Yes, I told myself. Deep inside, I knew that the same reasons I wanted to stay were the same reasons I needed to leave. As long as I was a stripper, there was zero chance I’d be able to make a normal life for myself or be able to look Fr. Sweeney in the eye while I was receiving communion. It was tempting to stick with it, to grab every last sweaty five-dollar bill, but I needed to get out. And this was the new life I’d chosen. I just had to find a way to stop ending up like this, fearing for my own safety and jumping at every little creak or sound.
The green tea was calming. I realized I was making too big of a deal about things. First of all, Owen might not even know the cops were coming for him. As Detective Goss had said, it was quite common that they wouldn’t get their man on the first try. And even if he did know, why assume that he would immediately come after me? There were probably thousands of people arrested for sexual assault in Las Vegas every year, and I’d never heard of any of them trying to murder the victim after she complained. Why did I think I was so special?
I made myself a reasonably healthy dinner and vegged out on the couch, sneaking glances at the clock every three minutes. At times like that, I wanted company, to not be sitting alone in a little apartment wondering what was going on in the world outside. It was a rare moment when I wanted to go to work.
That Wednesday night was surprisingly busy. None of the girls knew which conventions were in town, which had me rolling my eyes and clucking like the old mother hen I was. In my day, we’d have spreadsheets linked directly to the Las Vegas tourism board’s website, and they showed not just who was in town but how many people. A previous manager had even come up with a ranking system. Four dollar signs meant the conventioneers usually enjoyed our services and paid out big tips (chiropractors, finance guys, and anything related to sales or computers), while a single dollar sign (e.g., the National Accountants Board) meant “Stay at home! Don’t bother with these cheapskates!”
When I got home around three, I checked online to see if there was any news about Owen’s arrest, but there wasn’t anything. The LVPD were known for leaking their high-profile arrests to the media, so I took it as a sign that he hadn’t been arrested. I conked out on my sofa and didn’t move a muscle until the sun’s piercing beams began streaming through my condo just before seven, at which point, I dragged my exhausted butt to my bedroom and shut the drapes as tightly as they allowed.
My phone woke me up just after eleven. It was Dan.
“Raven, it’s about Laura,” he said, sounding alarmed.
“What’s going on?”
“She’s not at work,” he said, his voice sounding rushed. “They just left a message on the machine assuming she was working from home this morning. But she left about two hours ago.”
“Okay, Dan, slow down. And she’s not answering her phone?” I asked.
He sighed. “No. It goes straight to voicemail. I’ve texted and emailed but nothing.”
“Well it’s only been a few hours, right?” I asked, trying to sound reassuring in spite of my growing sense of concern.
“You’re right, but this is very unlike her. She never misses work. And I don’t know why her phone would be off, either.”
He was right, and we both knew it. “Have you called the police?” I asked.
“Not yet. I’ve heard they won’t do anything until someone is missing for twenty-four hours, and it’s only been a few,” he said. “Is that true?”
“Kind of. There has to be something really crazy going on for them to get involved. And in your case, you’ve got a domestic situation where frankly⦔ I trailed off, reconsidering my reasoning in midsentence.
“Frankly what?” he asked.
“Well, I mean,” I stammered, “let’s just say it’s a situation where the cops would not be surprised if one of you, you know, ran off.”
Dan huffed. “Because of your little theory that Laura and Rev. Owen were sleeping together?” His voice was trying to mask shame with mild outrage.
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s not important. What’s important is that we find her, wherever she is. Owen is missing, too, by the way,” I blurted out.
Dan was silent now. I could imagine him trying to rationalize it, trying to cling to the last scraps of hope that his wife was faithful and that his minister wasn’t a sleazebag. But Dan was a smart guy. The fact that both of them were missing at the same time was pretty alarming.
“That’s not good,” he whispered. “What do you mean ‘missing’?”
“The cops tried to arrest him yesterday, but he wasn’t there. And they haven’t had any luck finding him,” I said, telling him what I guessed to be the truth.
“Can they find him?” he asked.
I thought about it for a second. “I think they can, but I doubt they will.”
“How come?”
“If everything I’ve reported is true,” I began, “it’s probably only an attempted assault. Even if they could prove he drugged me, they wouldn’t be able to prove he planned to rape me, for example. The point is, they’re not going to set up a big manhunt for a crime like that. He’s a creep and a criminal, but he’s not a serial killer. They just don’t have the resources to hunt down every guy like that.”
Dan sighed. “You’re probably right. So where does that leave us?”
“Where would you run off to if you were Owen?” I asked. “Does he have a place anywhere? Family nearby?”
“Not that I know of,” Dan said. “They could be anywhere,” he mumbled.
They, I thought. He was finally admitting to himself that they were together. “I don’t have any great ideas, to be honest, but I’ll make a few calls and get back to you later. Let me know if you hear anything from Laura, okay?”
