“It was a sad day when you disappeared last year,” the client said with a roguish smile. “I hope you’re back to stay.”
“I didn’t ‘disappear,’ Hollis,” Heather-Anne said, her hands resting on his abs as she counted crunches. “I fell in love and moved to be with my sweetie. You’ve got to be willing to make sacrifices for true love.”
Charlie was glad Gigi couldn’t overhear the woman’s saccharine tone. It was enough to make Charlie barf, and she hadn’t been married to Les.
“I’d make sacrifices for someone like you,” Hollis said, his face red with exertion.
Heather-Anne smiled flirtatiously. “Oh, Hollis. As a matter of fact…”
Hardly able to believe her ears, Charlie listened as Heather-Anne fed the smitten Hollis a story about needing a bit of money to tide her over since her car had been broken into and her wallet stolen from her hotel the previous night. An almost-sob, eyes that looked at Hollis like he was the only lifeguard in sight while she floundered in heavy seas surrounded by Great Whites, a flash of cleavage, and the man was trotting to the locker room to retrieve his checkbook. Charlie raised her brows, realizing she was watching an expert in action.
“Can I work in?”
Startled, Charlie released her grip on the bar, realizing she’d done at least fifty reps while listening to Heather-Anne milk the unsuspecting Hollis, to find a young man motioning to the lat pulldown machine. “I’m done,” she said, sliding out from under the thigh pads.
Having learned enough, Charlie exited the Y and returned to her car, loosing her hair from its ponytail and shaking it around her face to change her looks somewhat before meeting Heather-Anne. She kept a duffel in the car full of hats, shirts, totes, and other items that made it easy to change her appearance while on surveillance, and she pulled a red hoodie from her stash. Looking in the rearview mirror, she finger-combed her bangs down onto her forehead, added a flick of mascara and a slick of red lipstick—purely for disguise purposes—and left the car to meet her client.
Standing at the corner of Kiowa and Tejon where they’d agreed to meet, Charlie felt the wind bite through her thin sweats and smelled the familiar downtown scent, a mix of exhaust, coffee from a nearby diner, and wet cement from the damp sidewalks. Saturday shoppers strolled past, studying the wares in boutique windows, and a panhandler worked the corner of Acacia Park across the street. Dark clouds snagged on the mountain peaks to the west promised precipitation later. Charlie hoped for snow; winter rain was too damn depressing.
On the thought, she caught sight of Heather-Anne making her way down the sidewalk from the Y, a windbreaker protecting her torso from the cold, but her long shapely legs still bare. She looked pleased with herself, tossing her honey-colored hair back from her face and smiling a feline smile as she approached the corner. When she was within earshot, Charlie stepped forward, hand outstretched. The younger woman reared back, and fright flared in her eyes. Charlie got the distinct impression that she was planning to run.
“I’m Charlie Swift,” she said quickly. “You’re Heather-Anne Pawlusik, right?”
Heather-Anne recovered swiftly, running her fingers through her hair. “Oh. Yes. I was expecting someone older, taller.” She appraised Charlie through narrowed eyes.
Wondering why the woman had spooked so easily, Charlie said, “Do you want to get a coffee?” She nodded toward a Starbucks.
“No. I miss the cold. Costa Rica’s so damned hot all the time. Let’s sit in the park.” Without waiting for Charlie’s reply, Heather-Anne started across the street. Charlie caught up with her, and they found a bench across from the empty bandshell that hosted open-air concerts in the summer. Now a colony of pigeons huddled beneath it, purple and gray feathers fluffed against the cold.
“So,” Heather-Anne said, “you said you needed more information. I suppose you don’t really trust Gigi to do the job right.” She finished with a little laugh.
Charlie was conscious of a surprising surge of anger on her partner’s behalf. True, she hadn’t wanted to share the business with Gigi, but she was learning quicker than Charlie had thought she would, and she had become quite competent with computer searches. Her stream-of-consciousness thought process frequently led her to data that Charlie would never have uncovered with her more linear approach. It galled Charlie that this snot-nosed thirty-year-old was making fun of the woman whose husband she stole. “On the contrary,” Charlie said, careful not to let her anger show. “Gigi’s very sensitive to nuances in interviews.”
