Of course, if the guy had used a bunch of different florists, it would take me a lot more time. I might be able to cut that time down if I contacted the florists by phone first instead of paying each of them a visit.
Speaking of phone calls, Ryan had told me that after the roses stopped, the stalker had moved up to harassing calls to the house and no doubt to Melody’s cell as well. Ryan had told me the caller ID on those calls had been blocked.
The cops might be able to trace those calls. I couldn’t. I’m not a computer hacker and I don’t have any contacts who could get me information like that.
Even if I knew what phone company to check. I had no clue who Ryan’s telephone service provider was, and Melody’s cell probably burned up along with her car. Besides, if the stalker was smart, he would have used a prepaid phone and then dumped it. From my perspective, trying to track the phone calls was a dead end.
So were the photographs. Ryan had told me that Melody destroyed them. Nothing for me to track there.
Or was there? Justin Sewell had clearly been taking pictures of Melody with his cell phone. What if Sewell had taken the pictures Ryan saw? If he had, he could have been the guy on the phone as well, the one who’d hung up whenever Ryan answered. Was that why Melody told Ryan she was used to dealing with unwanted attention from men, because she knew Sewell was the guy making the phone calls and she’d just assumed he’d taken the pictures, too?
But then what about the roses? Had she assumed they’d come from Sewell as well?
Come to think of it, how had Ryan even found out about the roses if they’d been delivered to Melody at work?
I should have asked him back when we first discussed the whole thing, but I’d been too surprised by his request to really think through everything I might need to know. I couldn’t ask him now since I wasn’t supposed to be talking to him, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make Samantha be the go-between on something like that.
It seemed from the photo I’d taken that the attention Sewell had been showering on Melody wasn’t exactly something she hated. From Ryan’s perspective, she’d attracted a stalker. Maybe what she’d really attracted was a new boyfriend, and she didn’t care if one of Ryan’s friends found out.
I needed more information on Sewell, so I did a quick background check.
Born in Boca Raton, Florida, Justin Sewell was thirty-eight years old. He’d worked for his current bank for the last four and a half years, which was how long he’d lived in Reno. Before that, he’d been employed by a series of mortgage brokerages in Southern California.
The addresses where he’d lived since he’d come to Reno were all apartment buildings or condos, and it seemed like he bounced from place to place every six months. He had a modest bank account, an unremarkable credit history, no bankruptcies, he owned no property, and he had one car registered to his name, a three year old Prius. He’d never been married, and he had no litigation history in the court records I could access online. His parents were both deceased, and I could find no record of any siblings.
I was much more social media savvy now than I’d been last year when Samantha had introduced me to the world of blogging. These days I included searches of all major social media sites whenever I did a background check.
Justin Sewell had a LinkedIn profile, which was nothing more than typical banking promotional material. If he had a Facebook account, it wasn’t under his own name. Ditto for Twitter and Pinterest.
Sewell was a big fat nothing online. If he was a player, he didn’t talk about it and no one else talked about him. Even a Google Images search on the name resulted in nothing except a picture of a smiling farmer in his eighties who’d grown a record-setting pumpkin a few years back.
The only thing out of the ordinary about Sewell was that he changed addresses frequently. Then again, he’d seemed to be new at that particular branch of his bank, so maybe he hopped from branch to branch every six months or so and just moved to be closer to his work. The address for his current apartment was near Reno High, only a couple of miles away from the branch where he worked.
The other way to get a handle on whether Melody knew Sewell as more than just a casual lunch date was to see what I could find online about her. I’d never bothered to look her up before, not even when Ryan and I had first split up. Back then my ego couldn’t have handled it. Now I didn’t have a choice.
Unlike Justin, Melody was all over the social media sites. She had a LinkedIn profile as a personal trainer, complete with a photo of her in skin-tight lavender leotards. She had a Twitter feed, although she didn’t seem to post there often, unlike Facebook where I found multiple posts per day and more photographs than I had on my thumb drive.
