The Tech-Chron Corporation made software for the gambling industry, but apart from that I knew nothing about it. They didn’t exactly have a receptionist at the entryway, but a plump woman with pink cheeks said hello to me, so I pounced.
She examined my business card and then gave me the once-over.
“Are you the famous one?” she asked, left eyebrow raised.
I smiled and tried to brush it off. “Not exactly. I was in the news a few months ago, but that’s it.”
The woman gushed with delight. In the old days, I had often been recognized as the girl from the giant billboards plastered around town. I supposed being recognized as a detective was a mild upgrade.
“My name’s Gloria,” she said. “Can I keep this?” She asked, fingering my business card. There was a twinkle in her eye.
“Uh, sure. Anyway, I’m here about Laura Hartmann. Her husband is concerned about her and has hired me to investigate.”
She nodded solemnly. Her desire to cooperate was palpable. “What can I tell you?” She asked. Then she looked back and forth to see if anyone was within earshot. Before I could answer, she began whispering in a conspiratorial voice. “Nobody really likes her, if you want to know the truth,” she said.
I nodded, stone-faced, trying not to laugh. “And why is that?” I asked, pretending to be very concerned.
The woman looked around again to make sure she wasn’t being overheard. “Because she sneaks other people’s treats. One time, I brought in a whole plate of pumpkin spice muffins, and before ten, the plate was half empty! And there were crumbs on her desk! I saw them myself.”
I had to stifle a laugh at the image of the rotund and rosy-faced Gloria sleuthing around the office with a giant magnifying glass, hunting for incriminating crumbs.
“And treats are serious business, right?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said solemnly. “That’s not why you’re here, though, is it?”
Um, no, I thought. I’m not here about muffins, scones, donuts, or any kind of pastry whatsoever. “I’m here because she’s gone missing.”
“Oh, right,” she said, looking a bit foolish. “That was a little scary, wasn’t it?”
“Was?” I asked.
She nodded. “I mean, we were very glad to see her back at work the next day. Even though we didn’t like her very much.” She said this last part in her trademark whisper.
I was confused. “Wait. You’re saying she’s back at work?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “She was out on Tuesday, but she’s been back ever since.”
“And is she here now?” I asked.
“Let me check. Here, come with me.” She led me through a maze of gray cubicles, many of which were covered with a spaghetti of bright-colored wires and power cords. Most of the employees seemed to be men in their twenties and thirties, more than a few of whom seemed to be trying to check me out without wanting to be obvious about it. But they were. I winked at one guy, a chubby balding man of about thirty-five, and I blew a kiss to a younger Indian guy. Both of them immediately stared down at the floor. I swear, even the Indian guy’s dark-skinned face had developed a reddish hue. Ah, nerds.
Apparently, Laura was hot stuff because she had an office with a view rather than a cubicle in nerdville. The office was empty.
Gloria shot a questioning look at an older woman in the office next door.
“She’s out at a client call this afternoon. Probably not coming back today,” the woman said.
I thanked Gloria for her help and, on a whim, decided to give her a few extra business cards. “Tell your friends,” I said. She was delighted.
I got back in my car, turned on the air conditioning, and just sat there. So, Laura was back, as though nothing had happened. And she’d been back, too. It wasn’t a recent development, and yet Dan had just asked me to keep looking for her. That meant one of two things. Either Dan knew she was back and wanted me to look for her anyway, which would be strange. Or she hadn’t told Dan that she was back and was staying somewhere else. At least she’d be easy to find now, I figured. I could just call Dan and tell him she was okay and was continuing to work at Tech-Chron.
But that raised another question with me. I had assumed that Laura had run off with Owen, but would she continue to stay with him now that he’d been arrested? Women were funny like that, I knew. They could stick with their man no matter what, but this was a big what.
