Sex & Sensibility

by Shannon Hollis

  Though she knew full well Cerberus would go into the mailbox when she was finished and hit the “delete” key, she said what she had to say. With a sigh, she hung up and leaned one hip on the counter, running her hands over the cashmere of her new/used sweatshirt, taking comfort in its soft embrace.

  It would be so nice if, just once, somebody besides a computer would listen.

  3

  From the private journal of Jay Singleton

  God knows how many hours Christina’s been gone and no ransom note yet. This is destroying me. When we find the sonofabitch I’m going to take him apart, bone by bone. This is my daughter we’re talking about here. Okay, so she hasn’t exactly had the chance to see me as a dad. Ten years is a long time. But I was around in her formative years, wasn’t I? Kids develop their personalities by five, and I was there then. It wasn’t my fault that Barbara wouldn’t let me have custody when we split up. It wasn’t my fault I had a business to run and only twenty-four hours in the day. I was doing it for them, for chrissake, to put a nice roof over their heads and good food in their mouths. That was what she signed up for, right?

  But Barbara is never happy. There’s always something over the horizon that she has to have, and once she gets it, she’s looking out the window again. I hope she didn’t teach that to Christina. I hope the schmuck she married realizes it before she drains him of all his capital.

  Christina asked to come to me. That’s something, isn’t it? It’s only been four or five months and I think our relationship is pretty good. She seems to like Mandy, anyway. Except for Barbara, I’m a good judge of women. But then, without Barbara I wouldn’t have Christina, so there you are. The sweet with the bitter.

  God, I hope she’s okay.

  Why doesn’t the bloody phone ring?

  GRIFFIN STOOD in the middle of what he supposed would be a crime scene if he could find any evidence that there had been a crime. Something had happened to Christina between eight o’clock last night and eight this morning, and damned if he could find one thing that would tell him what it might be.

  He glanced at Amanda Singleton, who had been with him since he’d begun work on the cottage four or five hours ago. Mandy was a blonde with bombshell curves and the kind of sleekness that came from hours at the gym and salon. Her hair had been skillfully and expensively cut to fall around her shoulders in artful disarray, and her aquamarine eyes were not the result of genetics but contact lenses. When he’d first met her he’d expected every stereotype in the book, but Mandy had soon set him straight on what happened to nice people who made stupid assumptions. She was honest, kind, and instead of being raised to the heights of wealth from the trailer park, she’d had her own legal career in Silicon Valley before she’d joined the corporate law team at Ocean Technology and been sucked into the orbit of Jay Singleton.

  People often made the mistake of treating her as though she should be wearing tight jeans and big hair. They didn’t make it twice.

  “There has to be something else you can try.” Mandy pulled on a bow-shaped lower lip. “The fingerprint kit turned up nothing but Christina, me, and Lucia. There are no footprints outside the windows and doors, not even Christina’s because God knows she wouldn’t go near dirt even if she were forced. No ransom note, no goodbye note, no suicide note. Nothing missing but the clothes she had on and her purse. Not even a backpack.” She released her lip and frowned at Griffin. “How could she vanish without a trace? Not to mention her makeup.”

  “To quote an old episode of The X-Files, nothing vanishes without a trace. There has to be something. We just haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Okay, Mulder.” Mandy gave up on the cottage and led the way outside to the little patio covered in wisteria vines where a person could drink their coffee and contemplate the multimillion-dollar view of the Pacific purling in below. “If you were going to just walk away in the middle of the night with your purse and the clothes on your back, what direction would you take?”

  The breeze blew the scent of salt water and drying seaweed toward them. “The beach.” Griffin turned to the north and gestured expansively toward the house. “Not the garage, since her car is still here. But what about the neighbors?” He made another quarter turn, toward the acres of scrub oak, wild grass, and fern that separated them from the nearest house.

  “Overnight? Without a call to tell us she was there?”

  Griffin had to admit this was unlikely. “I’ll check them out anyway.”

