by Jenna Black
I had no luck at the first two bars I tried. No one at either place even recognized Heather, much less Doug. A bartender and a waitress at the third place recognized Heather, and the waitress thought she might have seen Doug around, but she couldn’t be sure, and she didn’t know his name.
I hit pay dirt at bar number four, a tiny little place called Farraday’s. It was upscale, as were all of Heather’s hunting grounds, but it didn’t have the pretentious decor and stuffy atmosphere of Top of the Hill. The bartender recognized Heather and knew her by name, and though he didn’t recognize Doug, he directed me to the bar’s owner, who was apparently the kind of hands-on type who spent more time at her establishment than any two of her employees combined.
Linda Farraday was a friendly-looking forty-something whose body language screamed confidence and competence. There was a sharp intelligence in her eyes that made me swallow the pretext I’d made up about why I was hunting for Doug. So far, I’d made up a different story at each bar, tailoring the story to my audience, but my instincts suggested that Linda might know bullshit when she heard it.
Of course, I couldn’t tell her the truth about why I was looking for Doug, either, so after our initial greeting and handshake, I got right to the point.
“I’m a private investigator,” I told her, drawing the now much-handled photo print of Doug and Heather from my pocketbook, “and I’m looking for this man. I have reason to believe he’s spent some time at this bar.”
Linda took the photo from my hand and put on a pair of reading glasses to examine it. I saw immediate recognition in her eyes, though I was pretty sure she was trying to remain impassive and not give anything away.
“Why are you looking for him?” she asked. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”
I quelled my natural desire to manufacture an explanation. “It’s a private matter,” I told her instead. “I can’t violate my client’s confidentiality. I hope you understand.”
She gave me a shrewd look over the top of her reading glasses, and though I wasn’t sure she’d be willing to talk to me without any explanation, I knew I’d made the right decision in not lying.
Linda stared at me another long moment; then she shrugged. “I can’t tell you a whole lot. He’s only been in here once that I know of, and if he hadn’t been such an asshole, I probably wouldn’t remember him at all.” She peered at the picture again. “He looked a lot scruffier when he was here, and he wore glasses. I thought he looked like a guy I went to school with, so I tried to talk to him.” She made a face. “He acted like I was trying to pick him up instead of reconnect with an old classmate. Like I said, an asshole.”
“So, was he your old classmate?” Something within me resonated, told me I was on the right track. I tried not to look too eager.
She shrugged again. “He said no. Said he never went to Georgetown.” She handed the picture back to me. “Maybe I’m just imagining the resemblance. People change a lot in twenty years, and I never really knew the guy. Just had a class with him.”
My enthusiasm dimmed, but that was just logic talking, throwing doubts on my gut reaction. “What was his name?” I asked. “This classmate of yours?”
Linda scrunched up her face in thought, but eventually she gave up with a regretful sigh. “I don’t remember. I’m not sure I ever knew. He and I didn’t exactly run in the same crowd, and he probably skipped more classes than he went to.” Her lips curled in a small smile. “But he was a treat to the eyes, and I was a teenager. I noticed the hell out of him. Sorry I can’t be more help.”
But my gut was telling me she’d helped far more than she knew.
SIX
I was both mentally and physically exhausted when I got back to the mansion. I don’t know how many total miles I ended up driving that day, except that it was a hell of a lot. And although I now had a good, solid lead, my next step in finding the mysterious Doug required a visit to the Georgetown library, which would have to wait until morning.
The fact that Anderson had taped a note to my door telling me we needed to talk didn’t exactly soothe me into sleep. It was somehow more personal—and more invasive—than the voice mails he’d left me, which I’d ignored. Of course, he could just let himself into my room and wait for me there if he was really determined to corner me. The notes and messages told me he was trying to give me at least a little bit of space, but I knew it wouldn’t last. Eventually, we would have to talk about his mission to get revenge on Konstantin, and I was going to have to find the courage to refuse. I wanted to think he would take my refusal with grace and acceptance, but unlike the rest of us in this house, Anderson wasn’t a Liberi. He was an actual god, although I was the only one who knew it. Read a few mythology texts, and see how accepting the gods tend to be when a mere mortal says no to them.
As a general rule, I’m not too much of a procrastinator, but the longer I could put off the confrontation with Anderson, the happier—and safer—I would be. As long as he was willing to let me dodge him, I was going to take advantage of the opportunity.
I woke up at five on Friday morning, my body stubbornly programmed to get me up by dawn no matter how late I went to bed. I was still bleary-eyed and sleepy after showering and dressing, and it was way too early to head out to the library, so I hunkered down on my sofa with my laptop and my coffee to do a little research on Wayne Fowler. Maybe Fowler wasn’t as bad as Heather thought. Maybe he was really an upstanding guy who just happened to be good at putting the fear of God into people who tried to blackmail him.
