Deceived (Private Justice Book #3): A Novel (18 page)

When at last he pulled back into the church parking lot and stopped beside a white utility van, she was sorry to see her weekly food delivery gig come to an end.

“Where’s your Taurus?”

He set the brake. “We play musical vehicles at Phoenix. The van is my wheels for this month.” He shifted around to snag his jacket off the backseat. “I’d invite you to Starbucks for a quick drink if I didn’t have to be at my own church in half an hour to coach our middle-school basketball team.”

A guy who not only went to church but volunteered for a youth activity.

The man got better and better.

“I’ll take a rain check.”

“I’ll remember that. Shall we brave the heat?”

“I guess so. I climbed over the gearshift once to get to the drivers’ seat after someone parked too close to me at a shopping mall, but I was wearing sweats. I’m not dressed for those kinds of maneuvers today.”

“I noticed.” The appreciative perusal he gave her belted silk dress and open-toed high heels more than validated her decision to sacrifice comfort for fashion, despite the heat.

After a few charged seconds, he angled away and opened his door.

She did the same, though the muggy air did nothing to cool her down as she circled behind the car.

He was waiting beside the driver’s door as she approached—jacket hooked over his shoulder, dark sunglasses now hiding his eyes. “Better get inside before you melt.”

Excellent advice.

Yet as she looked up at him, the spark of electricity that jumped between them—more sizzling than the waves of heat radiating up from the pavement—held her in place.

Had he felt that high-voltage jolt too?

Hard to tell, with those sunglasses—until he lifted his hand, touched her cheek . . . and spoke in a voice that had gone a shade deeper. “I’ll be in touch.”

Innocuous words. Businesslike, even.

But as she slid behind the wheel, as he closed her door and strode toward his van, she suspected his air conditioner was about to be cranked up as high as hers.

No question about it; romance was in the air.

Yet until she had definitive answers about the little boy in the mall, her love life was low priority.

In the meantime, she would do everything she could to help find those answers—including sending a very important email.

ASAP.

O
ut of the corner of his eye, Connor saw Nikki come to an abrupt halt at his door on her way from the back entrance to the lobby.

“You’re either picking up Dev’s messy habits or you got a very early start on your Monday.” She surveyed his littered desk. “Please tell me it’s the latter.”

“It’s the latter.”

“Whew. What a relief. One like Dev is enough.”

“Enough for what?” Dev’s question was followed by the bang of the back door.

Nikki sent him a withering look. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Good morning to you too.” Dev stopped behind her and inspected Connor’s desk over her shoulder. “Did you stop in over the weekend?”

“No, but I did work on the case a lot since Friday. I’ve been focusing on Sanders this morning. As soon as Cal gets here, I’d like to have a powwow. You too, Nikki.”

Dev groaned. “That means he has a job for you. There goes my filing. Again.”

“Quit complaining. I swung by on Saturday and got you
caught up.” As Dev’s expression grew sheepish, she narrowed her eyes. “Don’t tell me. You came in over the weekend too, and pulled out a mound of stuff that now needs refiling.”

“I wouldn’t call it a mound.”

Nikki glowered at him, and Connor reined in his grin as she turned his way. “I’ll be ready for the meeting whenever you are.” After directing another dark look toward her nemesis, she disappeared down the hall. A few seconds later, a muttered “Oh, good grief!” came from the vicinity of Dev’s door.

Dev leaned back and called down the hall, “If you cut the dramatics, I’ll bring you a latte tomorrow.”

“That hardly makes up for ruining my Monday morning . . . but I’ll take it.” The door to the lobby banged shut behind her.

“Women.” Grumbling under his breath, Dev propped a shoulder against the door. “You want to give your basketball buddy a preview of what you found?”

“Nope. I need to dig through some more material that just came in. Let’s plan on nine.”

“Fine. Make me wait.” He looked down the hall after Nikki. “Maybe I’ll get a present for the kid. That might put me back in her good graces.”

“Until the next time you dump a bunch of filing on her first thing on a Monday morning.”

“Yeah. Probably not the best timing.”

“You know . . . you might want to work on that timing thing before you get married. How did the housecleaning go, by the way? Was Laura impressed?”

“I dazzled her with my barbecuing instead.”

“Meaning you didn’t finish the vacuuming?”

“Almost. See you at nine.”

As Dev made a fast exit, Connor shook his head and shifted his attention to the stacks of material on his desk.