  “I think the beach is the best bet.” Mandy jumped down from the flagstones of the terraced patio to the lawn sloping away to the beach. “What if we see footprints? Maybe they can tell us something.”

  By this time of day there would be fifty sets of prints from day trippers and people walking their dogs on the beach, which had a public right of way. But they had nothing else to go on, and Griffin could use the walk to clear his head. Maybe if he came back in half an hour, he’d see something he’d missed.

  They were nearly across the expanse of lawn, striped light and dark by the back-and-forth course of the gardener’s lawn mower, when they heard a cry from the direction of the house.

  “Señora! Señora Singleton, wait!”

  Lucia leaped down the terrace steps and tore across the lawn after them, her hair falling out of its neat ponytail and the fabric of her white cotton shirt flapping against her.

  Griffin headed for her at a run. “Lucia, what is it? Did the kidnapper phone? Is there a ransom demand?”

  She clutched his arm, gasping, as Mandy pounded up to them. “Yes, señor. The kidnapper left a message at El Jefe’s office not one hour ago.”

  WHEN THEY REACHED Singleton’s office in the house, it was Griffin who was out of breath and Mandy who looked as if she’d just come in from a relaxing session at the tanning salon. Damn, he had to bump up his morning jog another mile.

  “What have we got?” he demanded.

  Singleton punched a button on his phone console. “This was in my personal voice mail at work.”

  “You have fifteen new messages—” a computerized female voice informed them sternly from the speakerphone. Singleton punched two keys. “Message twelve. Received today at 11:55 a.m.”

  Another female voice, younger and much more uncertain, spoke. “Mr. Singleton, my name is Tessa Nichols and you’re an unbelievably difficult person to reach. I need to tell you something about your daughter. I believe she’s in trouble. Please call me on my cell at 415-555-8076. Um, thanks. Bye.”

  Singleton poked at the console again and the automated voice grimly wished him a pleasant day. Then he looked up at Griffin. “I wouldn’t have expected a woman.”

  “You think that’s a kidnapper?” Griffin didn’t. That voice hadn’t been much older than Christina’s, and a helluva lot less self-assured. On top of that, her name was setting off a bell. It was a name he knew, from somewhere in the dusty cabinet of case files in his head.

  “What else?” Singleton demanded.

  “Typically, kidnappers are more vocal about what they want,” he said dryly. “Sounds to me like she’s a witness who’s seen something. We’ve got piss-all else to go on, so I recommend calling her back.”

  Instead of replying, Singleton used the speakerphone again and pressed the digits of the Nichols woman’s number, and while it rang a breathless silence descended on the room.

  “Hello, Mr. Singleton.”

  Griffin blinked, then recovered. Of course she knew who was calling; she obviously had caller ID. Then he frowned. He’d set up the house system with the phone company himself. They had every blocker known to man on the house line, so that no ID would show.

  How had she done that?

  “Tessa Nichols?” Singleton asked.

  “Yes. Thank you for returning my call.”

  “What else was I going to do? But let me tell you right now, if this is some kind of blackmail scheme, it’s not going to work.”

  The airwaves hissed for a moment. “Blackmail scheme?” the w
oman said blankly.

  “What I’d like to know is how you got her off the estate so easily.”

  Griffin closed his eyes. Jay Singleton on a rolling boil was not easy to shut down.

  “Mr. Singleton, she isn’t with me.”

  “Okay, so you have an accomplice holding her. Spit it out. Tell me your demands and I’ll tell you to go to hell. But hear me now, sister. If anything happens to my daughter I’ll kill you and your accomplice with my own bare hands.”

  There was a second of silence. “Oh, my God, he kidnapped her. No wonder she’s afraid.”

  “Who kidnapped her?” Griffin couldn’t keep still another second. “What do you know about it?”

  They heard her draw in a breath. “Is there someone there with you?”

  “Of course,” Singleton snapped. “Griffin Knox is my security guy. Former cop. So answer him. How are you involved?”

