by Diane Capri
“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m a family man now. I have to be more careful.” Skip shook his head and frowned. His words were serious, but he joked, “Honestly, I don’t know what Debbie would do without me. How would she survive?”
“She’d find a decent guy like Josh here to take care of her,” Dan replied, in the way of men whose insults were accepted as affection. “Stop fooling around with a screwup like you.”
Skip laughed. “Yeah, like that would ever happen.”
“What?” Josh said, his arms full of gear. “Debbie loves me better than you, anyway.”
They had collected all the gear now and were headed toward the plane, docked on the other side of the grass landing strip. Josh had already checked everything out and prepared for takeoff. They wouldn’t need to stop to refuel. They should reach Red Maple Lake well before nightfall, with enough fuel for the return trip.
The three friends continued to joke and tease each other while they loaded the Cessna and strapped themselves in, but Josh took his flying responsibilities seriously and they knew it. As he worked his way through his preflight checklist, they quieted down.
Before starting the engine, he buckled up. The harness didn’t cinch all the way tight. The webbing slid off his shoulder. He shoved it back into place. He wasn’t going to cancel the trip because the belt wouldn’t tighten.
“Ready?” he said. He didn’t wait for a reply before pushing the throttle forward. The roar swamped all other noise. The yoke shook in his hands. The big propeller fought the air. It was a battle the propeller was winning. A thousand feet later, he pulled back on the yoke and they were airborne.
CHAPTER SIX
Houston, Texas
Sunday
After he dropped Maddy off, Flint was too restless to sleep, even though recuperation time was exactly what his sore muscles needed after The Sea King case. Underwater work was always tough, even when he was in great shape. He should do it more often.
His stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten anything for way too long. His body was still burning calories like a campfire gobbling dry kindling, but his refrigerator was as empty as his belly. A quick trip to the drive-through diner solved his problem.
He carried his food and a liter bottle of water through to his desk and fired up his laptop. He started with basic online information searches about Veronica Beaumont. Google returned twenty-six million results in less than half a second. Impressive.
He inhaled the first hamburger as he perused the list of articles.
Beaumont had been named to several lists of wealthy CEOs since her first appearance five years ago, when her tech company went public and she became an instant millionaire. Before that, she had been named to Houston’s Top 40 Under 40. A quick review of her list-mates revealed the usual suspects. Many of them were brats with rich daddies he knew personally.
Beaumont’s tech success story was familiar by now to people who followed the industry. She was still in college in Chicago when she came up with her LookBook idea for a software program that focused on people in the fashion business. She developed the software program to connect her and her friends to the fashion icons she adored at the time. Expansion had been exponential and fueled her growth.
Flint shook his head. She was a savvy businesswoman, but everything about her online persona proved she’d been shallow all her life.
Still, Beaumont was in the right place at the right time and her software took the fashion and social networking worlds by storm. These days, she was a powerhouse multimillionaire on her way to becoming a billionaire. The more he read about her, the more convinced he became that she was everything he hated in a client.
Sure, she was rich. That didn’t bother him. In fact, extreme wealth was a plus because he liked to get paid. He’d grown up in poverty and he’d escaped. He didn’t intend to go back. The problem with Beaumont was that she was a demanding, cold female used to getting her own way and having everyone around her kowtow to her every wish.
None of that was going to work with him. Not even close.
He moved on to information about her private life as he gobbled the second hamburger.
Before relocating to Houston, where her son was born almost eight years ago, Beaumont had lived in Chicago. Flint found the official birth certificate for Jamison Beaumont. The boy’s father was not listed on the birth certificate or anywhere else.
School records were sealed, which slowed his search. He’d finished his second burger, most of a large pack of fries, and the water before he found what little information existed in the school files.
At that point, Flint stopped prying. He didn’t need to search for more data about Veronica and her son until after he talked to her, and maybe not even then. He saved his research and polished off the fries before he moved on to the work he had been planning to begin tomorrow. Work he had been avoiding for far too long.
A year ago, he had met a man who had claimed to know his mother. Within minutes of taunting him with that information, the man died.
Flint had ignored the claim, but it continued to nag him. The question popped into his dreams sometimes. When he was tired. Or idle for too long between jobs. He wasn’t interested in a new romance to fill his thoughts, so he handled the problem by taking on more work. Most days, he simply shook the unwelcome intrusions from his head.
He had lived thirty-three years without knowing his parents. His mother had abandoned him when he was an infant. For more than three decades, he’d had no desire to find her or to know who she was. That system had served him well enough. There were plenty of advantages to not being bogged down by family. Why mess with success?
He’d always believed he could find his parents, if he’d wanted to. But he’d never felt the urge.
He was an heir hunter. The best in the business. He knew that people gave up their children for good reasons, and he respected that choice. As for his own situation, he was happy enough. He wanted for nothing. If his parents had chosen to abandon him, he was better off without them.
