by Liz Fenton
“Are they?” Jason asked, his eyes empty. “I think it’s becoming clear she may have left on her own.”
“We don’t know anything for sure yet,” Natalie said, but Jason didn’t respond.
“Should we tell the police what the bartender said?” she finally asked.
“No,” Jason said, grabbing the back of the seat in front of him as the cab lurched forward. “Let’s keep it to ourselves. I’m worried they’ll stop looking for her.”
“Okay,” Natalie replied. “I still think that no matter how bad things might have been with you two, she wouldn’t leave the girls.”
Jason’s mouth set in a tight line. “Maybe it’s time to consider that you didn’t know her as well as you think you did.”
When they arrived back at the hotel, Natalie and Jason found Lauren in the hotel’s restaurant sitting behind a laptop, a pad of paper next to her with several phone numbers written on it. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, blue circles under her eyes, a full cup of coffee in front of her. “I’m sorry about earlier,” Lauren said before Natalie could speak. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay,” Natalie said. “I don’t know why I snapped,” she lied. She knew exactly why—Annie’s allegation that maybe something traumatic had happened bothered her because it was something Natalie had already considered.
“Hey, Jason,” Lauren said, not getting up from her chair. “It’s been a while—I’m sorry we’re seeing each other again under these circumstances.” She gave him a long look. Natalie could tell by Lauren’s posture—her tight shoulders and neck—that she was thinking about Ashley’s accusations against him. Like Natalie, probably trying to determine what had really been going on in Ashley’s marriage. But they’d made a deal—to keep their feelings about him out of this. She hoped Lauren could stick to it.
“I feel awful about what’s happening,” Lauren said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, and offered her a sad smile.
She and Natalie shared a quick look.
“What?” he asked.
Lauren began to wring her hands nervously. She glanced at Natalie again.
“What is it? I really can’t take any more secrets.” He also looked at Natalie.
“At La Cantina, Ash asked me to go somewhere with her and talk. She said she wouldn’t leave with Marco—she wanted to work things out with me.” Lauren looked down.
“And?” Jason pressed.
“I said no. And now I can’t stop thinking—what if I had said yes?”
“Why didn’t you go?” Jason asked, not unkindly.
Natalie wanted to say something to rescue Lauren from Jason’s questioning. She’d just been on the other side of it, and it didn’t feel good. But she didn’t have the words. Because she wished Lauren hadn’t been so obstinate. That she had gone with Ashley. Because maybe they wouldn’t be here right now, dissecting every detail of last night.
Lauren’s cheeks flushed. “We weren’t getting along.”
“Things weren’t great between any of us.” Natalie finally jumped in when she saw Lauren’s eyes fill with tears. “I think we were all ready to go home.”
Jason combed his fingers through his hair. “I counted on you guys to look out for her.”
“We did,” Natalie said, hoping that it was true. Because, truly, she didn’t know.
“Obviously, you didn’t!” Jason snapped, and Natalie hung her head, silent. Because he was right—they clearly hadn’t.
Lauren stepped in. “Listen, we all have regrets about how we handled last night. But we need to stick together. Okay?” she said, waiting until both Jason and Natalie bobbed their heads up and down in response. “Let’s focus on what we can do. How we can find her. The hotel loaned me this.” She pointed at the computer. “I’ve listed Ashley missing on every website I could find. And I finally got ahold of the right person at the US Consulate, and she’s contacting hospitals. There are private ones, public ones, but luckily there are only a few in this area where an American would likely end up.”
“You can cross the one I was at off the list—Star Medica. I inquired there, but they said no one matching her description had come in,” Natalie said, then frowned, staring at a map of Mexico on the table next to Lauren. She didn’t know the population of the country but guessed it was at least 100 million. How would they find her in a place so large? If she was even still in the country. She thought about throwing that dart again. Where would it land? Where had Ash landed? Fear gripped Natalie’s insides and clung to her.
“Okay,” Lauren said, running a line through Star Medica. “This is like finding a needle in a haystack. Where the hell is she?” She looked at Natalie. Natalie saw the fear. She knew Lauren was thinking the same thing she was. The hours were slipping away, and they were no closer to finding her. This was Mexico. If someone wanted to make a person disappear, it wasn’t that hard.
“Jason, we should see if she took any flights. I’ll text Officer Garcia right now and ask him,” Natalie heard herself say. But what she wanted to say was What if we never find her?
Jason shook his head. “We can double-check, but I sincerely hope they’ve already investigated that.”
“Did you guys find out anything new at La Cantina?” Lauren asked.
Natalie filled her in about what the bartender had told them, Jason glowering as he heard the story again.
“Do you think this means she left with him?”
Natalie looked at Jason, wondering what he might say.
“I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “Maybe.” He looked down and sucked in a sharp breath as if trying not to cry.
Natalie squeezed his arm, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. Because every second they stood here speculating, she was losing hope that Ashley was coming back—and they had to face the real possibility she had left on her own. She found herself struggling to reconcile her feelings of relief because that would mean she hadn’t been involved in her disappearance, and the frustration that she would now lose the Revlon deal, and ultimately most of her assets. Maybe even her marriage.
