“Because Peter contacted me after the time he was supposed to be dead.” I didn’t have any response to that. “I was sort of telling the truth when I hired you. I did want you to find him, to find out why he wasn’t dead. But I couldn’t very well tell you that.”
“But why me?”
She sighed. “I heard about you from someone at the club.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve built up such a reputation for myself.”
“No, really. Paul Burrows knew your father’s friend and knew how you helped him. I thought you’d be perfect. You’d only helped that one guy, you were brand new, hadn’t really done much detective work.”
“I’m inexperienced,” I translated.
“Yes.” She threw her hands up. “For crying out loud, I didn’t think you’d actually figure any of this out.”
I bit my tongue, cutting off a snide reply. “Did you lie about the plane ticket, and not helping the police with the credit card information?”
“Yes.”
I let out a long breath. “If you want Peter found, why send me in the wrong direction?”
“If you weren’t sure where Peter was, maybe you’d contact some of his lovers. Then they’d suffer for what they’ve done to me.”
I glared at her.
“I was going to tell you about the ticket. And about the credit cards,” she said sourly.
“So what’s all this business about passing comics books at Patini’s?”
Her jaw dropped. “You’ve been following me?”
“Surprise,” I said. “I’ve figured out a lot. I knew something wasn’t right almost from the start. I just didn’t know what. You’ve never seemed that concerned about Peter, and that made me wonder about you. What you might be up to.”
She thought about that before she responded. “But it wasn’t just about finding out what happened to Peter. There’s more.” I waited. “I think the group is after me now.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m being followed,” she said.
“Was it a 4-Runner? Gray?” She nodded her head. I tried not to smile. “That was me.” She turned red. “I thought that was them,” she said, but with no relief.
“It’s okay. I’ve been tailing you for two days. And by the way, what's with making phone calls from pay phones at the Cherry Creek Mall? Why not from somewhere around here?”
Amanda blushed. “I thought if the call was somehow traced, it would be better if the call was placed far away from my house.”
I rolled my eyes at her illogical logic. “Why are you worried about calls being traced?”
“Oh, it doesn't matter! They’re still after me.” She covered her face with her hands, muffling a sob.
“Who?”
“The people I hired,” Amanda said. She finally worked around me and reached for a glass.
“How about doing this straight?” I said, grasping her wrist.
“Just water, then.” Her hand shook as she filled a glass with water and sat on the sofa. After draining half the glass, she repeated, “I think the group I hired to kill Peter is after me now. I, uh, wasn’t exactly truthful with them.”
“Are you with anybody?”
She threw a vicious look at me. “I made it sound like Peter was a monster. That way this group would take care of him for me.”
“Why?”
“I wanted him dead,” she stated flatly. “I wanted the money, not him. Our marriage was… is… nothing anymore.”
I locked eyes with her, staring her down. “No, there’s more than that. You’re not fooling me.”
She held my gaze for at least ten seconds before averting her eyes. “All right.” She threw up her hands. “I was afraid Peter was going to divorce me. He didn’t care anymore, he wasn’t trying to hide his affairs, and he’d been dropping hints about a separation. I didn’t want to go back to having nothing. So I hired this group. But now,” she whispered, “but now, I wish I hadn’t done any of this. I want Peter back. Not because I love him. I don’t. I made a mistake. But if I can get him back, we might be able to work something out.”
I heard voices in my head, one saying I told you so, the other, you should’ve dropped this case when you had the chance. I ignored them. “You need to see the police.”
“No!” she said. “If I go to them, I’ll be dead within days. This group does not play around. They made that very clear.” I saw the fear leap into her face, and I had no doubt what she said was true. Whoever she hired would not risk exposure of any kind. “I need your help.”
“What good is finding Peter going to do? He’ll divorce you for sure.”
“Not if I can convince him not to. And that doesn’t really matter now, anyway. But if we find Peter, we can expose the group. They made a mistake keeping him alive, and I can use that against them.” She was arguing for her own life, as well as Peter’s.
“And Peter will be grateful to you in the end, and not leave you penniless.” The spark in her eyes told me that even fear of death didn’t keep her from thinking about money. “That’s pretty shaky,” I said.
“It’s all I have.”
I sat down on the other couch and regarded her. She was a scared, lying, conspiring woman. But could I walk away knowing what I did? Could I let harm come to her, and not feel terrible, even if she’d brought all this misery on herself? Didn’t that lower me to her level? And could I rest not knowing where Peter was, or what happened to him?
“Who is this group?” I asked, grabbing the rope that would pull me further in.
Immense relief flushed over her face. “I don’t know anything about them. They’re an underground group that goes by the name X Women. I found out about them from a friend at the club.”
“Is it that common to get rid of your spouse, that you can just get a name from someone at the club?” I spoke in a mock imitation of a snooty rich person.
“Don’t be coy,” Amanda said.
“Who told you about them?”
“I can’t…”
I held up a hand to stop her protests. “Tell me. If you want to get to the bottom of this, you’d better.”
“But she’ll kill me,” Amanda used the expression without thinking.
