The Wrong Girl (John Taylor Book 3)

by Travis Starnes

  ‘Or because you don’t want her to embarrass you on national television’ Taylor thought, but held his tongue as Whitaker gathered the skin of his arm between two fingers, readying another painful reminder to be on his best behavior.

  “So you want me to find her then? Someone of your status, I’m surprised the FBI didn’t volunteer to send a hundred agents out after her.”

  “I won’t lie, Mr. Taylor, there are advantages to my position. I, however, need this handled quietly and quickly. I just want her located and followed until I or someone I send can retrieve her. I am aware of your rates, and I’m willing to pay significantly more than your standard retainer.”

  “OK, Senator,” Taylor said, standing. “If you, or someone on your staff I guess, could email me her information and a picture, I’ll get started in the morning. Whatever you can get me, cell phone, address, that kind of thing.”

  The senator stood as well, reaching out to take the business card Taylor handed to her.

  “Thank you, John. I appreciate your help.”

  After the senator had replaced her disguise Whitaker walked her out, the two chatting happily. Taylor was just heading for the bedroom when Whitaker returned, her happy demeanor replaced with a scowl.

  “You can’t help yourself, can you?” she said, her fists balled up, resting on her hips.

  “I think I did OK for myself, Princess. I mean, I had the flight from hell, then you waltz in with Suzette fucking Caldwell, without an ‘oh, by the way, I’m bringing the Steel Matron by for a chat.’”

  “She hates being called that,” Whitaker said, trying to remain pissed at Taylor despite his valid points.

  “How do you know what she doesn’t like? What, are you two buddies now?”

  “No, we’re not ‘buddies.' I got called to Solomon’s office yesterday, and he asked me to set up a meeting between the two of you. The first time I ever spoke to her was on the phone this morning to make the arrangements.”

  “You could’ve given me a heads up. And did she have to constantly use my first name? It was creepy.”

  “OK, fine, I get it. I shouldn’t have sprung her on you like that. You still don’t always have to be such an asshole to people.”

  “I am who I am, Princess,” Taylor said with a cocky smile he’d learned worked well on Whitaker.

  “Don’t I know it. Now get your ass in the bedroom,” she said, pointing angrily at the door across from them. “I still want to get some of that practice you promised earlier before you pass out.”

  Taylor laughed and followed her directions.

  ♦♦♦

  Sunlight streamed between the blinds covering the window next to their bed; the light from its scattered rays forcing Taylor to open his eyes. Reaching out with one arm to the other side of the bed, Taylor felt only the lumpy shape of the blanket and an empty spot where Whitaker should be.

  Rolling the other direction, Taylor pulled the alarm clock toward him and stared at it through blurry, sleep filled eyes. He must have been even more exhausted the night before than he thought. Even when pushing himself on a case, working all hours of the night, he still always managed to get up early the next morning. But, if this clock were to be believed, it was after ten.

  He set the clock back down and pulled himself out of bed, rubbing his eyes. Taylor went through his morning routine methodically, not bothering to rush. He’d agreed to take the case, both because it hadn’t sounded all that hard compared to some of the other jobs he’d had recently, and because it seemed important to Whitaker. But he wasn’t in any particular hurry to get started. Compared to tracking down a girl abducted from in front of her school in broad daylight, finding a wealthy coed who liked to party too much didn’t seem overly urgent.

  After he finished showering and what not, he stopped to clean and reassemble his gun, something he’d forgotten to do the night before. Even if this case looked to be relatively straightforward, Taylor never liked leaving the house unarmed if he could help it.

  Grabbing his phone, he saw an email from someone named Loren Dashel. It was an unusual name, especially since the picture in the email signature at the bottom of the message showed Loren to be a man, and not a woman as Taylor had first guessed from the name. It also helpfully identified him as one of the senator's assistants. Scrolling through his email, he saw Mr. Dashel had sent along the information the senator had promised the night before. Multiple phone numbers were included as well as an address and room number of her dorm, along with a picture of the girl.

  Most people would say Mary Jane was relatively attractive, although based on the descriptions her mother had given the night before, this picture probably did not match how she usually looked. Like her mother, Mary Jane had light reddish blond hair, although where the senator had hers cut short, Mary Jane’s hair spilled over her shoulders and seemed long. Although it was hard to tell exactly how long from the photo.

  She was wearing a sweater with a logo on it, and a blue bow in her hair, smiling sweetly at the camera, which Taylor would bet was not how she usually dressed. He wasn’t an expert, but it seemed her makeup was also tastefully applied. Just enough so Taylor could tell she was wearing some, but all made to be natural shades that might not have been far off what the girl’s lips or skin looked like without makeup.