At first glance, he seemed respectable enough. A wealthy attorney with a posh Chevy Chase address, an old-money wife, and a pair of children. Photos showed a middle-aged man who was fighting off baldness and had expensive taste in clothes. The thinning hair and the slight paunch the clothes couldn’t hide gave him a look of jovial harmlessness, but it didn’t take long to see that something not so harmless lurked beneath his facade.
Fowler was best known for working high-profile criminal cases, defending drug lords, murderers, and even professional hit men. He had a frighteningly good track record, so much so that there were rumors of jury tampering, witness intimidation, and bribery. Of course, rumors aren’t reality, but there were also two cases he’d tried in which key witnesses turned up dead before they had a chance to testify. As if that weren’t bad enough, his first wife, with whom he’d had a rocky relationship at best, had been raped and murdered during a home invasion when he was away on business. He had an airtight alibi, but the wife’s family insisted he had hired someone to kill her. The police had never been able to find enough evidence to arrest him, but it wasn’t because they didn’t believe the family. I could totally see why Heather was so scared.
The law had to presume Fowler was innocent until proven otherwise, but that didn’t mean I had to. There might not be enough evidence to arrest him for any of the crimes he was suspected of committing, but a man doesn’t arouse that level of suspicion without there being at least some kernel of truth. Heather was in danger, and I was the only person who had a legitimate chance of helping her.
I headed out of the house not long after sunrise, slipping away before anyone else was up. It was still too early to hit the library, so I took my laptop to a nearby Starbucks and killed time there, drinking more coffee than was strictly good for me.
I was the first visitor in the library that morning, standing at the ready when the doors opened. Reading about Fowler and his history had ramped up my sense of urgency, and I was eager to get to work.
The librarian directed me to the fifth-floor archives, where there was a complete collection of Georgetown yearbooks. I grabbed the books from what I figured were the most likely years that Doug had graduated—assuming Linda had been right when she thought she recognized him. And assuming he had graduated. Then I sat cross-legged in the aisle and started flipping through the photos of the graduating classes, my photo of Doug on the floor i
n front of me for easy reference.
The job was tedious as all hell, and I grumbled under my breath in annoyance that the yearbooks hadn’t been digitized and made searchable. I examined photo after photo, trying to find a younger version of Doug’s face among all those smiling twenty-somethings. A couple of times, I caught sight of faces that might have been familiar, but when I looked at them more closely, I felt certain they weren’t Doug. I’d started out with a stack of three yearbooks, and when none of them yielded results, I pulled down four more. I was getting stiff from sitting on the floor but preferred that to having to tromp back and forth from a more comfortable seat.
After four hours of searching photos with meticulous care, I’d still found no sign of Doug, and it was looking like either Linda had been mistaken, or Doug had never graduated. My morning coffee had worn off, my eyes were dry and burning, and my butt was numb because I was still sitting on the floor. I stretched and groaned as I stood to put the latest set of yearbooks back on the shelf. It seemed like a dead end, and yet my instincts had led me here for a reason.
Gritting my teeth, I reached for the first yearbook I’d looked at, planning to go through them all again, but as I was flipping through the book to get to the first page of pictures, something else caught my eye: a list of graduates who had declined to send in pictures for the yearbook. I considered smacking myself in the head for not having thought to check those lists sooner. Douglas isn’t the most common name in the world, so if I could compile a list of all the Douglases who hadn’t been pictured in the yearbooks, I would probably have a manageable number of names to research.
There were no unpictured graduates with the first name Doug or Douglas in the book I was holding. However, there were two people with the surname Douglas, one Lucy and one Elliott. Obviously, Lucy wasn’t a candidate, but I figured I might as well take a chance and look for Elliott.
I hadn’t thought to bring my laptop into the library with me, but I did have my phone. I looked up Elliott Douglas from Georgetown on Facebook and was quickly rewarded with some hits, the first of which showed a lovely thumbnail photo of a man who was unquestionably Heather’s Doug.
“Gotcha!” I said under my breath, thinking to myself that con men probably shouldn’t put up public Facebook profiles but feeling glad that this one had.
I had found Doug—or at least, I now knew his real name. The question still remained: what was I going to do about it?
Elliott Douglas turned out to have a very . . . colorful history. As far as I could tell, he lived a fairly ordinary middle-class life as a kid, and he’d graduated from Georgetown with the always-useful degree in English. It was after college that his life seemed to have taken a turn. I don’t know if he’d gone to college planning to live a respectable life forever after, but that’s certainly not the plan he came out with.
He started collecting arrests at the tender age of twenty-one, and he seemed to have made a steady career of it. It was always small stuff—shoplifting, passing bad checks, engaging in various commercial endeavors without a license. No history of violence, and his only convictions were for misdemeanors, for which he’d spent a grand total of one week in prison. The arrests had tapered off over time, and it had now been almost ten years since his last one. I doubted it was because he’d turned over a new leaf—he’d just become a better crook, as demonstrated by his slick operation against Heather.
I tracked down his address with no problem, and I decided that I couldn’t make an informed decision about how to proceed until I knew whether Douglas had already contacted Fowler. If he hadn’t, all I had to do was get the video back before Fowler ever found out Heather was vulnerable. But when is anything ever that easy?
