Reclaim

by Beth Yarnall

  “Did you ever get their names?”

  “No. They’d come in and go straight to his office without knocking, like he was expecting them. They’d stay ten or fifteen minutes then leave. They never spoke to anyone not even his assistant.” She makes a straight on through gesture. “In and out like a surgical strike.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Big. Both of them had dark hair. One looked like a boxer, you know, with a messed up nose. The other one was missing the last two fingers on his left hand. We called him Lefty and the other guy Bruiser. Not guys you’d want to owe money to or get caught alone with in a parking garage.”

  We talk a little more, but she doesn’t have anything more to tell me that might be useful. We part, promising to get together soon. My meeting with Anna makes me late to meet Inez Torres, Carla’s neighbor and babysitter. I don’t glean much new information from Inez, but she backs up Carla’s story, including her asshole of a landlord. She insists I stay for a cup of very strong coffee and sweet empanadas, which are filled pastries she made herself. The taste reminds me of the ones my grandma used to make when I was kid.

  I text Nolan as I leave Inez’s house with a bag full of empanadas to let him know I’m on my way. Once again I’m late. It’s nearly dinnertime and way past the time I thought I’d be heading over to his house. I hadn’t thought much about what he told me about Martin possibly being dead when he showed up at my apartment. I was too busy panicking at his unexpected arrival. Since then I’ve been running from meeting to meeting all day with hardly any time to catch my breath in between.

  On the drive over what he said really hits me. If Martin is dead then there is something much bigger going on here than any conspiracy theory I might come up with. What happened to him? How did he die? How did Nolan figure it out he was dead when the authorities didn’t? How does this affect Carla’s case?

  And the most perplexing question of all, what am I going to do about Nolan?

  17

  Nolan

  I left Lila’s condo with the same sensation I’ve been having about her almost since the moment I met her—she’s hiding something. What I don’t know. Even after doing some minor checking into her background I can’t figure it out. She’s not married. She doesn’t have a child. As far as I can tell she’s squeaky clean and exactly who and what she says she is. So why don’t I believe her?

  What is it about her that creates more questions than answers? Will she ever confide in me and if not, can I live with it? Maybe I should just take what she’s offering for however long it’s offered and stop trying to figure her out. The truth is most guys would. They’d accept the crazy no strings attached sex without question. I need to start being one of those guys, I decide. The only other option is to keep things strictly professional. No more naked Lila. No more recording our sex acts. No more of the best sex I’ve ever had.

  Well, that’s not going to happen. The mere thought of giving up being with Lila is so ridiculous I laugh out loud, earning me a questioning glance from Cora as she looks up from the report I handed in about the updates on Carla’s case.

  “You okay?”

  “Sorry. Ignore me. What do you think of my theory?”

  “I think it has merit. The similarities in the description and composite drawing on the medical examiner’s website to John Martin are striking. Contact the Spokane police department and let them know what you suspect. If this is Martin his family might finally get some closure. Good work.”

  “It doesn’t help Carla’s case. If anything it creates more questions than answers.”

  “Have you shown Lila what you discovered? She’s the legal expert here. She’d know how or even if Martin’s death affects the case. The witnesses you’ve found and the information you’ve gathered might already be enough to bring the case before a judge.”

  “What about the DA’s connection?”

  “Those are some strong accusations to bring forward without anything concrete to back them up. Sit on them until we’re absolutely sure we have enough to bring to the authorities. We’ll want to run this by Mr. Nash before we do anything. The DA’s not someone you can throw baseless allegations at. We need to make sure we’re not setting ourselves up for a lawsuit. Be careful. Don’t let him get wind that you suspect him of anything.”

  “I won’t.” I can’t screw this up, I remind myself. There’s too much at stake for all of us.

  “How’s the Lasiter case going?”

  I’m glad to move on to surer footing. No one’s career is going to get ruined over a wife cheating on her husband with her personal trainer. So cliché and yet most of the cheating spouse cases we work on are. It’s rare that a suspicious spouse is wrong. It happens, but not often. Usually their hunches are right. Which brings me right back to Lila and my hunches about her.

  I push those thoughts away…again, and focus on reporting the status of the other cases I’m working on for Nash Security and Investigations. Cora seems satisfied with my work, but she’s distracted. I’ve been so consumed with my own problems that I haven’t been paying much attention to the people around me. My mom reminded me of that with her guilt-laced phone call earlier today. I missed the last couple of weekly dinners with my parents because I’ve been so wrapped up with Carla’s case and my issues with Lila.

  I force myself to once again put Lila out of my mind and ask Cora if everything’s okay with her.

  “Yeah. I guess. Mostly.”

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “Nah. I’m just being paranoid.”

  “About what?”

  She makes a face and shakes her head. I recognize something in her expression. It’s the same look I get when I’m trying to figure Lila out.

  “Want me to do a little digging on Leo for you?” I joke. “I could run the basics see if there’s anything unusual going on.”

  “No.” She adamantly shakes her head. “Absolutely not. I’m sure everything’s fine.”