  Smart money said whatever campaign event or flyer this picture was taken for; her mother had paid good money for someone to make Mary Jane look innocent and wholesome. The girl in the picture looked more like a tennis fan or, well, a college coed and not the hard-drinking party girl that had been described.

  The one thing that stood out to Taylor, which wouldn’t change no matter how she was dressed, were her eyes. They were a piercing shade of blue, with light flecks of green around the irises.

  Clicking off the phone, Taylor headed out of the apartment and to his car. Twenty minutes later he regretted not just taking a taxi. Georgetown was not the easiest place to park, and Taylor ended up leaving his car six blocks from the girl's dorm. That in and of itself wouldn’t have been so bad, but February in DC can get pretty cold, and there was even a light snow on the ground.

  Taylor was at least glad he’d looked at the weather and ditched his usual leather jacket for something more appropriate to the weather as he trudged along the sidewalk toward the college. When he walked in the front door of the dorm and stamped the snow off his feet, Taylor had lost feeling in his nose and the tips of his ears.

  There was a desk for visitors to check in, and the senator, or more likely the helpful Mr. Dashel again, had not only left Taylor’s name as OK to visit but a room key as well. Taylor briefly wished all his cases were this easy.

  Taylor got a few odd looks as he got off the elevator at her floor and let himself into her dorm room. The first thing he noticed was she had no roommate, which was pretty unusual. Even the most elite colleges in the country, like Harvard or Yale, had their undergraduates in dorms with at least one roommate. Finding a sophomore with her own room was weird.

  Taylor also wondered why she was in a dorm at all. With the Caldwell fortune behind her, Mary Jane should have swung her own apartment off campus, and her mother had the pull to make sure the college let her. Maybe her mother wanted her on campus. If she was the wild child, the senator portrayed, Taylor could see her wanting a check on her daughter. Not that it mattered one way or another toward Taylor finding her. It was just one of those oddities he ran across from time to time that would end up bugging him.

  While Whitaker was a typical Type A personality and never left anything sitting out for longer than she had to, his previous relationships had taught Taylor that women were just as slovenly as most guys, though they generally managed to hide it better.

  Mary Jane’s room didn’t fall into either the neat freak or disgusting categories. There were clothes dotted around, but they looked to be from the last time Mary Jane had been in her room, and not multiple day’s clothes strewn haphazardly. Other than clothing and the odd daily use
item, everything else seemed to be in its place.

  Nothing stood out to indicate anything noteworthy had happened here. There weren’t signs of any struggle or something bad having happened to her in the room. Not that Taylor was expecting any. The smart money was still on her being shacked up with a guy somewhere, but after almost a year doing this, with most of the cases being of a much more violent variety, his eye went to details like that automatically.

  Taylor walked the perimeter of the room without touching anything at first. Just looking at everything in plain view, getting a sense of the girl. He wasn’t avoiding touching things out of any worry, it was just part of the process he’d started to develop. While he was in a legal gray area being inside the room, since although her mother paid for the room, she wasn’t the resident and so didn’t have the power to authorize Taylor’s entry, that didn’t bother him. Even those times when he’d blatantly broken into someone’s room, Taylor had done so with few second thoughts. Whitaker, however, took multiple opportunities to remind him of the legal reasons for being inside someone’s house or room, and the problems with going outside of those laws. Taylor and Whitaker had never seen eye to eye on that point. She believed in doing things strictly according to the rules and Taylor preferred a more common sense and expedited process to getting his job done.

  Once he’d finished his circle of the room, he first stopped at the girl's mail and thumbed through it. Not much stood out as noteworthy. A few credit card bills and other junk mail, but nothing personal or otherwise illuminating. Taylor did notice the mail and credit cards were for Mary Jane Norris, and he seemed to dimly recall a news program he’d half-watched some time recently, doing a profile of the senator. It had mentioned her husband, Mary Jane’s father, had passed away from a heart attack, four years earlier. The program had also mentioned the senator had decided to retain her maiden name when she got married. While the news hadn’t been so crass as to point out, she kept her name because 'Caldwell' had a cachet and a public profile that would help her a lot more in her political ambitions than the unknown Norris name would have, but Taylor assumed that to be the case.

  Taylor sat at Mary Jane’s desk and started pulling open drawers and rummaging through papers. Most of it was various school work or just random junk people always seem to hold onto. Underneath one set of papers, he found a small bag with a couple of joints and five random pills in it. The joints weren’t a surprise considering the average millennial these days, but the pills suggested something more. They were all different, and them being in a bag with pot indicated they were not prescribed, or at least not prescribed to Mary Jane.

  He had no idea what the pills actually were, but Taylor assumed they were something for partying. It didn’t matter one way or another since he already knew she was a party girl, but it did go to confirm her mother’s opinion of her daughter.

