Authors: Chris Patchell
Jill didn’t flinch. She forced a careless shrug and dodged the question.
“Well, she’s new. Maybe he’s taking her under his wing until she gets settled.” Her insides felt like they were being squeezed in a vice so hard it was difficult to breathe. Rachel was the closest thing to a friend she had in the San Jose office, but there were things Jill didn’t share with her. With anyone. Jamie was one of them.
“Like a mentor? Ha. I don’t think it’s the kind of mentorship Human Resources has in mind.” Rachel’s words dripped with innuendo
as she arched an expressive eyebrow at Jill, leaving little doubt as to her opinion.
Jill’s lips twitched.
“Whatever. You think everyone is getting some.” She fought the magnetic pull of her gaze toward Jamie’s table.
Rachel’s throaty laugh was bitter. She ran her fingers absently over the place her wedding ring used to occupy. “You may have a point there. God knows, I’m not.”
“Is the divorce final yet?” Jill asked, taking full advantage of the chance to change the subject.
Rachel grimaced and shook her head.
“No, the bastard wants me to sign over the cabin in Big Sur. No doubt to take his teenage, Barbie-doll girlfriend there to commune with nature.”
“He’s still seeing her?”
Jill looked across the table and instantly regretted the question. Rachel’s lips pressed together in a tight line. Her eyes were liquid pools of acid.
“They’ve moved in together.”
“I’m sorry. How are you doing?”
Jill was tempted to stretch her hand out to touch Rachel’s arm. She knew it was a good-friend thing to do. But instead, she let her fingers to fall back to the table. Rachel’s twisted grin was bitter.
“I’m a tough old bird. I just wish I had extracted my own pound of flesh, if you know what I mean.”
Jill didn’t, but that was okay. She knew Rachel was working her way through the stages of grief and might be stuck in anger for a while. Who could blame her? She tried not to picture Alex’s face as she looked across the table. After all, their situation was different. She wasn’t planning on leaving Alex or anything. She was just …
“Fucking online dating sites,” Rachel muttered.
“Excuse me?” Jill snapped back to the conversation.
“That son of a bitch had posted his profile on three online dating sites and was actively nailing anything in a skirt while we were still together. That’s how he met Barbie.”
Across the table, Rachel’s moist eyes met Jill’s.
“It’s so cliché. Married man goes in search of a little something on the side. Lying about himself to get what he wants. Really, what kind of bastard does something like that?”
Jill shook her head and glanced over toward the windows in time to see Jamie follow Dana Evans out of the cafeteria. Her eyes bore a hole into the back of his striped Hugo Boss shirt.
What kind of bastard, indeed?
CHAPTER SIX
N
o smoking gun lurked in Natalie Watson’s email account. Alex ran a hand across his tired eyes. He’d spent hours late into the previous night sifting through information on Natalie’s computer, searching for some clue, some inkling into where she might have gone. To no avail.
Disappointment tasted as bitter as cold coffee. He was sure he’d find something on her hard drive. His instincts, typically dead-on, were telling him the secret to Natalie’s disappearance lay somewhere in the online world. But so far, no dice. And no Natalie, either. It was as if she’d just vanished.
Although this was now officially a missing-persons case, with Jackson in charge, Alex couldn’t leave it alone. He spent part of his morning talking to the principal of Ballard High School, lining up interviews with Natalie’s teachers and some of the students.
Alex glanced at his watch and waited for the bell to ring as he stood outside the main entrance to the high school. He wanted to meet Emily Jenkins, Natalie’s best friend, on neutral territory. After her adamant refusal to open up to him yesterday, he had decided to come alone. One on one, he might have more luck.
Pale November sunshine warmed his face. The smell of fried onions and bacon reminded him it was time to eat. With all respect to Jill’s healthy-eating, no-skin-on-the-chicken mantra, a burger and a shake would taste mighty fine right about now, he decided.
A few minutes later the doors opened, and hordes of hungry students poured from the building, a torrent of under clad teenage girls and scruffy teenage boys. The mob streamed passed, and Alex searched for a familiar face. As the last few trickled out, he wondered if he’d missed her somehow. But then Emily trailed out of the building, walking apart from the crowd.