They sat in the empty chairs around the table. Natalie propped her elbows in front of her and hung her head.
“We have to get some sleep,” Lauren said, looking up at the clock on the wall. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I can’t sleep. Not with her out there somewhere,” Natalie said, as rain started to come down in sheets without warning, pounding the sand outside the restaurant. She prayed wherever Ashley was, whomever she was with, that she was okay. That she’d found what she was looking for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
TWO DAYS AFTER
LAUREN
The next morning, Lauren found herself back at the restaurant with Natalie and Jason, a familiarity to it, as if it were the place they could find answers, a comfortable silence having set in. The laptop open in front of them. In the hour or so of sleep Lauren was able to get, she’d dreamed that Ashley had come back to the hotel with a silly explanation about getting lost without her phone. But she was fine! Lauren had squeezed her, Ashley flinching. “That hurts!” Lauren smiling. “I’m so glad you’re back, Ash.” She’d woken with a start, the reality hitting her hard, much like the rain that had fallen the night before.
Maria walked over to their table. “The policía are here again,” she said. “They need to talk to all of you. Shall I direct them to one of your rooms?”
Natalie looked at Jason and Lauren. “No, it’s okay, we can talk here.”
Maria’s lips formed a straight line. “They said they’d prefer privacy.”
Jason stiffened, and Natalie became wild-eyed. Lauren was too afraid to ask Maria why they wanted privacy. It could only mean one thing: the news wasn’t good. Natalie gripped her hands together to stop them from shaking. It was so odd—they were in desperate search of the truth, yet terrified of it at the same time.
“We can talk in my room,” Natalie said. Silently, the two of th
em got up and followed her.
Natalie grabbed Lauren’s arm as they climbed the winding staircase to the bungalow and pulled her to a stop. “Do you think it’s bad?” she whispered.
Lauren held the railing and turned toward Natalie. Jason was behind her, blinking back tears, clearly worried about the same thing. Lauren didn’t have a good feeling, but she was not about to say it. With each passing hour it was becoming harder to believe foul play wasn’t involved, as the police had originally told TMZ. Lauren wondered if they’d always known more than they’d let on, even when they were interrogating them. Why wouldn’t they divulge everything they had? Unless they suspected Lauren and Natalie were involved . . . She shivered at the thought of being detained here. “Let’s stay positive,” she heard herself say.
Natalie leaned into Lauren as they entered Natalie’s room, Ashley’s shorts hanging over the back of the chair, her favorite Dodgers baseball hat on the floor, her makeup scattered across the counter. Natalie hadn’t moved anything—confiding in Lauren that it had felt wrong to fold her shorts or put her eye shadow in its bag. That she’d thought that if she disrupted the way Ashley had left everything, somehow it might make it harder to find her. Like it was a crime scene she shouldn’t touch.
Jason looked around, seeing the room for the first time. He picked up Ashley’s favorite black mesh bathing suit off the floor. “She was packing this when we argued about Revlon’s offer. She tried to get me to stop talking about it, but I wouldn’t relent. Why wouldn’t I just back off? Let her handle it?” Jason said, more to himself than Natalie or Lauren.
Natalie reached out to console him, but he shook his head and slumped into a chair, balling the Lycra suit in his lap.
Lauren sat quietly on the bed with her thoughts. If Ashley was dead, would she ever be able to forgive herself for the last words she’d spoken to her?
A sudden knock on the glass door startled Lauren. She turned and saw Officer Garcia and Officer Lopez on the other side of it. Natalie pulled the door open. Officer Garcia asked Natalie to sit down. Lauren’s heart pounded as Natalie eased next to her on the bed. She saw the color drain from Natalie’s face and grabbed her hand and squeezed. Lauren tried to contain her fear. Tried to stay positive. She glanced at Jason, who was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly his knuckles were visibly white. She knew they all wanted to ask the same question: Did they find Ashley?
Officer Garcia stepped forward. “There’s been a development.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for the news.
“An American woman has come forward. She said that Marco Smith tried to get her to leave with him when she visited Tulum three months ago.”
Lauren let out the breath she’d been holding. “So you haven’t found Ashley?”
Officer Garcia shook his head. “No.”
“Thank God,” Lauren said. “I mean, I was so scared. I thought you had bad news for us.” She glanced at Natalie, whose face had now regained some of its color.
“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. There is a leak in the police department and I am not sure where it’s coming from—so I wanted to speak with you privately about this.”
Lauren glanced at Nat again. She wondered who was feeding the information to TMZ if it wasn’t Officer Garcia or his partner, Officer Lopez.
“This woman told us he was very persuasive but that she decided not to go with him. She said she never told anyone about it, but when she read that he was one of the last people seen with Ashley, she had to come forward.”
“Are we sure it’s the same Marco Smith? There’s no picture of him, so maybe it’s just a coincidence?” Natalie asked.
“His physical description matched,” Officer Garcia said. “She also knew details that have not been in the papers. She described his dog, knew its name, and she also knew where he lived,” he added, reading from his notepad. “We thoroughly vetted the story before bringing it to you. We believe it to be true.”