  In another drawer, he found a picture with two other girls standing in front of a classroom of some type. Next to Mary Jane in the picture was a girl with blond hair cut into a short bob wearing a flower dress, looking like she should still be in high school. It was dated on the back as being from just before the Christmas holiday and said ‘We survived Professor Chang's class. Crissy.’

  Taylor knew Mary Jane had a laptop. He could see a power cable running to the desk from the wall and a disconnected mouse sitting next to an empty spot that would have fit the portable computer perfectly. He also hadn’t found a cell phone or address book of any kind, any of the three would have been a source for where she might have gone.

  Taylor reached for his own phone and dialed a number.

  “Senator Caldwell’s office,” a pleasant male voice said.

  “Loren Dashel please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Loren, this is John Taylor. I need your help with something.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Taylor. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to know about Mary Jane’s schedule last semester. She had a class with a Professor Chang.”

  “One second,” Dashel said, and the clacking sounds of a keyboard could be heard through the phone. “Here we go. She had Biology 101 with a Professor Justin Chang on Tuesdays and Thursdays, last semester, at two in the afternoon.”

  “I don’t suppose you have anything about a student in that class named Crissy, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Taylor, that isn’t in my records.”

  “I figured. Thanks,” Taylor said and hung up before he got a reply.

  Taylor sat for another five minutes at the girl’s desk, looking around, just taking it in while he thought then got up and made his way out of her room carrying the picture of the girls and locking the room behind himself.

  Taylor made his next stop at the registrar's office. Walking in, he busied himself with a rack of brochures about various classes and groups on campus while watching the front counter. There were two people helping students, an older woman who was most likely a permanent employee and a kid who looked fifteen but was probably nineteen on work-study.

  The older woman finished first, and Taylor waited, continuing to seem busy since for what he had in mind, she was probably not his best shot. Another student came in and started asking questions of the older woman, thankfully right as the younger kid got done with the person he was helping.

  Taylor put the brochure about a robotics club back on the rack and walked over to the young man, who had just pulled out a text book and started reading.

  “Hey, I really hope you can help me,” Taylor said, going for a mixture of exacerbated and genial.

  “Sure, dude. Whatcha need. Looking for continuing ed classes?”

  Taylor decided not to take that as a comment that he looked old.

  “It’s kind of embarrassing to explain but, my son goes here and met a girl in his class last year and, well, last week he was diagnosed with a, umm, STD.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do about that, man.”

  “The real problem is, he says he was only, you know, with, one girl all last year, but he didn’t know her well. He doesn’t know her last name, and they went to his dorm, so he doesn’t know where she lives or anything.”

  “We can’t give out student's information,” the kid said firmly.

  “I totally get that. But, this isn’t any STD. It’s . . .” Taylor paused, trying to sound flustered and upset, looking around like he was worried someone might overhear him, “it's HIV. We’re worried she doesn’t know she has it.”

  “That sucks man, but I still can’t give out anyone’s information.”

  Taylor put his head in his hands, trying to seem desperate.

  “OK. I was just hoping we could find an easy way to do this, so we didn’t have ruin a bunch of kids’ lives. I mean, I really want to make sure no other kids get this, you know. I was trying to keep from having to go the health department. I didn’t want them poking around asking a lot of questions and embarrassing kids, that sort of thing. Let me just get your name, so I have a point of contact to give them, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  Taylor pulled out a piece of paper and took the pen from the kid's hand, hoping like hell a teenager didn’t know there was nothing the health department could do in a situation like this.

  “Man, why would they need to talk to me.”

  “Well, I guess cause you're the one I asked for help. I need to tell them I asked this kid, it’s Danny, right?” Taylor asked, looking at his name tag and writing it down. “That I asked Danny in the registrar's office for help finding the girl and he said he couldn’t help find her. I’m just trying to keep other kids from having to go through the hell my son's going to go through now, ya know.”

  “Look, I . . .” Danny said, starting to look around for help.

  Taylor put his hand out on Danny’s arm, holding him in place and looking into his eyes.

  “I mean, I didn’t even need to know her dorm room or anything. I just need to drop off a note for her. Like, at one of her classes or something.
I wasn’t looking to invade anyone’s privacy.”

  The older woman had walked into a back office with a file while the person she was helping waited, leaving poor Danny all by himself.

  “I guess I could . . .”

  “Hey man, I really appreciate it. I swear I won’t let it slip you helped me. I just need to make sure she knows to go get tested.”

  “Yeah, I get it. What’s her name?”

  “Her name is Crissy, maybe that is short for Christine. She was in Professor Justin Chang’s Bio 101 class at two on Tuesdays and Thursdays last semester.”

  Danny typed for a minute and said, “OK, I found her. I’m not going to tell you her last name or where she lives, but you can find her at this class. It ends in about twenty minutes.”

  Danny wrote down a building and room number on a piece of paper.