By the time the Phoenix team assembled fifty minutes later,
he’d organized his notes—and come up with an investigative plan that involved all of them.

He brought them up to speed on his weekend work, ending with the call he’d put in to the Ohio Vital Statistics office first thing this morning. Then he distributed a printout of the timeline he’d created, beginning with the death of Sanders’s wife.

“As you can see, our guy had some serious back-to-back setbacks. His wife dies. Three months later, his employment ends for reasons unknown. A year and a half after that, his son dies. Weeks later, his house is foreclosed on—not long before the so-called accident in New York. He then drops off the radar for four months, resurfacing in Montana. There’s no record of employment from the construction job in Cleveland to the one in St. Louis last March.”

Cal took a sip of coffee as he reviewed the timeline. “No apparent income for five years. What was he living on?”

“Fumes.” Connor pulled another sheet of paper out of the stack in front of him. “Since we’re all ex–law enforcement types who try to abide by the rules as much as possible, I contacted our data broker in the UK in the early hours of the morning to see what kind of credit information he could dig up on Sanders.”

When Cal squinted at him, Connor jumped back in before the senior partner could deliver the anticipated lecture. “You don’t need to say it. I know that’s pushing the boundaries of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.”

“Pushing might be an understatement.”

“I consider it a gray area—unlike Dev’s blatant vandalism when he was working his fiancée’s case.”

“Hey.” Dev straightened up in his seat. “Breaking a window isn’t a federal offense. And it was life or death.”

“Only verified after the fact. And my gut tells me this information may be life or death too. If Sanders killed my client’s husband and kidnapped her child, I feel no compunction about
stretching the margins of the law to the max to gather data that will lead us to the proof we need.”

Cal looked at him for a moment, then settled back in his chair. “Fine. Cut to the chase. What did our UK guy dig up?”

Consulting the paper in front of him, Connor exhaled. As straitlaced as Cal was about legalities, he could have taken him to task for jumping the gun. Their offshore information broker was always a last resort, and in truth he could have tried a few other avenues first. But he was anxious to move this case along for both personal and professional reasons—and he suspected Cal knew that.

Good thing they were friends as well as business partners.

“He found a lot. Prior to the move to Montana, Sanders was heavily in debt. His credit card was maxed out, it appears he refinanced his house a year or so before the bank foreclosed on it, and he’d fallen behind in his utility bills—although he’s been steadily reducing that debt over the past three years.”

“How, if he had no income?” Dev drew a dollar sign on the pad of paper in front of him.

“That question’s on my list.”

“The debt isn’t hard to explain, though.” Cal took a sip of coffee. “His family had a lot of medical issues. Those kinds of expenses can wipe people out.”

“He should have had COBRA available for eighteen months after he lost his construction job. That would have covered most medical problems.” Dev doodled a box on the tablet in front of him, frowning. “But there would have been a gap between the end of COBRA coverage and his son’s death, so your point may be valid. What else did you find out?”

Connor scanned the sheet again. “I had the broker pull some detail from Sanders’s credit card statement for the year before and after Kate’s husband died. A couple of red flags showed up. The first, about nine months before the accident, was a
significant airline charge—suggesting he bought a ticket—or two—to some far-flung destination. The other is that for four months around the time of the accident, there was no credit card use at all.”

“He didn’t want his activity—or location—traced for that period.” Cal made a note on the tablet in front of him.

“That would be my take.” Connor folded his hands on the table.

“So what can we do to help nail this guy?” Nikki leaned forward.

“I’m glad you asked. There are quite a few people I want to contact, and with a little help from my friends, I could wrap up that piece of the investigation pretty quickly.”

“I’m in.” Dev lifted his shamrock mug.

“Me too,” Cal seconded. “I have a few calls to make this morning to iron out some details for our executive protection gig in New York, but I can clear my schedule after that.”

“I’m up for anything that gets me out of filing.” Nikki sent a pointed glance toward Dev.

“A temporary reprieve,” Dev countered.

She made a face at him.

“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Connor distributed background sheets as he doled out tasks. “Dev, I’d like you to tackle Cleveland. See if you can track down Sanders’s old boss or any former co-workers. Nikki, try connecting with someone on the staff of the church he attended there, which I assume is the one listed in the death notices for his wife and son. The high-school-buddy or old-neighbor-trying-to-reconnect pretext should work. Or use whatever seems appropriate. If phone contact doesn’t turn up anything, a trip to Cleveland might be in my future.”