The majority of the photographs were selfies. I felt ghoulish as I scrolled through picture after picture taken by a smiling, happy woman who’d pointed her cell phone camera at her own face, recording each happy day, blissfully unaware that her life was almost over. She’d taken some of the pictures in the foyer at the gym. I recognized the rock wall behind her. She’d snapped others at different night clubs or restaurants around town, only some of which looked familiar.
Then there were the pictures she’d taken of herself with her friends. Stacy from the gym was in a few of the pictures with Melody. One picture showed Melody with a group of women, all wearing paper party hats and blowing noisemakers. The date the picture had been posted was last New Year’s Eve. The caption below the picture identified the women by name: Melody, Stacy, Meghan, Gloria, and big sis Naomi.
I’d never known Melody had a sister. The resemblance was obvious, although Naomi’s hair was a shade darker blonde and she had maybe ten pounds or so on Melody, a difference that was only noticeable because her cheekbones weren’t quite as defined as her sister’s. The picture had been taken at a private party—I could see a living room couch and a flat screen television in the background with the Times Square ball slowly descending toward the new year—but the one thing I didn’t see in the picture was Ryan.
In fact, Ryan wasn’t in any of the pictures on Melody’s Facebook. Most of the pictures were of Melody alone or Melody with her girlfriends. No LOL cats or cute dogs, funny cartoons or memes, another term I’d learned from Samantha.
I scanned Melody’s Facebook wall as far back as the program would let me. Whenever she made an actual post that wasn’t a picture, it was about the fun she’d had the night before or a great new clothes shop she’d discovered or the smoothie she couldn’t believe was low calorie because it just tasted so good.
Not one mention of Ryan anywhere, which made me wonder if that was Melody’s decision, or his.
Ryan had worked hard to build a reputation as a quality attorney. The website for his law firm oozed solid professionalism from every pixel. None of the partners in the firm were over fifty, but the website was so old school that I always expected to see a picture of John Houseman on the home page.
The firm had hired a media consultant to spruce up their internet presence back when we’d still been married. I used to tease Ryan about the difference between his real personality—former college jock who still played every sport like he was going for the gold—and the calm, competent, professional persona he was trying to convey. He’d told me that flamboyant personalities went hand in hand with criminal law, but in order to attract business clients, the ones with deep pockets who could afford to pay their legal fees, he had to appear more serious than he really was.
Image gets them in the door, he’d said. From there, it was up to him to keep them from walking back out again. If all of that meant he had to act more dignified than he really was, so be it.
If Melody was really the party girl her online persona portrayed, that wouldn’t have fit with the brand Ryan had worked so hard to create for himself. I could just imagine the discussions he’d had with her about what he did and did not want her posting as far as he was concerned.
But did that explain why Melody hadn’t included a relationship status on her Facebook page?
Ryan had his own Facebook account. Just like the firm’s website, Ryan’s Facebook was subdued to the point of being downright staid. Melody could have mentioned that she was engaged to Ryan Maxon and left it at that. She hadn’t.
Then again, when I clicked over the Ryan’s Facebook page for a quick look, I noticed that he hadn’t indicated a relationship status either.
Maybe teenagers were the only ones who did that.
But were teenagers the only ones who looked at Facebook to determine if someone was single? If Justin Sewell had looked up Melody on Facebook, he might have assumed she was available. And if she accepted the roses he sent, talked to him on the phone, and agreed to meet him for lunch and flirted with him after she left, didn’t that point to an affair in the making rather than a stalker?
I clicked back to the picture of Melody and the other women taken on New Year’s Eve.
Ryan had told me they were going to a party at a colleague’s house. At the time I’d been nursing a separated shoulder and living with Samantha in a rented condo while Norton Greenburger was having the crime scene my house had become cleaned so that Samantha and I could move back home. Ryan had been more attentive to me during that whole time than he’d been since we’d been divorced, and because of that, he’d been sure that I knew what his plans were for New Year’s Eve.