He nodded, pushed away from the desk, and carried the trash from his meal into the kitchen where he stuffed it into the compactor. Nobody nagged him to eat off plates or do the dishes. Being alone had its advantages, particularly for a man in his line of work. He was beholden to no one. And he liked it that way.
Felix Crane had changed all that when he’d taunted Flint on a cold and snowy mountaintop. Crane had tried to hire Flint, but he’d refused the case. Crane didn’t take it well. “I knew your mother,” Crane had said. He was the first, last, and only person who had ever made such a claim in Flint’s entire life. As soon as he heard the words, he’d known he wouldn’t be able to ignore them forever.
At the time, Flint had other things to worry about. He and Crane had faced off, weapons aimed. Big money was at stake and Crane would have said anything to win. So Flint shrugged off the taunt. That was then.
The claim had bugged him more than he let on. Now, a year later, Crane’s words rested in the back of his subconscious and refused to be forgotten.
I knew your mother. What did Crane mean by that? Were they lovers? Something else?
The obvious thing would be to follow up. Obvious, but not possible since Crane was dead. Flint was a man of many talents, but conversing with people beyond the grave was not a skill set he had managed to perfect. Unfortunately.
He found a crystal glass and poured a healthy four-finger portion of single-malt Scotch. He added a couple of large ice cubes and returned to his desk.
He tapped his right knuckle against his teeth and looked at the laptop screen. A man like Crane was easy to investigate. He had been in the public eye far too many times. Billionaires often were. Privacy was not possible and usually not even remotely desired.
Crane had fathered four children, according to Flint’s quick research, three daughters and one son, all older than Flint. The daughters lived in Europe somewhere. Not completely untouchable, but not as easy to confront without a lot of travel hassl
e.
Flint wasn’t especially interested in globetrotting to track down whatever connection Crane might have had with his mother, even assuming Crane’s daughters would know. Which was a long shot, at best.
There was an easier option. The son. Jasper Melvin Crane.
What a hideous moniker for a kid, although it probably suited the adult fairly well. Flint cocked his head and flipped through the images on the screen. Jasper’s mother must have had some strong genes, because Jasper was a good-looking guy. If you liked the lean and smarmy type. Plenty of women did.
As he continued flipping through the images on the screen, he saw many such women on Jasper’s arm at one event or another. He was taller than his father and, odds were, he was less controlling. Maybe that elevated him to chick-magnet status. But probably it was the oil and gas business gushing money.
When a boy grew up in his father’s long shadow, two outcomes were common. The boy could become aggressively violent or passively aggressive. Either would get him noticed by his dad, which was the only thing most boys wanted. Approval was good, but attention was better.
Jasper looked like the kind of man who’d mastered the passive-aggressive style long before his dad relayed the business baton to junior.
Flint curled his lip and held the Scotch awhile on his tongue. He liked a man to behave like one. Stand up for himself. Take his licks for it if he lost the fight, but fight like a man in the first place. Jasper didn’t look like the fighting kind.
Flint shook his head. Hard to believe this was Felix Crane’s kid. But he had seen the birth certificate. This effeminate dandy was the guy. No doubt about that.
Jasper was now the head of Crane’s oil empire. He’d inherited everything when his father died. He was already living in the mansion and working for the company before he inherited it. But now he had what had eluded him all the years his father was alive. Control.
According to the financial news reports, Jasper wasn’t doing such a great job. But the kid had only been in charge for a year. He still had plenty of time to turn into as lethal a snake as his father had proved to be.
Question was, did Jasper know anything about his old man that Flint couldn’t discover through other means? Meaning, would talking to Jasper make Flint’s search for his mother easier and faster, or precisely the opposite?
A quick phone call to the man could elicit the information Flint wanted, if Jasper was inclined to share. But in Flint’s experience, that kind of call never worked. He’d need to see Jasper in person and encourage him to tell what he knew. Which had a slim chance of success. Or he could find the information another way.
So, alternatives first. Leaving Jasper for later, if necessary. He might be able to avoid the man entirely. Hope lightened his mood.
Flint eventually found the background data he was looking for on the old man.
Felix Crane had been born in Mount Warren, Texas, an oil boomtown back in the day. He’d grown up there in the rough-and-tumble way of such places. He’d cut his teeth on the oil business, living with his parents until he left for college. When he graduated, he returned to Mount Warren to work in his father’s oil company for several years afterward. He started his family there and took over the family business when his father died. Just like Jasper.
Flint leaned back in his chair and sipped the Scotch. Given the time frame, if Crane did know Flint’s mother, he could have known her in Mount Warren. Or at least it was a reasonable place to start looking.
Flint had been to Mount Warren once. Booms and busts in the oil business had come and gone since Crane’s time. Now, it was a small, depressed town deep in West Texas. Thirty-four years ago, when Flint was conceived, the town’s permanent population had waned from the oil boom days. Small city, small population, not many women of childbearing age. If Flint’s mother had known Felix Crane in Mount Warren, finding her would be fairly easy.
Which presented an entirely new set of issues.