Nikki picked up her pen. “What specific information are you hoping to get?”

“Cause of death of Sanders’s son. Anything you can find
out about his expensive travel bill. Why he left his job. General information about the man’s attitude and personality. Why he refinanced his house. Why he was in debt.”

Dev finished scribbling and looked up. “You don’t want much.”

“I’ll take anything—and everything—I can get. I’d rather end up with pieces that don’t fit our puzzle than have gaps in the picture. Given his pattern, I think it’s safe to assume he hasn’t been in touch with anyone back in Cleveland, so we shouldn’t have to worry about him being tipped off to our questions.”

“What’s my assignment?” Cal moved his coffee aside and picked up his own pen.

Connor extracted some clipped pages from his pile and passed them over. “That’s a copy of the incident report and autopsy from the accident. With your police background, I thought it made sense for you to touch base with the local authorities and see if you can ferret out anything that wasn’t in the report. Impressions, opinions, conjectures. I figured one of your old buddies at County might have a contact in New York who could smooth the way for you with an introduction.”

“In other words, assure the cops up there I’m not one of the slimeball PIs.”

“That was the general idea.”

“Anything else?”

“If you can manage to track down any info on where Sanders was for the four months around the time of the boating accident when he dropped off the radar, that would be helpful.”

Cal jotted some notes. “I’ll give it a shot. I assume you’re tackling Montana?”

“Yeah. I’ve already researched the town. There’s a family-owned diner that sounds like a local hangout, from what I can gather on the Net. I doubt our guy was all that social, but
chances are in three years he was in there at least a few times. And with a cute kid in tow, he’d likely be noticed. There’s also a small neighborhood grocery store. I’m going to see if anyone remembers them, and dig for information on where he lived. If I can nail that, I’ll talk to his landlord too. This one could also require a trip if the phone ploys tank.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Dev connected the two offset boxes he’d doodled, creating a 3-D image.

“Why don’t we regroup around four with status reports?”

“Works for me.” Nikki rose, notepad in hand, and his two partners stood as well.

“With all of us on this, we should be a lot closer to having some answers by the end of the day.” Cal studied the documents in his hand as he walked toward the hall.

“I hope so.” Connor followed them out, flipping off the light in the conference room as he exited.

And hoping a light would flip
on
during the next few hours that would throw some illumination on a case that was growing darker and more sinister with each day that passed.

As Kate added a packet of sugar to her coffee in the New Start break room, Nancy poked her head in the door.

“Your ten o’clock is here.” She homed in on Kate’s mug. “What’s with the sugar?”

“I need an energy boost.”

“Busy weekend?”

“Too busy. And not enough sleep.” The latter thanks to a certain PI who’d invaded her thoughts—and to concerns about a little blond boy who, if he turned out to be Kevin, was in for another major trauma. Both had kept her tossing.

“I hear you. The boys both had softball games. Trust me, watching Little League is not a recommended activity for an
August afternoon in St. Louis. I was afraid I was going to melt like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.”

Kate offered a sympathetic chuckle. “At least I stayed cool most of the time.”

“Well, I hate to tell you, but this day is heating up. I just had a call from Diane Koenig, that new client you saw last week. The one who wore the great Saks-Fifth-Avenue type outfit?”

Also the one who’d clammed up at the end of their session, then left in a hurry—without making an appointment.

“What did she want?”

“An appointment—today, if possible. I told her you were booked solid, but she insisted I ask if you could fit her in. You want me to slot her for tomorrow or Wednesday instead?”

Kate hesitated. She didn’t have a spare minute today—but Diane had seemed so distressed when she’d left last week. Despite her designer clothes, she’d looked like a woman who needed a friend. A woman who was still fragile as she tried to carve out a new life and reclaim the confidence her abusive husband had destroyed. A woman who was now asking for help.

“See if five-thirty works for her.”

Folding her arms, Nancy sent her a stern look. “You need to look after yourself too, you know. You’re still going to take your four-day weekend, aren’t you?”

Kate wrinkled her brow. “Is that this week?”

“Yes. You scheduled it in January. Don’t tell me you’re going to cancel this one like you cancelled the last two.”

She lifted one shoulder and sipped her coffee. “Maybe. I don’t have anything planned.”

“Then plan something. Go to a movie. Read a romance novel. Eat out. Or just sleep in. But take the time. You’re way overdue for some vacation.”

Considering she hadn’t taken off more than a handful of days in the past two years, the receptionist had a point.