Lauren rubbed her forehead. “So what does this mean?”
Officer Lopez leaned against the wall. “This woman, she sounds very similar to Ashley. Very successful in the United States. Wealthy. She traveled here with her girlfriends.” Lauren tried to focus as Lopez explained how Marco had met the woman at a yoga class and then isolated her from her friends for the rest of her trip, asking her to disappear with him on the last night.
“Oh my God,” Lauren said, breaking the silence once he finished. “But she didn’t go with him?”
“No, although she said she strongly considered it. That Marco had laid out an entire plan—he gave her a place to meet him that was away from her hotel. He told her he knew how to make them disappear off the grid. He’d encouraged her to transfer money into his bank account for them to live on. She didn’t, thankfully,” Officer Garcia said, then glanced at Officer Lopez.
“Have you checked your bank account?” Lopez asked Jason.
“Doing it now,” he said.
Lauren could see the fear etched across Jason’s face, in the haunted look in his eyes—the broken blood vessels, a result of hard sobbing, no doubt. She couldn’t imagine what he must be thinking. She thought of Ashley’s description of his cutting words, his hot-tempered episodes. She wondered if he was planning to change if—no, when—they found Ashley. She had told Ashley that Geoff would have, but she wondered deep down if that was just her heart trying to outsmart her head.
“Where did he want to take the woman?” Lauren asked.
“Belize,” Officer Garcia said, holding up his hand as Lauren opened her mouth to say something. “We’ve already contacted the authorities there. But so far it’s been a dead end. We got several sets of fingerprints from Marco’s apartment, but none of them were in the system here or in the US—we’ve worked with our contacts there. So it’s making it that much harder to locate him. He had no social media accounts. And we have been unable to find a driver’s license for him because we don’t know his real name, and the passport number he gave to his employer was fake. They also paid him in cash. And without a picture . . .”
“Did the woman have a photo of him?” Lauren asked, but she already knew the answer. She thought of the video she’d taken—if only she’d captured more than the back of his body. If only she’d had the foresight to know she’d need to.
Officer Garcia said no.
“Same story—about not liking his picture taken?” Natalie tilted her head.
“Yes,” Officer Lopez said.
“I don’t see any unusual activity with our money,” Jason said. “Nat, can you check your business accounts?”
“I just can’t believe she’d take from BloMe . . .” Natalie trailed off.
“Anything is possible at this point,” Jason said, a pained look settling into his face.
“I’ll email Janice. She’ll get back to me right away.”
“Check your credit card statements too, although if there’s been no activity in your bank accounts, I’d be surprised if you find anything,” Officer Garcia said. “This guy has done this before—or tried to—so he knows not to leave a paper trail.”
“Okay, but I’m checking now anyway,” Jason said.
Natalie said she would log in to their corporate Amex and Visa accounts.
Lauren watched them frantically swiping and typing on their phones, trying to find a trail to Ashley. “So this woman.” Lauren looked at the officers. “Did she say why she didn’t take off with him?”
Officer Garcia tilted his head. “She said there was nothing about him all week that struck her as odd, that his questioning about leaving her life had been playful, and she hadn’t thought much of it. But that last day, his demeanor changed slightly. He became pushier, a little desperate, and she realized that . . .” He paused, flipping through his notepad, then read from it. “She realized that he wasn’t genuine. That it was a play to get her money.”
Lauren wondered how Ashley could be more naive than this other woman. Why the gut
she relied on so much hadn’t set off an alarm. Or had it, and Marco hadn’t wanted to take no for an answer?
“And Natalie, I got your text—we had already checked all the possible flights she could have been on, and there’s no record. Unless he had a falsified passport and she did too, but that I doubt.”
Lauren, Natalie, and Jason sat in silence after Officer Garcia and Officer Lopez left, promising to contact them if they found anything unusual in the bank accounts or credit cards. Or if you remember anything, Officer Lopez said pointedly to Natalie, right before shutting the sliding door, Natalie wincing slightly at his veiled accusation.
Lauren thought back to how surprised she’d been at the way the seams of Ashley and Nat’s friendship had come undone—how Natalie seemed almost desperate to sell the company, growing more and more frustrated at Ashley’s refusal to sell.
Had Natalie finally lost it that night? The thought stopped her cold.
Jason finally broke the uncomfortable silence. “You guys spent time with him—you think he was after her money?”
Natalie spoke first. “She did tell me they talked about her owning BloMe. She said she’d told him that when she first met him.”
“And then he lied about owning Tropical Kiss,” Lauren added. “Why would he do that if he didn’t have ulterior motives? I’m telling you, I did not trust that guy.”
“Why didn’t you mention this sooner?” Jason asked.
“I don’t know.” Lauren stiffened.
“Everything is relevant. Don’t you guys see that?” Jason looked away as if trying to control himself so he didn’t get angry. Lauren had seen Geoff do the same thing many times. Look away. Clamp down his jaw. Wring his hands. Lauren’s stomach turned at the memory of how anxious it would make her. Had Ashley seen these mannerisms in Geoff, the same way Lauren pinpointed them so easily now? Was that when she’d decided she had to save Lauren, rather than herself?