I wasn’t sure what Douglas claimed as his profession on his income taxes—I don’t think “full-time con man” is an option—but whatever it was, it apparently paid a lot. Either that, or the FBI was right behind me, trying to figure out how he could afford to live in a pricey Georgetown town house. If you’d told me the CEO of some Fortune 500 company lived there, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It seemed our pal Doug wasn’t as concerned about keeping a low profile as Heather was.
If Douglas had held a respectable job, my odds of catching him at home on an early Friday afternoon might have been slim. However, I seriously doubted he actually worked for a living. I climbed his front steps, rang the bell, and crossed my fingers.
Moments later, I heard footsteps approaching, so I put on my best harmless smile. The peephole darkened, and I added a little more wattage to my smile. With his history, I suspected Douglas was leery of strangers on his doorstep, but sometimes being petite can be an advantage. I certainly didn’t look like most people’s image of a cop.
The door opened, and Elliott Douglas stuck his head in the crack, looking me up and down with naked suspicion in his eyes. He was dressed casually, in expensive jeans and a Polo shirt, but there was no doubt that he was Heather’s “Doug.”
“Can I help you?” he asked, sounding anything but helpful.
“Maybe,” I answered him in a chipper tone that did nothing to disarm him. “But it’s more likely I’m going to end up helping you.” I casually wedged my foot in the door as I pulled the battered photo print out of my purse and held it up for him to see. “We need to talk, and it’s probably best to do it inside.”
His face lost a little color when he saw the photo. I could almost see him weighing his various options, one of which was no doubt to slam the door in my face, regardless of the minor obstacle of my foot.
“If I were going to call the cops on you,” I said, “I’d have done it already.”
“It’s not the cops I’m worried about,” he mumbled. “Open your purse. Let me see.”
My hopes that he hadn’t yet contacted Wayne Fowler lowered a notch. He looked seriously spooked, and I doubted he made a habit of asking visitors on his doorstep to let him inspect their purses.
I hadn’t brought my gun with me, not feeling like I was in any particular danger. I opened my purse as Douglas asked, showing him each compartment. Of course, my purse was full of enough crap that I probably could have had a gun under there somewhere, and I certainly could have had one concealed on my person. I wasn’t eager to have some guy frisk me, so I tried to stave off the request before he made it.
“I’m gathering you’ve had a chat with one of Heather’s gentleman callers recently,” I said. “And it looks like he had about the same effect on you as he did on Heather.”
“Who are you?”
I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’m Nikki Glass,” I said, holding out my hand for him to shake. He still hadn’t invited me inside, but he did shake my hand. “Heather hired me to find you. She was hoping I would before you made an unfortunate phone call, but I guess I’m too late.”
Once again, I could see Douglas considering his options. As a con man, his natural inclination would be to deny all wrongdoing and try to charm himself out of trouble. But the pallor of his skin and the frightened look in his eyes told me he knew he was in over his head.
“Let me in,” I urged him. “Tell me the whole story, and I’ll do what I can to keep both you and Heather safe.” Not that I was exactly brimming with plans, mind you, but I was hoping something would come to mind.
Douglas let out a deep breath and opened the door wider. “That might be a neat trick, if you can pull it off,” he said under his breath.
The first thing I noticed when I set foot inside Douglas’s town house was the large suitcase sitting in the foyer.
“Going somewhere?” I asked him with an arch of my eyebrow as he closed the door behind us.
Douglas rubbed his hands together nervously. “I thought getting out of town for a little while might be a good idea.”
I couldn’t blame him. However, the things I’d learned about Wayne Fowler made me think running away wasn’t going to do a hell o
f a lot of good. He was not the kind of man to forgive and forget a blackmail attempt, and he had the money, power, and connections to pursue his quarry as long and as far as necessary.
“You tried to blackmail someone who’s had witnesses under federal protection murdered,” I reminded him. “Getting out of town might delay things, but you’ll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life.”
He swallowed hard. “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”
“I’m still working on it,” I told him, though an inkling of a germ of an idea was beginning to take root. “If you tell me everything you know, and I pair that with everything I know from Heather, and everything I learned on my own, I might be able to work something out.”
Douglas was unnerved enough that my lukewarm assurances were enough to get him talking.
SEVEN
I spent a good two and a half to three hours interviewing Douglas, though to tell you the truth, nothing I learned from him was terribly useful as anything other than background information. Turned out he had glommed onto Heather when she started blackmailing a guy Douglas was already working some convoluted scam on. Douglas quickly saw a chance to make a big score without having to do a whole lot of work, since Heather had already done the hard part for him. Not only was he a blackmailer, but he was a lazy blackmailer.
If Douglas hadn’t been so lazy, if he’d done more than the most cursory research into Heather’s victims, he’d have avoided Wayne Fowler like the plague. I suppose the same could be said of Heather, although at least she’d met him personally. Some of the baddest bad guys out there have the most charming personalities—the better to lull their victims into a false sense of security.