Flint stood and paced the room. Briefly, he considered his uncharacteristic indecision. His instincts were solid. He’d relied on them to keep him alive for a very long time. He thought of himself as a point-shoot-aim kind of guy. His experience and training had provided him with everything he needed to solve the relatively minor puzzle of his mother’s identity. Hell, he could have done that years ago.
The problem was that he didn’t know whether he wanted to solve it. Everything kept coming back to that point.
He shook his head and drained the last of the Scotch from the glass. As a kid, maybe he’d wondered about his parents. Maybe he’d wanted to find them. Maybe he’d harbored normal childhood fantasies about being reunited with his mother and father.
And maybe not. If he’d had those desires and fantasies, he had no memory of them.
Not that he had amnesia or anything. He’d just never thought about it. Not even once. His earliest memories were of living with his foster mother, Bette Maxwell, at the Lazy M Ranch and Boarding School. It was the only home he’d ever known.
Like most kids, he remembered very little of anything before the age of four or so. But as far as Flint was concerned, his life began when he was eight. That was the year he met Katie Scarlett. She had arrived at the Lazy M when she was ten. She was already a holy terror, just like Flint. They became inseparable almost immediately. That’s when his world began to take shape. Everything before that was muddy and irrelevant.
Flint and Scarlett had been glued to the TV set, watching old Westerns every night, during that first year. He grinned just thinking about those old shows.
He held out his left hand and looked at the scar on his palm where Scarlett had sliced it with one of Bette’s sharp kitchen knives she’d stolen that morning. He remembered how serious her face looked. Scarlett had the idea, but he hadn’t needed to be persuaded. He was always up for anything remotely exciting.
The cut had hurt like hell. He’d screamed out when she did it, and she’d told him not to be such a baby. She cut her own left palm and barely winced.
When they held their hands together and commingled their blood, Scarlett seriously intoned that they were now blood brothers, because she resisted her femininity fiercely, both then and now. Scarlett had always acted more like a boy than a girl. He couldn’t imagine a better male role model than the one she had been for his eight-year-old self.
They’d remained closer than family all these years, which was fine with Flint. She and her seven-year-old daughter were the only family he had, and he liked it that way.
Or at least they had been. Until he met up with Bette Maxwell again. Until she told him what little she knew about his mother. Until Crane taunted him at gunpoint.
Flint learned from Bette Maxwell that his mother had been a teacher in West Texas. He suspected she must have lived and worked in Mount Warren because Crane had lived there.
And now that he knew these facts, what was he going to do about them?
Mount Warren was an easy flight from Houston. He could go down there tomorrow. He could find her in a couple of hours. He could talk to her.
And say what? Ask what? Did he want to know why she had abandoned him? Some secrets were better left buried.
Bette Maxwell had said he was an illegitimate child. His mother was a schoolteacher and the conventions at the time made keeping her son impossible. Okay. He could accept that.
What had sparked his curiosity was why she never came back. Never. In all those years.
Bette had tried to make him feel better about his mother’s abandonment by invoking the closed adoption process. Bette had insisted that closed adoption records were sealed. No one could unseal them, even if they’d wanted to. Not the bio mom or the adoptive parents or even the kid.
But Flint had never been adopted. His mother had left her young son with Bette and simply never tried to find him again. People who gave up their children had the right to make those decisions. That’s what he told his clients, and he believed it.
Now was the time to t
ake his own good advice. To let this go. If she had wanted to find him, any halfway decent investigator could have done it. She’d never made the effort.
Still, the open issue nagged. Before he could rationalize away the urge, he sent a quick request to one of his sources. No explanation. Just the questions. She would search government, public, and private databases. She’d send him what she found.
He’d make up his mind after he had more facts.
He closed the laptop, carried his glass into the den, and poured another. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. Might as well get buzzed. He did some of his best thinking that way.
He plopped down into his favorite chair, put up his feet and closed his eyes, and leaned his head back. He pushed a button on the remote to change the music to something quieter so he could think.
Did he want to find his mother? How about his father? What if Crane had meant his taunt literally? That he had known Flint’s mother in the biblical sense. Was Felix Crane his father? Did Flint really want to know that, assuming it was true? Definitely not.
Flint heard the back door open. He didn’t move. He’d been expecting her.
“It’s a bad sign when you’re drinking alone in the dark, listening to Haggard and Jones,” Scarlett said as she walked into the room. He opened one eye and watched her fill the glass she’d collected in the kitchen on her way through. “You’re not gonna cry or start a fight or anything, are you?”
He grinned and opened his other eye and lifted his glass to her in a silent hello.
She plopped down on the sofa across from him and propped her feet up on the coffee table. She slouched and sipped and finally said, “So what’s up? What am I doing here in the middle of the night?”
He grinned again. She always exaggerated everything. “It’s not the middle of the night.”
“It is for me. You have any idea what time a seven-year-old gets out of bed to go to school?” She sipped again. “You enticed me over here with the Scotch, which is excellent. But I can’t stay long. What do you want?”