“Really?” Heather-Anne looked unconvinced. “So, what else do you need to know?”
“I’m not sure anyone knows exactly how much money Les embezzled from his various business interests. Was it enough for him to retire on or was he working somewhere?”
Heather-Anne didn’t seem offended by Charlie’s reference to her lover’s criminal activities; indeed, she smiled proudly. “Oh, he made more than enough to retire. More than enough. He works at managing his money, you might say.”
“I need help understanding something,” Charlie said with an air of bewilderment. “He’s got a beautiful girlfriend, plenty of money, no family responsibilities … no man would walk away from that without a damned good reason. I have to conclude that something scared him away. What was it?”
Heather-Anne blinked once, slowly. “You’re smarter than he said you were. I think his investment in Swift Investigations was a better move than he realized.”
“Save the flattery for your marks, Heather-Anne,” Charlie said, pleased to see she’d finally startled the other woman, who looked reflexively over her shoulder as if Hollis were standing behind her. “Or is it even Heather-Anne?”
The younger woman stilled, an animal freezing at the sudden appearance of a predator. Only a strand of hair moved, teased by the wind, catching at the corner of her mouth. She finally brushed it away. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her voice was harder, older than before, and Charlie was intrigued to see that she didn’t rush off in an offended huff. She wants to find out how much I know, Charlie thought.
“It means,” Charlie said calmly, “that I couldn’t find any trace of Heather-Anne Pawlusik before you turned up in Colorado Springs two years ago. Either your entire history’s been erased, or you didn’t exist before moving here.”
Tears sprang to Heather-Anne’s eyes. “If you could figure that out, so can he. He’ll find me.” Her lips parted, and fear crinkled her smooth forehead.
“Who? Les?”
“No, my husband.”
Charlie eyed her client doubtfully. “Your husband?”
Heather-Anne nodded. “I left him four years ago. He was … is violent, obsessed. I had to leave before he killed me. I drifted from small town to small town in the South, waiting tables, babysitting, doing other jobs where I got paid under the table so I wouldn’t leave a money trail. I came here with a boyfriend, and when he moved on, I decided to stay.”
Heather-Anne’s eyes searched Charlie’s face. “I liked it here, thought it was far enough away that he wouldn’t find me easily. I thought I was safe here. And I was. I changed my name, got my personal trainer certification, built a new life. Then I met Les, and I began to think that I could love again, that I could trust again.”
The B-movie dialogue was making Charlie nauseous. “Oh, cut the crap, Heather-Anne. You saw a meal ticket.”
“You’re wrong,” Heather-Anne said with quiet dignity. Charlie couldn’t tell if she was sincere or acting. “I love Les. He’s my soul mate.”
Charlie could believe that, given that Les had embezzled from people who trusted him, and Heather-Anne—if her performance with Hollis was anything to go by—was adept at separating men from their money … and their wives. Neither one had more conscience than your average anaconda.
The panhandler had made his way around the park and now hovered within arm’s reach, his ripe smell drifting toward the bench. For the first time, Charlie noticed a small mutt hovering clos
e to the man’s leg. With a sigh—she never knew if she was helping someone or enabling an alcohol or drug addiction—she handed him a five, responded to his nod of acknowledgment with a small smile, and turned back to Heather-Anne when he was out of earshot. “What’s your real name?” Charlie asked, “and what does your history have to do with Les’s disappearance?”
Heather-Anne hesitated. “Cindy,” she said. “Lucinda Cheney. I—I wasn’t exactly up front with Les about my situation,” she confessed, bowing her head so Charlie couldn’t read her face. “He found … he found some letters, some documents from my life before. He was hurt, angry. I didn’t blame him.” She looked up so Charlie could see the anguish and sincerity in her face.
Oscarworthy, Charlie thought. “So, you’re saying—?”
“We fought. He accused me of lying to him, said our whole relationship was a sham. I told him I loved him, that my feelings were real.”