“And if she doesn’t, this underground group will.”
She paled, then blurted, “Maggie Delacroix. She gave me a number. She didn’t even write it down, she made me memorize it. And before you ask, I have no idea how she knows of them, or if she ever used them.”
“Is she a friend of yours?”
“Not really. I see her around the club.”
“What do you know about her?”
Amanda waved a hand at me, like she was shooing a fly away. “What does it matter what I know about her? She’s just some lady at the club. She’s married to some rich guy who owns paper warehouses or something. He’s her second husband. I think she’s got kids, a daughter or something. I don’t know Reed.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to calm her down. “So you contacted this group, and then what?”
“The person who answered told me to go to Patini’s with a Spiderman comic and leave it with a waiter named Jack.”
“I knew you didn’t like Superman,” I said.
Her eyes flashed at me and she bit off a protest, remembering that I had followed her. “Most of the contact was made through signals like that. It was a type of code. The only time I met face to face with anyone was after I left the comic the first time. I was contacted again, and told to go to Washington Park and wait near the boat rental place. A lady met me there, and I told her what I wanted. We spoke for about five minutes. I was supposed to return to Patini’s in a week. If they accepted, Jack would pass me an X-Men comic. If nothing was passed, they had declined to take me on as a client.”
It all sounded so professional, as if it was a mundane business transaction, not a death deal. “So they accepted. What happened next?”
“I got a call and was instructed to wire five hundred thousand dolla
rs to an account in the Cayman Islands. They’d take care of everything from there.” So that was the going rate. Pathetic.
“Where did you get that kind of money?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Please, we have that in our accounts. I can access it just as easily as Peter.”
“He didn’t notice?”
“I lied to him. I said that our accountant suggested we transfer some of the money into a new bank.”
“He didn’t find that suspicious?”
“No. I handle some of our finances, and he’s too busy to pay a lot of attention to the details.”
“Okay. Who did you wire the money to?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. The caller gave me an account number to wire the money to. That’s what I did.”
“Do you still have the account number?”
“Sure,” she said. Her purse was sitting on the floor in the hallway. She got it, rummaged around and pulled out a piece of paper. She handed it to me. It had the account number, the name of a bank, and also a phone number.
“This is the number you called to get in touch with this group?” She nodded. “Didn’t Maggie make you memorize it?”
She blushed. “I was afraid I’d forget it,” she said sheepishly. “It’s useless now. It’s disconnected. When I called it the other day, the woman said the number wouldn’t work anymore, and I was to wait for them to contact me.”
I sighed. The plot thickened. “So after you paid the money, you didn’t have to help set up Peter?”
“They do all of that,” she said. “Someone called me one more time, gave me the time frame for the deal, and told me what to do when Peter didn’t come home. That was it. I wasn’t supposed to contact the group again. Ever. No matter what happened. If something went wrong, they would contact me.”
“You were supposed to go to the police, report Peter missing, and leave it at that.”
She nodded.
“But you didn’t leave it at that.”
She protested. “I did it according to plan. They gave me a date, last Monday, but not where or how. Just the date. I went to the police after a few days, when I thought it would make sense. I had to take Peter’s normal behavior into account,” she said like she was talking to a child. “But since Peter called I’ve been in a panic. So I decided to come to you.”
“And now, since you’ve breached the group’s code of conduct, you think they’re after you.”
Her lower lip trembled. “Yes,” she whispered. “Now they’ll come after me. I don’t know what to do.”
“Is this why you’ve been passing comics again?”
“Yes,” she said. “They wouldn’t do that if everything was okay. They asked for me to be available to them, that the plan had changed. Passing the comic was my answer.”
“Which was?”
“Yes,” she spat. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”
I nodded. “They’re not happy with you, are they?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I’m looking for Maggie Delacroix,” I said to the pert receptionist at the country club. “She said she’d meet me in the bar.”
I had convinced Amanda that I had to contact Maggie in order to track down the group she hired. Once she’d had a drink, she called Maggie and dropped the news that someone else knew about their contact with the group. Maggie resisted, but Amanda pleaded, begged and finally pointed out that I would find Maggie anyway, so she might as well get the meeting out of the way. I was wary of the compliment, even as Amanda arranged to have me meet Maggie at the club. I left Amanda to her second drink of the morning and drove to the country club.
“Yes, she informed me that she would have a visitor. Down the hall on your right.”
I retraced my steps from the other day and entered the bar. Amanda had described Maggie as an elderly woman, with gray hair and too many wrinkles to be attractive anymore. I was instructed to look for her at a table by the windows that faced west. As I stepped into the bar, I immediately noticed Maggie, but not because the description fit. Just the opposite.
Maggie was on edging toward sixty, with dark hair dramatically streaked with light gray. As she looked up at me, I noticed hints of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise her face was plastic-surgery flawless. She wore an understated blue pantsuit, had a large diamond ring on her left fourth finger, and smelled subtly of expensive perfume. My only criticism would be a bit too much makeup. Reflecting on Amanda’s description, I’d say she was jealous of Maggie, and I could see why. Amanda’s drinking would age her at twice the pace of someone like Maggie.