  I make a mental note to ignore her protest and run the check anyway. I want to make sure everything’s as fine as she’s insisting it is. I’m not sure what I’d do if I found out the boss’s son was messing around on Cora, but if I was her I’d want to know.

  “Okay. Just let me know if you change your mind. The offer stands.”

  “Thanks. I could do it myself, but…”

  “It feels invasive and distrustful. Like a line you don’t want to cross.” Like the line I crossed with Lila.

  She nods. “Exactly like that. Relationships should be built on trust. Thanks for the offer though.”

  “No worries. Any time.”

  As soon as she leaves I run the usual on her boyfriend even though she told me not to. It doesn’t take me long to figure out why she’s sensing something’s off with him. I smile to myself and close out of the programs I was running and shut down my computer for the day. She’s got a mighty big surprise headed her way. Good for her. Good for them. They deserve to be happy. I hope someday I find someone to make suspicious and then surprise. Again my thoughts turn to Lila. She’s pretty much a constant pop up window in my head, frequently interrupting whatever I’m doing.

  Speaking of… My phone pings with a text. Lila’s running late. She’ll meet me in an hour at my place. On the way home I stop at the store and pick up something for dinner. I have no doubt she’ll be hungry and maybe sitting down across from her at the table will help me get some kind of perspective and put some distance between us. I can calmly lay out the ground rules I’ve been mulling over in my head all day during dinner.

  Rule number one: This is just about sex. No emotions. No expectations. No commitment.

  Rule number two: No spending the night. No cuddling. Sex and then gone.

  Rule number three: Work and sex and that’s it. No texts or emails about anything except work. No making plans to get together unless it’s about the case.

  Rule number four: No meeting each other’s friends and family. No personal talk. No qu
estions. Keep it business only.

  Rule number five: Discretion. No one is to ever know about our arrangement.

  Rule number six: Either one of us can end the sex at any time for any reason. No questions asked. No recrimination. No looking back. Once it’s over it’s over whether the case is or not.

  I feel confidant she’ll agree to my terms and that we both can abide by them without anyone getting hurt. I know it’s what she wants and it’s what I can live with.

  She knocks on my door just as I finish setting the food on the table. Food, work, sex (if she’s amenable), and then goodbye. In that order. Structure and perspective. That’s what’s going to keep everything on track here.

  I open the door and all of my careful planning and promises to myself scatter like leaves in the wind. I’m momentarily stuck dumb. How could I forget how gorgeous she is? How did I not anticipate this would happen?

  She slips by me without a word or invitation and then she’s on me, grabbing me in that very direct way she has that leaves me with no choice, kissing me like she needs me to live. She tastes like coffee and something sweet. Her fingers twine through my hair, tugging it in a way that is part pleasure part pain. Any thoughts to stop her before things get out of control get overridden by her hand on my dick. My brain fizzles and fries. We’re all urgent, fumbling hands and hot seeking mouths.

  There are no rules. There is no order. There sure as hell is no perspective.

  Clothes get ripped off and thrown. We leave a trail from the front door down the hall. I grope for the nightstand drawer and find a condom, not wanting to take my mouth off of her. She takes it from my hand and I groan as she rolls it down. I love the way she touches me. No hesitation. No uncertainty. She takes what she wants from me and I like it. I pull her legs until she’s at the edge of the bed. She’s hot and wet. I thrust easily into her with her feet on my shoulders. Using her legs for leverage, I pound into her. Her cries echo around the room. The louder she gets the wilder I get until she grips my forearms, digging her fingernails into my flesh as she throws her head back. I can’t hold back and plunge deep, pushing into her as far I can. I come yelling her name.

  She opens her legs and I fall on top of her, catching myself so I don’t crush her. Her arms legs wrap around me. In the quiet that follows I realize I’m in trouble. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We didn’t have dinner. We didn’t do any work. We haven’t even said anything to each other unless you count the words harder, faster, and fuck you’re hot as an exchange of pleasantries.

  I force myself to disentangle from her. Her limbs fall away from me and she stares up at me with a satisfied smirk. I think I actually might hate her in this moment. She punched through all of my carefully laid plans, all of the roadblocks and slow signs I posted, like they weren’t even there. Some of the blame falls on me. It’s not like I stopped her from taking my pants off or paused for thought when I had my fingers inside her and my mouth on her tit.

  I’m so disgusted with both of us I pull out of her and turn away without a word to dispose of the condom. When I get back she’s lying exactly where I left her, her legs dangling over the edge of the bed like she’s ready for round two. Perspective, I remind myself, rules, order, control.

  But she looks so inviting as she gazes down her naked body at me and crooks her finger for me to come to her. I can’t resist. She’s a siren and I answer her call. I lay down on top of her, between her parted thighs. This, I realize, is where I want to be and I’d do anything to get here again and again. Anything.

  It’s not her I hate. It’s me.

  She puts a hand on my cheek. “I know you’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” I say a little too harshly to be believable.

  “Then who are you mad at?”