And that reminded me that I hadn’t heard anything about the case against Owen lately. I stopped by the grocery store on my way home and picked up some fixings to make a giant salad, which ended up being more shredded cheese than shredded lettuce. And then I called Tricia from the DA’s office. It was four o’clock on a Friday, so it was a long shot.
A secretary answered and then put me right through.
“Hi Raven,” Tricia said. Her voice was cheerful enough, although to my jaded ear it sounded forced.
“So what’s next?” I asked.
“I was just going to call you, actually,” she said. That got my hackles up. Whenever someone said “actually” to me, I assumed the person was lying. “There’s been a development.”
Here we go, I thought. “Did he accept a plea?”
“It’s in the works. Should be signed on Monday,” she said vaguely.
“How much jail time?” I asked, trying to cut to the chase.
“Four years, plus two years of supervision and mandatory sexual assault counseling. Plus a stiff fine,” she added. “That’s our joint recommendation, anyway. It’ll be up to the judge.”
I sighed. I was a big girl and didn’t want to make a stink about it, so I just rolled over. “So that’s it, then?”
She was silent for a moment. “It’s a solid deal,” she said softly. “He’s a first time offender, so it’s hard to get a lot of prison time unless the case is rock solid. A lot of drug dealers get less than four years.” For some reason, I felt bad for Tricia. She knew it was a crappy deal and that she’d let me down and that in four years, Owen would be free to do the same thing to another woman.
“I think I understand,” I said, resigned. “Let me know if there’s anything more you need from me.”
I was staring out my window, doing nothing, and I’m not sure if I stood there for ten minutes or a half hour. I didn’t know what I was really expecting. The death penalty? Twenty years? Four years wasn’t enough, though. Intellectually, I knew he’d hired a top lawyer, and I also knew that I wasn’t exactly the most compelling victim. Detective Goss had hinted at the possibility, and now it was clear he was right. Would a jury ever sympathize with a stripper? Would they think I led him on? Even in Vegas, strippers were sometimes second-class citizens. Especially when the accused was a popular and powerful minister.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
On Saturday morning, my phone roused me out of a restless sleep. It was Laura Hartmann.
“Raven, I’m in trouble,” she said, her voice a little shaky.
She and I had barely spoken before, so I wondered why or how she was calling me.
“What’s going on?” I asked, squinting at the clock next to my bed. It was just after eleven.
“Well, I left Dan. Actually, I was taken away from him. Two guys I don’t know abducted me and took me to a small house where they locked me in the crawl space under the house.”
“Wow,” I said, not believing a word of it. “Are you still there?”
“Kind of. I broke out, and now I’m in the house. They just left. Can you help me?” Her voice had a twinge of desperation in it.
I didn’t know how to answer. My mind was spinning, trying to make sense of it all. Obviously, she didn’t know that I’d already visited her office, which meant I knew she hadn’t been abducted by some strange men. So why was she asking for my help? I decided to stall for time.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“The address outside says 7113, but I can’t tell what street I’m on.”
“Are you on your own p
hone?” I asked.
She thought for a second. “Yes. They left it in the house after they took it from me.”
“Then it should have a map on there, where you can get your location,” I said, playing along.
She pretended to fiddle with her phone for a few seconds, as though pulling up the app. “Okay, here it is, Raven. It says I’m on Sagebrush Court.”
I wrote down the address. “Can you get away?” I asked. I was wondering why she thought she needed my help, why she couldn’t just walk away on her own.
Laura paused for a minute. She seemed to be making it up as she went along, probably on the assumption that I’d just drop everything and come to her rescue without giving it a second thought. “I’m really too scared to do anything, Raven. The second I leave, they’ll probably come back and find me. And then, they’d probably start beating me again.”
I rolled my eyes, but I kept playing along because I wanted to see where she was going with this. “Okay, stay put. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Oh, thank you, Raven! Please hurry.” Her voice sounded relieved.