Emily wore a micro–denim skirt. Her chubby legs were clad in black tights that slid into a pair of low, combat-looking boots. The plunging neckline of her shirt revealed more than just her butterfly tattoo as she strode down the stairs, hands dangling loosely at her sides.
She spotted him and, angling her body away, stopped, waiting for the last of the students to filter past. Finally she looked up through the unruly fringe of her dark hair, lips twisted into a slight pout, and heaved a long, inevitable sigh.
“I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that you’re here,” she said hopefully. A note of dark irony touched her voice. Alex smiled.
“I’m afraid not, Emily. Listen, I’m starving, so what do you say I buy you a burger and we talk?” He inclined his head toward the diner across the street and waited.
“I don’t suppose you’ll take no for an answer?”
“Well, we could talk before or after I eat. Your choice.”
Emily did not say a word but turned instead in the direction of the crosswalk. Alex fell in step beside her. Her makeup was lighter today. Yesterday, her style bordered on Goth. But today, it seemed she was in the mood for something lighter. Her puffy eyes hinted at a restless night, and he wondered if Natalie’s disappearance was wearing on her. He hoped it was and that it would provide him with an opening. At this point, it was obvious to him that Natalie’s disappearance was not just a fit of teenage rebellion.
“How are you, Emily?”
They stepped over the thinning grass and onto the sidewalk. She shrugged without looking at him.
“Okay, I guess.”
They found a booth at the back of the restaurant. The noisy chatter from the tables surrounding them provided an odd sense of privacy. A waitress stopped by to give their table a cursory wipe with a grimy cloth before taking their order.
Alex crossed his arms casually on the table and leaned forward, his eyes meeting Emily’s. She looked away.
“So, Emily,” he started in a quiet voice. “What can you tell me?”
A flurry of emotions crossed her face as she struggled to decide what to say, or perhaps what to feel. Finally, she sighed and shook her head.
“You know, Emily, secrets are funny things. I’m sure you don’t want to betray your friend’s trust. But I’ve got to tell you, some lies are deadly. And when it comes to finding Natalie, the sooner we know where she was going, the better.”
Emily propped an elbow up on the table and rested her lips against her clenched fist for a long moment before she spoke.
“I don’t know where she is,” she finally blurted out in her gravelly voice. “But I do know where she was going. Well, sort of.”
Alex nodded, a prickly sensation burning across the back of his neck. He remained perfectly, deliberately silent. A stream of questions queued up in his mind, but he stopped them before they escaped his lips, determined to listen.
It was a long time before she spoke again. When she did, her voice faltered, as if she didn’t know quite where or how to begin.
“Natalie wasn’t allowed to date. Her parents are kind of strict, and really, there wasn’t anyone in school she had a thing for anyway. Boys.”
Emily rolled her eyes in disgust.
“But there was someone,” he prodded gently. Slowly, he cautioned himself. Too much pressure and she might shut down.
Emily turned to look out the window, and nodded.
“There was someone.” Then she added quickly, “But I don’t know who. I mean, I don’t know his name.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
She slouched back in the booth. A mist of tears clouded her eyes, and she stared hard at the empty table.
“Not much. I know she met him online. They chatted a few times, and she said that he was older. Liked motorcycles, you know?”
Alex’s heart jolted as he got the first real lead in the case. He pulled out his notebook and started taking notes.
“Do you know how they met online?”
“Um, I’m not sure. A chat room maybe? She mentioned something about him a few weeks ago.”
“Did they email?”
“I think so.”
Alex frowned and considered this new information. He hadn’t found anything unusual in her email correspondence. Surely he wouldn’t have missed emails like this in his search. He’d need to look for secondary accounts. She might have accessed other accounts on another computer, at the school or library perhaps.
“Do you know his email handle?”
“Not really.” Emily shrugged. “God. Natalie mentioned it once. It was stupid. Something to do with motorcycles, but I don’t remember what it was.”
“Did she chat a lot?” His pencil started to scratch on the paper as he focused on what she was saying.
“Sure, we all do. She used her email account.”
Emily paused to take a sip from her Coke and then continued. “I could tell she was excited about him. She said something about meeting him for coffee on Saturday. Asked me to cover for her.”