  I take her hands off me and hold them above her head. Her eyes widen a fraction and then she rotates her pelvis, rubbing her pussy against me. I use my other hand to still her.

  “Let’s get some things straight,” I say. “This is only sex. We work and we fuck and that’s it. We don’t spend the night together. We don’t cuddle. We don’t touch each other like we care. You don’t ask about me and I don’t ask about you. We don’t date. No one can know we’re fucking. You don’t call me and I don’t call you unless it’s to work or to fuck or both. We fuck until we don’t feel like fucking each other anymore and we work until the case is over. And that’s it. Got it?”

  She nods a little too eagerly.

  “And you don’t ever, and I mean ever, fuck anyone while you’re fucking me. That is non-negotiable.”

  “The same goes for you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  I force myself to get off of her. “We eat, work, and fuck in that order and then you leave. No more coming at me like you did at the door ever again. Are we clear?”

  “I didn’t hear you complaining.”

  “I’m complaining now.”

  “I’ll follow all of your rules except one—we fuck whenever we want. If that’s before work or before we eat then so be it. But I’m not going to fuck on demand like some sex slave.”

  “That’s not the way I meant it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then get rid of the orderly eat, work, then fuck rule.”

  “Fine,” I grind out.

  She holds out her hand. “We have a deal.”

  I shake her hand, thinking I’ve made the worst bargain in the world. This is never going to work.

  18

  Lila

  This is never going to work.

  I know why Nolan wants what’s going on between us to be only about sex and work. Keeping them separate from each other is a good idea. I can compartmentalize that way and I know he can too. What I can’t seem to do is remain detached in a way that will make this deal feasible. By the angry way he offered the bargain I don’t think Nolan can’t either. So why are we doing this? I know why I’m doing it, but why is he? What does he have to hide?

  We eat at the table in silence. I could ask Nolan about why he thinks Martin is dead. I can tell him what Anna told me and about my visit with Inez. We can talk about the next step in the case and plan a new course of action. We can go over the rest of the stuff we found in Martin’s office. We can do a whole bunch of things we aren’t doing to get past the scene in his bedroom. Instead we focus on our food and let the silence hang over our heads like a guillotine blade. I’m beginning to think that we masochistically like it this way when Nolan finally breaks through the quiet.

  “I think Martin’s body is in the Spokane County unidentified remains storage locker. I think he was murdered and I think I know who did it.”

  As dropping bombs go that’s a big one. An atomic sized explosive. It shakes everything in me. I swivel my head his direction. He’s not looking at me. Something on his plate has his attention. My mouth flaps open, closed, open, closed. That’s a doozy of a conversation starter.

  I finally force words past the clog in my throat. “What? How? Who? Why?”

  He glances up at me. “You forgot where.”

  “You just told me where. Washington.”

  “I did like I said I would. I followed his addiction. Idiot kept the same user name with his favorite sites, but used a different method of payment. It tied him to Spokane. He kept his same steady diet of live porn for about a month and then all of a sudden it stopped. Cold turkey. No one does that unless they suddenly found God or was somehow incapacitated.

  “I searched the records of the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s unidentified bodies web page and found a post-mortem drawing of a man who resembles Martin and who was found a few weeks after Martin stopped visiting the porn sites,” he finishes, leaving me gaping at him.

  “But…who…?”

  “My money’s on Debbie Martin. Remember when we visited with her? Something about the way she talked about him—in the past tense—stuck with me. She said, “It was one of the things I
really loved about him, his devotion to his clients.” Loved. Past tense.”

  “She could’ve just resigned herself to his being gone and referring to him in the past tense could be her way of dealing with it.”

  “Could be,” he concedes. “But I found a hit on her husband’s credit report that led me to a local PI. We know she was already onto whatever he was doing when he disappeared. It’s not too far fetched that the PI Debbie hired would’ve done what I did in tracking Martin down for her. I checked and Debbie took some time off from work right before Martin’s sudden departure from porn. I bet if I dig deeper I can show that she traveled to Spokane.”

  “Now I really want to know what was in that box at the back of his bookcase and if Debbie got a hold of it, why would she kill him?”

  “Hell hath no fury…?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Could be Billits or someone he hired,” he continues. “Maybe the deal between them didn’t go as smoothly as it looks. Maybe Martin tried to shake him down for money after the fact. I’m looking at Billits’s whereabouts around the time Martin stopped visiting those sites.”

  “Are you going to contact the authorities here or in Spokane about you suspicions?”

  “Already did. Anonymously from a burner phone. I don’t want any of this to come back on us, Nash or the Freedom Project. I gave them enough that they could try to match Martin’s missing persons report with the remains in their morgue. We’ll see what comes of it. I could be totally wrong and it’s not Martin at all.”

  “I want to see this post-mortem drawing.”

  He pulls out his phone and taps the screen, then hands it to me. He put Martin’s DMV photo side by side with the drawing. It’s close. Very close.

  “They’ll likely do a DNA test if they can’t get dental records,” Nolan says. “It’ll be interesting to see how cooperative Debbie is.”