I’m from Cleveland.”
She sat so still in the water she seemed not even to breathe. I realized after a few seconds that she actually was holding her breath, whether she was aware of it or not. For a moment I considered joining her in the silence, leaving her with the Cleveland comment lingering in her mind while I thought of a better way to approach her. Then I gave up on that idea. There wasn’t going to be an easy way to approach her. Screw it.
“What are you doing here, Julie?” I said softly.
Her eyelids snapped open like shades pulled down and then released too quickly, and there was terror in her eyes. She pushed herself out of the water and lunged for the purse she’d brought to the edge of the whirlpool. I went after her, the weight of the water slowing my movements. She had her hand inside the purse now, and I dived toward her, aware she was probably reaching for a weapon. My outstretched left arm caught her around the waist as I fell back into the water, pulling her away from the edge and down with me. She had something in her right hand: a small, slim canister I recognized as pepper spray. I chopped at her wrist, harder than I wanted to, but hard enough to ensure she wasn’t going to be able to use the pepper spray against me. She dropped it into the water and turned against me, trying to put her knee into my groin. The weight of the water killed her momentum, though, and the blow glanced harmlessly off my upper thigh. I grabbed her forearms and forced them behind her back, pinning her, as she tried to use the knee again. She opened her mouth to scream, but I got my left hand over her lips, muffling the yell as I held both of her slim wrists in one hand
.
“Relax, dammit,” I said, pulling her body against mine to limit her ability to use the knee jabs with success. “I’m not here to hurt you. I work for John Weston. I work for your husband’s father.”
She continued to struggle, but her eyes changed with the words, and she was no longer attempting to scream. She tried to bite my hand, so I removed it from her lips. She didn’t use it as an opportunity to shout for help, though.
“Relax,” I repeated. “If I’d come here to kill you, Mrs. Weston, you’d be dead already.”
I released her and stepped into the center of the whirlpool, rubbing my foot across the tile floor in search of the pepper spray. I found it, bent at the knees, and picked it up, keeping my eyes on her. She backed to the edge of the whirlpool and stood with her arms wrapped around her torso, hugging herself like a small child. Her damp hair hung in her face, and she was breathing heavily, watching me with the wary eyes of an animal that was used to being the prey and not the predator.
“There are a few things you can do now,” I said, returning to the edge of the whirlpool and lifting my body out of the water to sit on the concrete. The moisture on my skin immediately chilled as the breeze caught it. “You can get out of the water and run like hell. But I’ll be right behind you. Not because I want to hurt you, but because it’s my job. You can start screaming like a banshee, and you’ll attract some attention. But do you really want to attract more attention? You’re the woman the world is looking for.” It was a bit of an overstatement, but for a Cleveland resident who had seen Julie Weston on the news every night, it didn’t feel like one. “Or,” I continued, “you can trust me, Mrs. Weston. I’d recommend you take that third option.”
She retreated to the opposite edge of the whirlpool and sat on the concrete as I had done. She was still hugging herself tightly, but I didn’t think it was because of the cool wind. She looked like a woman who felt very vulnerable. A woman who had felt very vulnerable for a while, maybe. She rubbed her hands over her upper arms and stared at me.
“You said John hired you?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me about him.”
I frowned, but then I realized this was her way of testing me, of seeing if I was who I claimed to be. “He’s a loud, opinionated old soldier,” I said. “And many people probably find him intimidating. He’s a lonely man, and he’s lonelier now than ever.” She winced when I said that.
“He loves his son, he loves his granddaughter, and he loves you,” I continued. “He’s opened his savings account to me and my partner, just in hopes of finding you, or at least finding out what happened to you. That is his reason for living right now. The last time I saw him, he was sitting on the deck behind your house staring at a snowman your daughter built as if it held everything that was left of his soul.”
I hadn’t meant to make her feel guilty or sad. I’d simply described John Weston with the first images that came to my mind. By the time I mentioned the snowman, though, Julie Weston was crying softly. She kept her hands clutched against her arms, and the tears slid along her nose and down her cheeks before falling in fat drops to her thighs. I sat across from her, motionless. I wanted to cross the whirlpool, put my arms around her, and tell her everything would be all right. But I knew she wouldn’t want me to, and I didn’t know if everything would be all right.
She cried for a few minutes, and I kept my mouth shut. If she was going to trust me, she’d have to do it on her own. If she didn’t, I was going to have to call Cody and have him send a group of agents out to scoop her up and take her back to Cleveland. That was what I should do. My job had been to find her, and now I’d done that. It was time to turn it over to the feds now and let them have their fun with the rest of it. I didn’t move, though. I wanted to hear what she had to say. Eventually, she stopped crying and took a long, shaky breath. Then she lifted her head and looked at me again, the shadows and her damp hair hiding most of her face. Her eyes were visible, though, and they caught me and held me, seeming to look right through me, as if she were searching my soul before determining how to deal with me. When she spoke, her voice was as soft as the rustle of the palm fronds in the breeze above us.
“I need help,” she said.
I waited for more, but nothing else came. I nodded. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I showed up.”