Ryan should have been in that picture with Melody.
I knew what he was like. He just didn’t decide a day or two before Valentine’s Day to pop the question. He would have known, even back then, that he loved this woman enough to marry her. Hell, he’d loved her enough to break his daughter’s heart when he’d left us for her.
Of all of the pictures on Melody’s Facebook, he should have been in this damn picture. So why wasn’t he?
Something was stabbing me in the hand. I looked down and realized that I’d clenched my fingers into such a tight fist my nails were digging into my palm.
I was furious, and worse than that, I was furious with a dead woman. She’d hurt the man some part of me would always love. She’d died and left him alone and broken, and I couldn’t fix it.
It wasn’t logical to be angry at her because she was dead, so I’d shifted the focus of my fury to some imagined slight because he’d been left out of this picture. But why did I assume he’d been left out on purpose? For all I knew, he’d been watching a football game with the guys in another room or taking a bathroom break or been doing any one of a million other things. He could have been the one taking the picture, for god’s sake, since this one wasn’t a selfie.
I slammed the laptop closed more forcefully than the poor machine deserved.
I had to get a grip. Norton and Kyle were right. I had no business working this case, not if I couldn’t keep a lid on my emotions.
I’d only stepped away from a case once in my life, and it had been because my emotions wouldn’t let me see straight. I still had a file in my desk drawer at the office where I’d stuffed all the work I’d done trying to find the hit and run driver who’d nearly killed my daughter. Norton would have called that file my albatross. I thought of it as my white whale.
I didn’t need a second white whale in my life. Especially not one of my own making.
I took a deep breath and opened the laptop, and went back to work.
CHAPTER 18
I GOT THE FIRST GLIMMER that I might be suited to life as a private detective when I was college. I’d uncovered the identity of the thief who stole my wallet through a bit of deductive reasoning, some legwork, and a bit of luck, with an assist from Ryan and his friend, Jimmy Fisher.
That had brought me to the attention of Ed Hastings, then a detective with the Reno Police Department. Ed told me I had a talent for detective work and if I ever thought I might like to pursue a career in law enforcement, to give him a call.
Ryan and I got married in a church in downtown Reno during our senior year at the University of Nevada-Reno. After we graduated, Ryan enrolled in McGeorge School of Law, and we both moved to Sacramento. I lost track of Ed, although I never threw out his business card.
The three years Ryan and I lived in Sacramento while he attended law school and I waited tables at a restaurant near the campus convinced us both that we had no desire to make California our home. We returned to Reno where Ryan went to work as a very junior associate at an insurance defense firm and I found myself in need of a real job to augment Ryan’s very junior salary.
I remembered Ed, but when I called the number on his card, I discovered that he’d retired from the force soon after we met and started his own agency. Just as well. I’ve never been a fan of guns. Although Ed had mentioned that detectives handled white collar investigations, I knew I’d still have to become a cop, complete with gun, before I could work my way up to a detective’s shield.
Ed’s experience as a cop enabled him to get a private investigator’s license, and he was also licensed to serve process for the courts and private attorneys. The only work experience I had was refilling customers’ drinks and making sure I didn’t trip with their food before I had a chance to serve it.
To get my own investigator’s license, I needed to apprentice with a licensed private investigator. Ed agreed to take me on at a salary that made Ryan’s look majestic by comparison.
What I didn’t earn in wages I more than made up for in experience.
Ed turned out to be the best mentor I could have asked for. I learned more about the world from him than I did from all the classes I’d taken in college, but he was more than just a teacher.
Ed pulled waiting room duty at the hospital when I gave birth to Samantha, and he nearly killed Ryan when he shoved a lit cigar in my then-husband’s unsuspecting mouth to celebrate our new arrival. He taught me the value of play-acting when trying to serve a witness who didn’t want to be found. He even knew when it was time to kick me out of the nest so I could start my own business.