After I hung up, I made a large pot of coffee, hoping that a few cups of java would jump-start my caffeine-deprived brain. Even though Laura was expecting me to hurry, she couldn’t possibly expect me to come to her fake rescue without any coffee in my system.
After half a cup, the mental fog began to lift. What the hell was Laura up to? Why call me, of all people, instead of simply dialing 9-1-1? It had to be some kind of setup. I wasn’t keen on visiting 7113 Sagebrush Court, but on the other hand, I sensed that this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away. Right now, I had the edge because I suspected a trap, and I didn’t want to give that up.
The problem, I realized, was that the guy I’d normally call for help was in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound. And I knew Mike was out of town visiting his parents in Utah. So I was flying solo, and that meant I wouldn’t be flying at all. I couldn’t envision any scenario in which it made sense for me to go try to “rescue” Laura from a mysterious address. What kept nagging at me was why. Why did they care about me? Had Laura realized that I’d linked her to the theft of money? If so, that didn’t explain Dan who had continued to ask me to find Laura even after she had resurfaced. He must be involved, too, I decided. But what was the link?
And then it dawned on me. If I was right that Laura was trying to lure me into some kind of trap, it meant there would probably be no one home at their house. If I could rummage around in there while they were waiting for me at 7113 Sagebrush Court, maybe I could find something to tie everything togetherâan open email, a Post-it on the fridge, or even just evidence that Laura had returned home and that Dan knew it. Just about anything would make things clearer than they were at that moment.
I looked up 7113 Sagebrush Court and found that it was in a residential part of town about four miles from Dan’s house. It was enough of a buffer zone but not by much. I dialed up the valet and found my car waiting for me when I got downstairs.
I sped over to Dan and Laura’s house, making great time, and then did my usual slow drive-by when I reached his street. The house looked dead, although I could have said the same thing for most of the other houses in the neighborhood. Despite the approaching autumn season, it was still ninety degrees in the midday sun, and people tended to batten down the hatches and live their lives almost exclusively indoors.
The fact that everyone was indoors gave me a little cover since I didn’t have to worry about people being outside and seeing me. There was always the chance that a neighbor would glance out her window and spot me, though, so I was hoping to be quick.
One thing I’d learned in PI school had proven trueâact like you’re supposed to be there, especially if you aren’t supposed to be there. Go skulking and sneaking around, and people can sniff that out without any trouble. They have an innate sense of when things don’t look right. But if you’re a woman armed with a clipboard, you look nonthreatening (as a woman) and appear like you’re there on official business (the clipboard). At Mike Caffrey’s recommendation, I always carried a clipboard in my car just for moments like these. It made me look like I was conducting a survey or inspecting something. It gave me a mantle of legitimacy, at the very least. If someone challenged me, I’d be screwed. But the point was to avoid the challenge in the first place. If you look like you know what you’re doing, like you belong, most people, being lazy and averse to confrontation, will leave you alone.
All of this is to explain why at high noon on a Saturday morning, you could find me walking up my client’s driveway, clipboard in hand, with a businesslike expression on my face. The first thing I noticed, apart from my rapid heart rate, was the empty carport. Good. I worked my way around to the backyard and was equally pleased to see an eight-foot cinder block wall encircling the yard. I would have privacy here.
I halfheartedly tried the back door, knowing it would be locked, which it was. There were two double-hung windows at just above eye level, but they didn’t budge either. I looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then I reached in my pocket and removed my driver’s license. Up on my tippy-toes, I reached up and tried to slide it between the two windows, hoping I could push the latch open. It budged a half inch but then locked up, giving me the sense that if I had a ladder and something stronger than a driver’s license, it would have worked perfectly.
I tried again at the second window and found success. Like the first, it had resisted my efforts after giving way slightly, but I was able to wedge my elbow against the frame and push my driver’s license through. The window stuck a little, as though it hadn’t been opened in a long time, but after jiggling it back and forth, it came loose and allowed me to push it up.