She asked me to show her identification and my investigator’s license. It was a pointless routine—IDs can easily be faked, and she’d already decided she had to trust me—but maybe the trivial precaution made her feel better. We went up to her hotel room, and she dried off and pulled a sweatshirt over her swimsuit while I stood in the living room and waited. It was a three-room suite, and the door to the second bedroom was closed. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw me looking at it.
“She’s in there,” she said, knowing who I was wondering about. She watched me hesitantly, then stepped past me and opened the door. I stayed where I was, but enough light from the bathroom filtered into the bedroom to display the little girl asleep under the covers, her dark hair spilling across the pillow. Betsy Weston. I stared at her for a few seconds.
“I’m glad she’s safe,” I said, and my voice sounded slightly hoarse.
Julie Weston stood in the doorway, out of the light enough so that I could see into the room, but in my way enough to block me if I tried to move past her. Protective. I turned away, and she closed the door quietly and led me onto the balcony.
“We should talk out here,” she said. “I don’t want to wake her.” She leaned over the rail and looked down at the pool below us. “I should never have gone down,” she said. “I was so scared to leave her here alone. But I needed to get out. I had to get away from this damned room. It’s been like a prison.”
I sat on one of the plastic deck chairs and watched her as she stood with her back to me, looking at the pool. The sweatshirt extended just beyond the bottom of her swimsuit, but the slim, graceful lines of her legs were visible in the shadows. She turned back to me but stayed on her feet, pressing her back against the railing. Then she told the story.
They’d been the perfect family, she said. Happy, healthy, and wealthy. She’d met Wayne while he was working for the Pinkertons. It had been a blind date arranged by one of her friends. They’d gone out once, and at first she thought he’d been a little too arrogant, a little too slick, a little too confident. But he was good-looking, and smart, and charming. So when he called again, asking for a second date, she’d found it hard to refuse. There’d been a second date, and a third, and eventually they’d spent a week in Switzerland, and he’d proposed to her in a beautiful chalet in the mountains. They’d married six months later, and Wayne had taken a risk, leaving behind the benefits of the Pinkertons to set out on his own.
And it had worked. Worked very well, as far as Julie Weston knew. Wayne originally had a partner named Aaron Kinkaid, she told me, but they’d decided to go their separate ways, and her husband had worked alone from then on. I watched her face carefully when she mentioned Kinkaid, but if there was any emotion or passion there, she hid it well.
So the happy marriage lasted, and the career thrived, and the family grew with the addition of their daughter. Wayne was making good money—great money, in fact—and he told her business was good, couldn’t be better, there were new clients coming in every day. On their tenth anniversary, he surprised her with a brand-new Lexus. Good-looking, charming, and prone to extravagant gifts, Wayne Weston seemed like the perfect husband. He was the perfect husband, Julie Weston told me. Until one day in February. She smiled at the recollection, but it wasn’t the product of emotions one typically associates with a smile. It was hard, cold, and bitter—a smile not at the memory but at her own foolishness, a mocking smile at her own faith that had turned out to be so undeserved.
“He came home early,” she said, “and I knew right away something was wrong. Betsy always met him at the door, jumped on him, and hugged him, and he always responded playfully.
That night, though, she just seemed to bounce right off him. He gave her an automatic hug and told her to go play in her room before dinner because he had a headache. She went to her room, but I looked at his face and knew right away it wasn’t a headache that was bothering him.” Her hands tightened on the rail, the knuckles pushing against the skin. “He told me he had a confession to make. And I was standing there in the kitchen, still holding the stupid meat tenderizer in my hand, just staring at him and thinking, ‘Whatever it is, we can beat it. If he’s having an affair, if he’s got cancer, we can get past it.’ And then he told me his confession. And it wasn’t an affair, and it wasn’t cancer. It was worse. He told me he’d been working for a businessman, helping him settle deals and get the best prices. And I said I didn’t see what was wrong with that. So he explained it to me.”
The cold smile came back again. “He’d been helping him by digging deep in people’s private lives and then handing the information over. He shot videotapes of married men having sex with their mistresses, he dug up information on addictions and past psychological problems, on family secrets—anything and everything people were afraid of. And then he handed it over to his boss, and they went to work turning other people’s fears into money. My husband,” she said flatly, “was nothing more than a blackmailer. That was his profession. To ruin lives, or threaten to ruin lives, so another man could make more money on his business deals or have more pull with the city government.”
I sat in silence. I didn’t want to tell her that it was not an uncommon practice. I didn’t want to tell her that secrets are money in the business world, that fear is leverage, that knowledge is power.
“I never pried about his job,” she said. “I knew it was confidential, and the few times I asked questions, that was what he told me. But somehow I’d always imagined that he was nobler, that he was out there solving cases the police couldn’t solve, or helping attorneys prepare for legitimate lawsuits. I knew the cheating-spouse cases would come and go, and there would be some unpleasant jobs, but . . . all he did was look for ways to hurt people. That’s it. He went to work every day determined to find some dirty secret, some sensitive topic, so another greedy man could make a larger profit.”
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