He agreed, and I ended the call not knowing if there was anything I could do to help him. Hunting fugitives wasn’t exactly my specialty. In this day and age, if two adults with money wanted to disappear, there wasn’t much to stop them.
After lunch, I decided to call Detective Goss to check in.
“Raven, I’m glad you called. I was just going to call you,” he said.
Yeah right, I thought. “Anything happening?” I asked.
“Clavette’s lawyer got in touch with us,” he said. “We arranged his surrender down here at the station, and he got a quick bail hearing. So, as of about twenty minutes ago, we’re done. At least for now.”
“We’re done?” I asked, surprised by everything. “What does that mean?”
“It means he’s been formally charged and arrested, and now the prosecutor takes over. It’s looking like a plea deal is in the works already.”
I had figured as much, but it was still a little bothersome for some reason. I had been picturing him wearing orange, doing the perp walk every day as he came and left the courthouse, because the trial itself would be part of the punishment, part of the humiliation he deserved.
“Will he do time, you think?” I asked.
He paused a second before answering. “Definitely. But he’s got money and a top lawyer. Between you and me, prosecutors are lazy. They roll over more for guys like that because they know what a bitch it’ll be to get a conviction. So it might not be as long as you’d like.”
“That sucks,” I said, doing nothing to hide my frustration. “Anything else you need from me?”
“Nah,” he said. “What’s her name will be in touch with you, I’m sure.”
“You mean Tricia? From the DA’s office?”
“Yeah. That’s the one. She’s pretty good, I hear,” he said.
After we hung up, I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. All this trouble so he can get a slap on the wrist? I supposed that’s why many women didn’t go through with it, especially when the assaulter was a rich or powerful guy. But, I reasoned, getting him a first offense was worthwhile. If he ever did it again, there would be no slap on the wrist. And sometimes, I knew, the publicity could bring other women out of the woodwork, women who were afraid to say anything
on their own, but who drew strength in numbers. Maybe I’d be starting a wave, a wave that would crash on top of Clavette and drown him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
So Owen had gone out and gotten himself a fancy lawyer, I thought ruefully. He was entitled, I supposed. And it wasn’t exactly surprising. The kind of guy who would secretly drug a woman was not the kind of guy who would simply admit to his crimes and move on. There would be theatrics, the casting of doubt, and, worst of all, blaming the victim. I could picture it now if he went to trial. Raven McShane, the “victim.” His lawyer would probably use air quotes when he said it. Raven McShane, who had done nothing with her life for the last decade except strip off her clothes and surgically enhance her body so that it was more attractive to men. More like Raven McShane, temptress. The more I thought about it, the more a plea deal seemed attractive.
I had a dinner date that evening with Alex, though I wasn’t really in the mood. It was rare enough that I had an actual date with a man, and this was a date with a real man. But the situation with Clavette was weighing on me, and something else was, too. Where had Dan’s wife run off to? If Clavette had turned himself in and was cooperating in the investigation, they obviously hadn’t run off together as I’d suspected. The two things might have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. It was a common enough assumption, a perfectly human leap of logic to assume a causal relationship whenever A and B happened at the same time. But assumptions like that were often wrong. I had assumed that Dan’s wife was sleeping with Clavette simply because I’d seen them together, in secret, at Clavette’s home. And then I had made the leap to conclude that because both of them were unaccounted for, they must have run off together.
I made a little mental note to try to learn from the error, to exhort myself to not be so lazy in my mental reasoning process the next time around. And once I had done that, and once I had finished beating myself up over it, I was still faced with the question that I realized was truly nagging meâwhere was Dan’s wife?
I assumed Dan would have called me if he had heard from her, but since it was bugging me, I decided to call him. I got no answer. It was tempting to blow it off since she’d been gone only a few hours. But with her phone turned off and with her not showing up to work, it was too strange and unsettling to ignore. All of this was weighing on me while I got ready for my date with Alex. I had insisted on a place that served real food, and so Alex had reluctantly agreed to meet me at Maria’s Mexican Restaurant, which was about a mile from his office and which served an off-menu entrée that they called Mexican lasagna. It was a mixture of pork chorizo and ground beef in a heavy brown mole sauce with corn tortillas instead of lasagna noodles. It was the kind of dish that made my knees buckle. Naturally, Alex had never heard of the place.
My operating theory was that I wanted Alex to go into this relationship with his eyes wide open so that he wasn’t laboring under some kind of adolescent fantasy about me. I wasn’t twenty-one anymore, and he wasn’t twenty-four; we were grown-ups, and neither of us was likely to change very much. So I wanted him to understand that this grown-up girl ate her share of cheesy Mexican food and drank more than her share of margaritas. I thought it was awesome that Alex was in such great physical shape, of course, but it was important for him to know he wasn’t getting himself involved with some kind of health freak. If the expectations were lowered, gently, at the outset, then there would be no big letdown later.
Typical me, I thought, as I drove myself to the restaurant. Here I was, already plotting a course for the inevitable breakup, trying to make it a soft landing rather than a crash. All this before our first real date. Was I that much of a pessimist? I tried to think positive thoughts heading into dinner, but the disappearance of Dan’s wife was still weighing on me.