Charlie rolled her eyes, but Heather-Anne, caught up in her story, didn’t notice. “He said he needed some time alone to think things through. I thought he meant an afternoon, an evening, something like that. I went to the beach to give him some space. I spent the afternoon there, just walking, thinking, crying. When I came home, he was gone. No note. Nothing. I didn’t know where he’d gone, if he was planning to come back … nothing.” She held her empty hands out, palms up, as if to demonstrate “nothing.”
“So you came here. Why?”
Heather-Anne—Charlie had trouble thinking of her as Cindy—twisted a strand of hair between two fingers. “I thought it was possible he’d come back to Gigi. He was fond of her, you know. Or to see his kids.”
Personally, Charlie thought it unlikely that a man who hadn’t given his kids a thought in over a year and couldn’t be bothered to pay his child support was going to return to his spurned wife and alienated kids after a spat with his new honey. She pulled out a small notebook. “Right. Well, you’ll forgive me if I take everything you’ve said with a grain of salt until I can find some proof. Where did you live before leaving your husband, and what is his name?”
Heather-Anne pulled back with a frown. “I can’t tell you that! You’ll make inquiries and he’ll hear about it. He’ll know why and he’ll find me. You have no idea what he can do. Look, I paid you to find Les, not to tear my life apart. If that’s too much for you to handle, give me my money back and I’ll hire a PI firm that wants my business.” She held out her hand as if expecting Charlie to count bills into it on the spot.
Charlie studied the younger woman, sure she wasn’t telling the whole truth but uncertain where the lies lay. “We’re still hunting for Les,” she said, “and Gigi’s your best shot at finding him fast. She tracked him to Aspen, after all.”
“Yeah, and let him give her the slip,” Heather-Anne said with asperity. She tossed back her hair with a head jerk.
“Let’s come at this another way,” Charlie suggested, putting her cold hands between her thighs to warm them. “Les embezzled from a lot of people on his way out of town, and maybe long before that, for all I know. Was anyone particularly mad at him?”
Heather-Anne gave her a disbelieving look.
“I said ‘particularly,’” Charlie emphasized. “I’m sure he generated hate mail on a Bernie Madoff level, but is there anyone who stands out? Anyone who threatened him with something more specific than ‘I could kill you, you scum-sucking, lower-than-snail-shit slimeball’?”
Heather-Anne was nodding before Charlie finished. “Patrick Dreiser. He and Les were partners in a vending machine company. He had to declare bankruptcy when Les left. His wife left him, and his son had to quit Stanford to get a job. He blamed Les. If he’d had adequate financial controls in place, Les wouldn’t have been able to do what he did,” she added self-righteously. “That’s what Les says.”
The old “blame the victim for making someone kill/rape/rob him” technique. “What did Dreiser do?”
Voice dropping to a whisper, Heather-Anne leaned in. “He threatened to hurt Les’s kids, Kendra and Darryl.”
“Kendall and Dexter.”
“Whatever. The point is, he sent Les this e-mail with photos that were…” Heather-Anne shuddered and Charlie got the impression that, for the first time, the woman was sincere. Her horror was genuine. “Who could threaten to do that to kids?”
“What steps did Les take to protect them? Did he tell the police? Warn Gigi?” Gigi had certainly never mentioned such threats to Charlie, but maybe it had happened before she joined Swift Investigations.
Heather-Anne looked baffled. “He couldn’t call the police—they would’ve arrested him! It all came to nothing because Dreiser realized—”
She cut herself off, but Charlie finished for her. “Dreiser realized Les didn’t give a damn about his kids, so threatening them wasn’t going to get him what he wanted.” Not giving Heather-Anne a chance to reply, she asked, “What did Dreiser want?”
“His money back, of course. A couple million and change. Plus ten percent for ‘mental anguish.’”
Charlie whistled softly. If Les had made off with two mil from one business, he must have made a total haul of over ten million. No wonder he thought Swift Investigations was small peanuts, not worth embezzling from. Eight figures would finance quite a nice lifestyle in Costa Rica, she imagined, and made it all the more unlikely that he would willingly return to a country where police slavered to arrest him, prosecutors panted at the prospect of tossing him in jail, and defrauded victims waited their chance to boil him in oil.