  “I don’t know anything about it except what I saw,” the woman said in a noticeably cooler tone, and Griffin’s gut went, Aha. I knew it. A witness.

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  “She was tied to a bed with scarves. Cotton ones, I think.” Her voice picked up speed with the memory. “You know, those cheap bandannas you can get at any discount store. He was looming over her, but I couldn’t see his face. And she was feeling anticipation mixed with fear mixed with something else, but I can’t really describe it. She—she was naked. At least from the waist up.”

  “Where were they?” Griffin asked. A witness. A real witness, whose recall might be painful to listen to, but helpful nonetheless. For the first time, he began to hope they might get somewhere. That hope roiled in his gut along with the awful knowledge that someone had stripped Christina and was holding her captive for God knew what reason.

  “I saw them in my vision,” she said.

  “Where’s that? A club? A hotel?”

  Another pause. “No. In a vision. Like, you know, a dream? While I was standing here in my kitchen, drinking tea. It was vivid and in color, the way they are when it’s real, so I knew it wasn’t just a random bunch of neurons affecting my optic nerve, like my sister says. In fact, I think—”

  But they never heard what Tessa Nichols thought, because Griffin just remembered where he’d heard her name. He leaned over Singleton’s desk and stabbed a button on the console. The light on the open line went out.

  “If there’s anything I can’t stand,” he said tightly into the silence, “it’s a fraud.”

  TESSA HIT “dial last incoming number” on her cell phone, thinking they’d been cut off, but when no one answered she realized they’d hung up on her.

  Why would no one listen when it was so important? A girl’s life could be in danger, here. You’d think they’d want to track down every lead they had.

  It was that man who’d done it. Tessa knew it as surely as she knew the fabric those bandannas had been made of. Singleton hadn’t even told her who he was when she’d recognized the voice—that baritone almost-drawl that held hints of sagebrush and wide-open spaces, the kind of voice that could seduce or betray and still sound just as appealing.

  Officer Griffin Knox.

  Almost of its own volition, her hand crept up to massage her upper arm, where the bruises from his fingers had been. Because she hadn’t gone into the police car willingly. She’d struggled and yelled and finally he’d grabbed her and shoved her in with an herbalist who was as angry and clueless as she was. And all the way downtown he’d lasered her in the rearview mirror with those vivid blue eyes in a face that shouldn’t have worn such anger. Lines fanning out from his eyes told her he was a man suited to the outdoors—maybe even a man who laughed. He had the kind of mouth made for wooing a woman’s body, with sculpted, mobile lips. Despite the bruises, she’d had to admit his hands held strength in long, capable fingers. And he was tall, too. She was a pretty respectable height and still the top of her head had only come to about lip level on him.

  Quit thinking about his lips, you nitwit. The guy had arrested her and she’d bet ten bucks he’d been the one to hang up on her as soon as she mentioned the vision.

  He was like Linn. If it couldn’t be bagged and tagged, he wasn’t interested in hearing about it. In fact, Linn was probably the only reason Tessa had been released that day. She’d called her from the booking area and Linn had dashed across the parking lot from the Santa Rita P.D. building to the county lockup to spring her before her name got into the system and messed up her job prospects for good.

  Tessa had walked out of there feeling dirty and ruffled and thankful that there were sisters who, while they didn’t believe in your gift, at least believed in your integrity. There was no way Tessa was dealing in petty fraud and Linn had wasted no time in setting Officer Knox straight on that score.

  But there had been something in those eyes in the rear-view mirror, some kind of pain that hadn’t had anything to do with her…she’d just been in the way.

  Tessa shook off the thought and went to pick up her cards. As she knelt on the ancient carpet, the phone rang.

  Probably Linn, fussing about flowers. Didn’t she remember that Kellan’s mom had been a florist? Why didn’t she dragoon her into helping?

  No, wait. It was—

  “Ms. Nichols, this is Jay Singleton.”