Alex texted that he’d be a little late, so I jumped at the opportunity to sidle up to the bar. I hadn’t been there in a couple of months, but the bartender took a look at me, smiled, and then fixed me a perfect margarita using the tequila I liked.
“Very good,” I said, genuinely impressed. And then I remembered why he remembered me. It wasn’t because I was beautiful or charming but because the last time I’d been there, it had been with a group of girls from the club, a going-away party for a girl who was marrying a client, a dentist from San Diego who’d taken a real shine to her. Since I had been the oldest girl and since I was the only one with more than eight bucks in my bank account, I had acted like a big shot, ordering drinks and leaving my credit card at the bar. I still remembered the exact bar tab. $482.70. It wasn’t the kind of memory that would lift my spirits.
The margarita helped, though, and by the time Alex arrived, I was three-quarters of the way through it.
“You’re a little overdressed,” I whispered, as he joined me at the bar. He was still wearing his navy pinstriped suit, no tie.
He shrugged. “I think they’ll serve me anyway. What kind of tea do they have?” He asked earnestly.
I shot him a look that was half horror and half death stare.
He smiled broadly. “Just kidding,” he said, chuckling. “I’ll have some single malt.”
“Alex!” I hissed.
He put up his hands defensively. “Again, kidding! I’ll have what you’re having.”
I waved the bartender over and ordered for my aristocratic date.
Alex sighed, almost imperceptibly, as he began draining his drink.
“Tough day?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Kind of. We had to let somebody go today, someone who’s been with the company a long time. But I hate talking shop. What about you? You have a good day?”
I snorted up half an ounce of margarita. “Umm, no. My client’s wife disappeared on us, and⦔ I trailed off, realizing I hadn’t told him about Owen.
“And what?”
“Well,” I paused. And then the margarita kicked in. On an empty stomach, it was a truth serum. “A guy tried to drug me a few days ago. And now he’s been arrested.”
Alex’s eyes got big, and he grew very concerned as I relayed the story to him. We ordered a second round of drinks, although Alex switched from the margarita to a glass of straight tequila, and then took them to our table to order food.
Alex played along and ordered the off-menu “lasagna” with me. I realized that this was an important first date for him too, and he was trying to play nice and make a good impression. I had always operated under the assumption that I was the one being judged, evaluated, poked, and prodded, but now I understood that Alex was expecting me to be sizing him up just as much. Or even more.
The steaming plates of chorizo and beef arrived, and Alex did his best not to regard them with horror or even skepticism. I cocked my head at him, impressed.
“What?” he asked, gamely plunging a fork into his meal.
“I’m impressed. That’s all,” I said.
He put the fork down. “You know, Raven, I wasn’t always like this,” he said, waving a hand across his too-lean torso. “Check this out,” he said, a mischievous smirk crossing his face. He reached down into his pants and pulled out his wallet and then handed over his driver’s license.
I was still chewing my first, delicious bite, and found myself mildly annoyed by the distraction. When I’m eating, get out of my way. He’d learn, in time. I examined the driver’s license, front and back.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked.
“Look at the picture.”
“Uh huh. And?”
He sighed. “I used to be fat,” he said, taking the ID back.
I looked at it again and then checked the weight listed on the card. “Ooh,” I said, mockingly, “you were a hundred and eighty-two pounds. A real chunker.”
He shrugged.
“That’s still thin,” I said. “Most men are, what, two hundred? According to experts, whoever they are, two-thirds of the country is overweight.” I bit into another delicious bite of cheese and meat, the irony not lost on me.
&n
bsp; I was waiting for Alex to take a bite, and when he finally did, he pronounced the food delicious and dutifully began to finish his plate, just like a good boy. And then my phone buzzed. It was a number I didn’t recognize and, despite being on a date, I answered.
“This is Owen,” the voice said. “Owen Clavette. How are you, Raven?”
His voice gave me chills, a flashback to our last encounter. I tried to collect myself enough to respond, although part of my brain was telling me to just hang up.
“You shouldn’t be contacting me,” I said. “You’ve got a criminal case going on, don’t you?”
“For now,” he said, a little too casually. “I was hoping we could get past all that.”
Alex must have read my body language because he piped in. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
I held up a finger to Alex to signal that I’d tell him in a minute. I needed to focus.
“What are you suggesting, Owen?” I asked. In the back of my mind, I knew there might be some way out of this, some way for him to walk, and I wondered if this was it.
“I’m suggesting we meet and just talk,” he said. It sounded rehearsed. “I think there was really a big misunderstanding, which was entirely my fault. And there would, of course, be someâ¦recompense, to accommodate you for the inconvenience of everything.”
Recompense, I thought. What a word. More like bribery. Still, I wasn’t completely above being bribed. “And where would this meeting take place? I’m not going back to your place,” I said firmly.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 13