That was the easy part, I soon realized. The opening was certainly big enough for me to crawl through, but the problem was that it was five feet off the ground. And, although I was flexible, I was no gymnast. The perfect thing to climb on would have been an old metal garbage can, but I hadn’t seen one of those in years. I scanned the barren yard, coming up empty and cursed, not for the first time. I was not going to get inside without breaking at least one nail.
I found that I was able to get a tenuous grip with my hands on the inside of the window frame, but the trouble was finding a grip with my feet. The cream-colored bricks had little valleys where the mortar held them together, of course, but it was scarcely enough to fit the toe of my sandals in. And then I sighed again as the realization struck me. I would have to go in barefoot.
I kicked off my sandals, looking around once more to make sure that no one was watching this slow-motion circus disaster. And then I tried again, pulling myself up from inside the window frame and desperately finding a grip with my toes. I finally realized that I could use the bottoms of my bare feet and not just the toes, and once I did that, I had enough leverage to push myself up and through the window.
Waiting for me on the inside was a large steel double sink filled with the obligatory pile of unwashed dishes and saucepans. Yuck. From the smell of it, someone had boiled a diseased mule and then forgotten to clean up the leftovers. There really wasn’t anywhere for me to land safely, especially since I was coming in headfirst. But I didn’t have the luxury of hovering there much longer since the window frame, which is all that was holding me, was digging painfully into my midsection. So I went for it, diving down in slow motion, placing my hands on the rim of the sink to slow my descent. One knee slid through, leaving that leg dangling precariously in the air, and then I pressed that leg’s bare foot against the wall as I brought the other leg through.
At that point, an acrobat would have done a backflip to get out of that mess, but my only option was to kind of collapse into the sink, one limb at a time. My left knee landed in a small pan with some kind of sticky yellow sauce in it, while the other knee found its way, naturally, to a tray of something that looked like it had once been a casserole of some kind. Was that eggplant in there?
It was disgusting, but I had found a firm enough footing to allow me to crawl out of the sink onto the countertop, from which I slid down onto the floor. I found a washcloth and washed the unidentifiable food particles from my arms and legs and then threw it back in the sink. I shuddered.
Considering that it was midday, it was surprisingly dark in the kitchen. I wasn’t bold enough to turn on a light or open the shades, though, so I would have to make do. As I scanned the room, it was evident that neither Dan nor Laura were clean freaks. A disheveled pile of papers lay on the kitchen table, accompanied by a sad-looking orchid in a small pot and a few mostly empty drinking glasses. I took a quick peek at the papers, but mostly it was junk mail and car insurance renewal information, nothing I was interested in.
The kitchen opened into a medium-sized living area with dated carpeting and an old upright piano standing against the wall. Plastic covers protected the sofa and a matching recliner, as though they were being preserved just in case Queen Elizabeth showed up unannounced for tea. The living room connected with the front foyer, and then beyond that lay the private side of the house, the side with the bedrooms.
There were two proper bedrooms and an office, of sorts. After a quick once-over of the bedrooms, I headed into the office and sat down at the computer desk which had a sorry-looking laptop resting on top of a few textbooks, probably for ergonomic reasons. My vague hope was that, like most people, they would have set all their browsers to remember their passwords on various websites, which would allow me to do a little snooping without having to crack any codes, something that was well beyond my skill level.
The computer was off, which wasn’t promising since it suggested it might just be sitting there gathering dust. It also meant the possibility of needing a password to get into it, but when I just hit Enter at the prompt, it let me right through. One hurdle down.
I fired up Internet Explorer which took me to a bizarre home page that was nothing but celebrity news and gossip. It was one flashy photo after another, each accompanied by a National Enquirer-style headline like, “Is Trouble on the Horizon for Brad Pitt?” or “Kardashians Reveal Truth About Booty Implants.” Really? Here I thought I had been dealing with God-fearing Christians, but apparently, they were just as materialistic and celebrity-obsessed as any other American.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 18