I sat in the chair Maggie indicated. “I don’t think introductions are needed,” she said, pushing the remains of a salad bowl off to the side of her place mat. She lifted a glass of water to her lips, took a tiny sip and said, “I really don’t know that I can be of any help to you.” Maggie was trying to play it cool, but I noticed that her glass shook as it came back to the table.
“Let me make it clear that I have no intention of bringing you into any of this.”
“You already have,” she said.
I shrugged. A waiter came to the table but Maggie shooed him away. I wouldn’t be staying long enough to finish a drink. “Amanda screwed things up and she’s probably in danger.”
“Amanda is a stupid woman,” Maggie said through pursed lips. “I never should have recommended her.”
I agreed with her, but continued. “I need to know how to find this group. I don’t know or care what your involvement with them is. Tell me about them and I won’t say a word about you.”
“Impossible,” Maggie said. “Even if I had that kind of information, I couldn’t give it to you.” I knew she couldn’t either. Her life wouldn’t be worth the ice in her glass if she did.
“How do you know of them?”
She leaned forward in her chair. “I found out the same way Amanda did. By asking a question here and there, by presenting my need to the right people. By listening to rumors. There are ways to do anything, especially if you have the means.”
“How did you contact them?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Did you pass comics back and forth?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was sure she did. She wasn’t that good a liar. She took another sip of water. “I have far too much to lose to tell you anything. Amanda was foolish to even mention me.”
“I hate to make threats, but I can make things very uncomfortable for you if you don’t help me.”
The water glass stopped halfway to the table. “That is a threat.” I nodded as the glass clinked to the table. “What would you do?”
“The police aren’t doing much right now. I’m sure a phone call from me would at least bring them to your doorstep. At this point, no one knows we’re having this conversation, and no one knows about your involvement, other than Amanda and me.” I paused. “And whoever you had killed.”
“I never hired them for myself,” she snapped. “I did it for a friend.” Her voice grew quiet. “A very close friend.”
“Jesus. You all make it sound so business-like,” I said. “You’re still implicated in this whole thing.”
She didn’t respond. I waited. She thought. “They are an organization referred to as the X Women,” she finally said, speaking in a hushed tone. “They work for the rights of women. They take on cases where a woman has been abused, where rape has occurred, or domestic violence, that sort of thing. They seek justice when it doesn’t occur within the boundaries of our ineffective legal system.” A hint of emotion split the calm demeanor. “I can contact them in the same manner as Amanda. Through a phone call. I have never personally met anyone, nor have I hired them for my own revenge.” She wanted that last point made very clear.
“How do you know of them?” I asked. “Amanda said the number she had would be disconnected by now.”
“Did you try calling it?”
I shook my head. �
��Not yet. I wanted to do it where it couldn’t be traced.”
Her lips moved into the suggestion of a smile. “That’s good. You’re giving them the appropriate credit. They are not a group to be trifled with.” A finger tapped the table. “And Amanda is correct about the number. It will be useless to you now.”
“Then how could you get in touch with them when Amanda can’t?”
“Amanda is a stupid woman,” she repeated. “She has broken group protocol, so the organization will now take measures to ensure they are not compromised by that stupidity. For myself, I have my resources, but I will not reveal them to you.” She sat back and crossed her arms defiantly. “I have nothing else to tell you.”
I contemplated her. “An organization called the X Women, huh.” Great, I was trying to find an outlaw women’s group who carried out vigilante justice. PMS meets Marvel Comics. “I don’t suppose I can find a listing for them on the Internet.”
“You are not funny, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is.” She waved the bartender over and asked for her bill. As she signed it, she continued. “Whether you believe it or not, this organization does good work. There are people, usually men, I’m afraid, who do little more than clutter up this lovely planet we live on. This organization helps in some small way to rid the earth of vermin.” She used a well-manicured hand to brush an errant curl off her forehead. “Our justice system leaves a lot to be desired. Murderers, rapists, sadists, abusers, too often get away with little or no retribution. This organization sees that, at least some of the time, this does not happen.”
“I’m sure they’re just grand.” I couldn’t hold back my sarcasm.
She strained to stay calm. “When my daughter was in high school, she was friends with a sweet young girl. This girl, I won’t tell you her name, was around a lot. I got to know her. She had a good heart, was maybe a bit innocent, but that’s never been a crime. She was around so much that she soon seemed like my own daughter. The two girls did everything together; they were inseparable. They even chose the same college so they could remain close.” She paused for effect. “That wonderful girl was abducted, tortured, raped, and strangled to death one night coming home after a date. The police had a suspect, but he was an all-star on a prestigious, winning football team. Even though the police knew this young man was guilty, they had to answer to very influential people who could sway the balance of justice. No charges were ever brought against him. Nothing was ever done. We were all devastated, her parents especially. I wasn’t willing to sit by idly, and I had the means to do something where her parents couldn’t. I made inquiries, found out about this group, and contacted them. Soon after, the football player had an unfortunate accident that killed him. As I said, this group does good work. Justice was served.”
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