Alex stopped writing, fixing his piercing stare on Emily.
“Her email account?” Bingo. There it was. The missing piece.
“Sure. Free sign-up.”
“How does she access it?”
“God, what do you mean?” she shook her head. “She logged onto it through her Me page.” Emily rolled her eyes.
“But I looked and didn’t find her on a Me site.” The search Alex had made of all the social-networking sites had turned up nothing on Natalie.
“She didn’t use her real name. She wasn’t dumb. Her parents were just the type to go snooping around in her stuff. They’re like that, you know? My mom wouldn’t have a clue. But Natalie’s parents …” She trailed off and looked back at Alex. “God, she’s smart with computers.”
“What is the address she used?”
“[email protected].” Emily shrugged, and a faint smile touched her lips. Alex’s brows creased together in a frown, and he scribbled some notes. “Slipstream … cycling jargon. That’s pure Natalie—nothing flashy.” Emily’s voice trailed off.
Her fingers pressed against her lips, and Alex noticed the brutally short fingernails coated in a fresh layer of black nail polish, the evidence of her nail-biting habit effectively camouflaged.
The waitress stopped by the table to deposit their food and then skittered away. Emily reached for the ketchup and spent a long time creating a red pool beside the large order of fries heaped on her plate. The black-tipped fingers pinched together to capture a fry, then hesitated and fell back to the table.
“When she didn’t call on Saturday night—” Her voice suddenly choked off. She stopped, cleared her throat with a wet, noisy sound, and continued. “I figured maybe things had gone well. She made me promise not to tell anyone. I thought maybe she had spent the night with him, and I didn’t want to blow her cover.”
Alex nodded as if in agreement. Misguided loyalty was something he understood. The fact that she was talking to him now, spilling Natalie’s secret, was proof enough that her indifference yesterday had been a well-crafted act. She played the part so well, in fact, that he had to wonder what things in her life had caused her to shut down. He recalled the dirty kitchen, the half-empty vodka bottle,
and her mother’s watery expression. Compassion for the girl flooded through him.
As he silently reviewed the information Emily had provided, he found himself doodling on the page where he had written his notes. The face of a teenage girl quickly took shape, her features mostly hidden by an unruly fringe of bangs. Dark eyes downcast. Expression pensive.
Alex looked up and saw Emily studying the page, too, and his pencil stilled. He loved to draw, had ever since he was a kid. Even though the sketch was rough there was no mistaking Emily’s face. He turned the page.
“Weren’t you worried when you found out she didn’t show up on Sunday?”
“Sure, but I thought she’d come home.”
“Anything else you can tell me?”
“No,” she said. “That’s all I know.” Her eyes met his. Fear glimmered in their depths. “Please find her.”
Alex nodded and closed the notebook. He took a sip of his milkshake, then quietly thanked Emily. Hope fluttered within him for the first time all day. A secret meeting. An email account. It was a damned good place to start.
CHAPTER SEVEN
J
ill Shannon’s fingernails clicked against the hard shell of her computer’s mouse. Jamie had been maddeningly unavailable. During the long week she spent in San Jose trying to corral the burgeoning number of project issues, he was holed up in meetings and otherwise occupied. Or so his administrative assistant claimed.
Lost in thought, she started at the sound of a knock on her door. Dana Evans glanced down at her through eyelashes so ridiculously thick, they had to be fake. She wore a knee-length black skirt, a sleeveless olive-green scoop-neck blouse, and high-heeled black boots. The look suited her, Jill grudgingly admitted to herself.
“Got a minute?” Evans asked.
Jill made no attempt to hide the scowl on her face.
“Sure.”
Dana strode in and closed the door behind her. A nauseating cloud of floral perfume filled the office, almost choking Jill. A closed-door meeting? Her eyebrows rose in surprise. Jill swiveled in her chair, facing her unwelcome guest.
“I came to apologize. My feedback the other day was rather blunt.”
Jill nodded. Blunt was one way to put it. She had other words for it.
“It’s fine.”
“So, that’s it. We’re square?” Dana asked.
“Sure,” Jill said, hitching her shoulders in a casual shrug. Whatever. She had no interest in airing her opinion on Evans’s unprofessional behavior. That was Jamie’s job.