Heather-Anne stood and twisted to pick up her gym bag. Charlie could see slat marks from the bench imprinted against the back of her bare thighs. “I’ve got to go—another training appointment. With Les gone, things are a little tight for me.” She grimaced. “So, I’ll hear from you soon?”
“Absolutely,” Charlie said. She watched Heather-Anne sashay out of the park, highlighted hair riffling in the breeze, bare legs drawing appreciative looks from every man within eyeshot. Like trout watching a glittery lure, she thought, making her way back to her car. She wondered if the men Heather-Anne reeled in ever even knew they’d been hooked.
11
Sunday morning, I showed up at the Embassy Suites hotel for a meeting I hadn’t known about with Heather-Anne. She had called my cell last night and left a voice mail, but I’d dropped into bed early after a day of shuttling Kendall to skating practice and convincing Dexter to work on his biology project. Spiders, and I’d even helped him catch some in the basement—ugh! I’d also had to move money from my shrinking savings account to pay the utilities bill, which was twice as large as usual due to my leaving the gas grill on accidentally after barbecuing on an unusually nice day in mid-January. I dreamed about being on a Mexican beach, probably because Albertine had suggested we go there when we were giggling about the ideal man for a postdivorce fling after our third margaritatini Friday night. I was holding out for George Clooney, but Albertine insisted Jimmy Smits was sexier. Albertine thought maybe having a fling would be easier if we headed to Cabo or Acapulco over spring break, but my checking account wasn’t up to that, even though a girls’ weekend with Albertine would’ve been fun. Sun, sea, shopping, tropical drinks with little umbrellas. It sounded divine.
I hadn’t checked my messages until morning, and Heather-Anne hadn’t answered when I called back, so I was running late when I arrived at the Embassy Suites. They were hosting a huge art sale, promising “Original Works of Art for Under $99,” and I saw several paintings I liked as I wove through the clumps of people looking at stacked canvases. How was I ever going to find Heather-Anne in this crowd? I craned my neck, looking over the heads of the shoppers, and saw a four-foot-square painting of sunflowers in yellows, oranges, and bright blues that would have looked wonderful on the wall above my sofa. I moved toward it before remembering my mission. Maybe Heather-Anne meant for me to meet her in her room? I listened to the message again.
“I heard from Les. We need to talk. My hotel, nine
A.M. tomorrow.”
Since it was already ten past nine, I headed toward her room. The crowd noise petered out as I walked down the hall. A maid passed me, pushing a vacuum cleaner, and an elderly couple blocked my path as they hauled six or eight bags out of their room on a luggage dolly. I helped them get it pointed down the hall. “They’re so awkward to maneuver, aren’t they?” I asked, and the old man agreed with a nod, trying to press a tip into my hand.
By the time I made it to Heather-Anne’s room, it was almost nine twenty, and I was worried that she’d be mad I was so late. The door was resting against the jamb, like someone hadn’t closed it firmly. I left hotel doors like that when I went to fetch ice. Did Heather-Anne expect me to just walk in? I couldn’t do that. I tapped on the door. No response.
“Heather-Anne,” I called softly. “It’s me, Gigi.” I shifted from foot to foot. My Joan and David boots pinched. When the door still didn’t open, I knocked louder, then leaned my head toward it to see if I could hear anything. Faint voices sounded from within. Had Les shown up? I pressed my ear against the door, trying to hear what they were saying. Scrunching my toes in the boots, I lost my balance and banged against the door, which popped open. I fell into the room with a thud.
I lay flat on the floor for a few seconds, winded, before pushing to my knees. This was more embarrassing than the time my bathing suit top came untied at the Fassendilbers’ pool party. “I am so sorry, Heather-Anne, I didn’t mean—” I stopped as I straightened up and realized no one was in the sitting room area. An old Quincy rerun played softly on the television.
“Heather-Anne?” I inched farther into the room. “The door was open, so I—” I wasn’t about to go into the bedroom. What if Les really was here and they were…? I sidestepped to my left so I could see through the open door. I squeaked.
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