  Ooh, how about that. He wasn’t using the speakerphone. She must be moving up in the world. “Didn’t you hang up hard enough the first time?” she inquired, sounding every bit as polite as his robot of an assistant.

  “I want to apologize. My security guy doesn’t believe in visions and all that. I can’t say I do, either, but we’ve got nothing else to go on.”

  “What exactly has happened, Mr. Singleton?”

  He sighed, the sound of a powerful man rendered powerless and deeply unhappy about it. “I don’t know. My daughter, Christina, went to her cottage around eight last night and that’s the last anyone has seen of her. Nothing is missing but the clothes she was wearing and her purse. No one saw anything. We’ve had no demand for ransom. My wife and I are frantic.”

  “What do the police say?”

  There was a beat of silence. “I haven’t notified the police. I have reasons for wanting this investigation to be private.”

  Tessa wasn’t the sister of a state investigator for nothing. “Mr. Singleton, whatever your reasons are, you have to put them aside and call in the cops. They have huge resources and systems set up to deal with just this kind of thing.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll explain why when you get here.”

  “When I—what?”

  “Whatever your services cost, Ms. Nichols, I’ll double it. You seem to have information no one else does. Despite what Griffin has been saying to me for the last fifteen minutes, I want you down here helping us. Whatever you have, these visions or dreams or whatever bullshit they are, I want you here where you can tell me about them. Then maybe we can gather some clues to go on.”

  Tessa’s mouth had been hanging open since double it. She closed it on bullshit.

  “Mr. Singleton, I can’t just drop everything and drive a hundred miles to tell you about a vision if and when I get one. They’re sporadic. Undependable. They come when they want to. This is not pay-per-view.”

  “Triple.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever you charge, I’ll triple it.”

  “My normal consultation fee is twenty dollars an hour, but I’m not going to—”

  “Fine. Sixty. Starting now. And clock your mileage down here. Bill me by the day, and I don’t care how many days it takes. Better come prepared for a week. I’ll see you in—” she heard a rustle and imagined him shooting back his cuff to look at his Rolex “—two hours. Any longer than that and I’ll send Knox up there to get you.”

  Now, there was a happy prospect.

  Tessa glanced at the worktable, which was piled with books and references and good intentions. She thought about her thesis. And
her student loan. And the bills, sitting in their own little pile on the Formica counter. Sixty dollars an hour times eight hours a day times seven days a week equaled—

  Who cared what it equaled? Jay Singleton, one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley, believed her. Her, Tessa Nichols, at whom her sister rolled her eyes even as she was springing her from jail. He believed her, and to her dried-up self-esteem it felt like rain falling in the desert, sweet and cool.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “See you in two hours.”

  4

  From the private journal of Jay Singleton

  She’s coming.

  Money talks, there’s no way around it. Wall Street would laugh if they could see me now, but hey, everyone knows the stock market is half bluff and half juju anyway. Psychics probably use the art of probability with more skill than Alan Greenspan.

  Bottom line is, I’m desperate. I have to do something, and if calling in a psychic is the only thing to do, that’s what I’ll do. Griffin will go ballistic, but it’s not the first time. I can handle Griffin—or anyone else, for that matter.

  The only one I can’t seem to handle very well is Christina. It’s a good thing this diary is private and I wrote my own code to create it. Even when I die, no one will be able to hack into it and see what I was thinking. But I was talking about Christina. I remember the day she was born. Thirty-six hours nearly killed Barbara, but even she agreed the baby was worth it. Red and scrunched and squalling and absolutely beautiful. I was afraid to hold her. She was wiggly and wet and so noisy I thought I’d split an eardrum. But I’ll never forget it. I fell in love that day. Oh, I’ve loved women. I love Mandy, for God’s sake. But not the way I fell for that baby. When she learned to walk and I’d get home at night, she’d come tottering toward me with both arms out…I’d fall to my knees, not to bring myself down to her level, but because they’d just gone weak with love.