A look of concern shadowed the barista’s face. “That’s terrible. Why don’t you stay here one second, and I’ll ask my manager. She’s here all the time, so she’d know more about Lily than I would. Hold on one second!” she called as she went running off.
“You’re not going to drag her back, kicking and screaming?” asked Harper as she moved to stand next to Lucas.
“Everyone here is everyone else’s best friend. Remember that the PI the Reinhardts hired had the same credit card statement we did. They would’ve found this coffee place too. If they came up with nothing, we have to make sure that we don’t go down the same route.”
Her mouth hooked up, and Lucas must’ve seen it out of the corner of his eye. He frowned at her. “What are you smiling at?”
“You. You really are a PI, aren’t you?”
“Are you surprised?”
“Not surprised. I just like to see when people know what they’re doing.”
“Funny. Usually I feel like I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.”
The barista bounded back in, this time with a woman behind her. The manager of the place looked exactly like the type who would manage a coffeehouse like this. It was hard to tell the woman’s age; she could be anywhere between forty and sixty. Her brown and gray hair was a mishmash of dreadlocks held in a ponytail, and her face was accented by a nose ring, lip ring, and three more piercings in each ear. “Are you the couple looking for Lily?”
Harper forced herself not to ask what the woman meant by couple. “We’re very worried about her.”
The manager went over to glance at the phone Lucas held out once more. “Well, I hate to say it, but I haven’t seen her in a few days.”
“A few days?” asked Harper. That was a lot more recent than three weeks.
“Usually she’s one of our regulars, but now that you mention it, it’s been a while since I’ve seen her. Did you say she’s missing? Shouldn’t the police be looking into this?”
“Trust me, the police are involved,” said Harper. The police were too busy arresting Lucas to actually look for Lily.... “We’re just trying to pick up any breadcrumbs. Do you know anyone she was normally here with? Did you notice any changes in her behavior?”
“No major changes,” said the manager. “Not that I knew her all that well. I mean, she was nice enough, but it’s New York. We didn’t talk much.”
“The last few weeks she’s been in here with that guy.... What’s his name?” The barista’s brows scrunched together. “Evan! I think her and Evan were, like, a thing. They started coming in together a lot last month.”
“Blonde spiky hair and too much jewelry?” asked Lucas.
“Yeah! You know him?”
“Yeah, I know him.... Why don’t you make that espresso a triple? It’s going to be a long night.”
Lucas put just enough creamer in the espresso to bring it to a tolerable temperature and threw his head back, chugging it as though it were hard liquor. His face scrunched up. He swallowed it all and really wish he’d ordered something that would work as a chaser.
“All right, the suspense is killing me. Who the hell is Evan?”
Lucas shook his head.
“You can’t be serious? We’re in on this together, and I need to know who this Evan guy is. You can’t refuse to talk about him.”
“Sure I can. This is me not talking about Evan.”
Harper set a hand on her hip and glared at him. “Do you really think that’s going to work with me?”
He waved a hand at her. “You really think the cute little hand on your hip annoyed act is going to help you with me? I’ve been around you long enough, Harper. I recognize your moves by now.”
“My moves? Anyhow, this is how I act when I’m exasperated with you, so it’s no wonder you recognize my moves. I’m always exasperated around you.”
Lucas glanced around until he saw the free Wi-Fi sign in the corner of the room. He bet that if he had a few minutes with an Internet connection he could figure out where Evan was.
He went to the next room. Everywhere he looked, he saw memories of Lily. At this point, she seemed to be mocking him. What a goddamn fool he’d been. She’d seemed so trusting, so innocent, and now she was screwing him over like this.
He went to the darkest corner of the room and plopped down on some ugly purple velvet loveseat.
Harper, even though she’d been annoyed with him most of the day, sat down right next to him, not wanting to miss the things that he did on his phone. “You know you’re going to tell me eventually.”
“Yeah, I know. Why do you think I’m so annoyed?”
“Just get it out. Like you’re ripping off the bandages.”
“You know, they make those fancy new bandages that don’t hurt when you take them off.”
“You’re broke. You can’t afford any fancy bandages.”
“Ouch.” Well, she sure as hell wasn’t wrong about that. “Evan Park is my former partner. We got into the whole private detective thing together.”
“You? Work with a partner?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t play well with others, but, like you just pointed out, I’m broke. I’ve been broke for most of my life. Evan had capital; we both had some free time, so we got in the business together.”
“Then what happened? Did you have a falling out or...?”
“No. We both recognized that it was too big a pain in the ass to work with someone, so we split off the business. He’d always handled the cheating spouse variety of cases and I always handled more... violent ones. It was an even split. Usually when I was in the city, I stayed with him so I didn’t pay for a hotel room.”
“Oh. You were probably staying with him when you were hanging out with Lily, weren’t you?”
“You got it. That’s how they met.”
“Okay, so all that makes sense. But why are you so pissed about it?”
Lucas started to say something, then stopped himself. He started again, and once again couldn’t get it out. “All right, I’m going to tell you something about my past. I don’t want your pity. And I don’t want you to tell me what you would’ve done in the same situation. Just listen. Okay?”
Harper stayed silent but nodded in agreement.
“Okay, so when I was younger, I always wanted to be a cop. It was my lifelong dream ever since I was old enough to pick out my own Halloween costume. Once I graduated from school, I was all set to run off to the academy and get my career rolling. But I went for one last summer vacation down in Cancún, and one of my buddies, one of my best friends at the time, shoved my bag full of black tar heroin and I got caught by customs once we got back to the States. Of course, the whole ‘my friend put it there’ defense is heard fifteen thousand times a day, so no one believed me. I spent three years in prison before I was released.”
He could see all the pieces clicking in place for Harper. His discomfort in the jail. His fear of flying. His anger at Evan. “So this thing with Evan is just one more betrayal?”
“I think whoever did this had access to my bank account information. Besides my former business partner, it’s not like there are a lot of people I was sharing that with. That, combined with the fact that he’s been hanging around Lily, doesn’t sit right with me. I’m thinking it’s looking more and more likely that I’ve been set up again.”
“Hey, we don’t know anything for certain. Why don’t we find Lily and ask her to tell us herself what happened.”
“I just want to get this over with. I don’t want some stupid jail sentence hanging over my head one more time for something I didn’t do.”
“Lucas, I’m so sorry you had to—”
“What did I say about pity? It’s a thing, it happened, and I moved on.”
“Then why did you tell me about it at all?”
“Because I figured you’d want to know just what the stakes are here. It was one thing when Lily’s parents were coming after me. But this is something else.”
“I get it. He was supposed to be a friend.”
Lily was a fling. If she ran off and decided to be crazy, that was one thing. But he still considered Evan a friend. Which was stupid. He’d more than found out exactly how little friendship meant to some people.
“So what’s the plan? Are we going to go visit Evan?” asked Harper.
“Yeah, but I’m sick of being one step behind. The landlord at Evan’s building knows me. I want to message him before I head over and arrange to get a key to Evan’s place.”
“The landlord is just going to give you a key?”
“I’ve had to head over to Evan’s apartment a few times. Both times I didn’t have the key, so the landlord hooked me up. I bet you if I give some sob story about Evan being in trouble, the landlord would have no problem letting us in. That way, Evan can’t refuse to see us.”
Harper raised a brow. “Not too shabby, Stone.”
“You have to stop being impressed with me. It’s insulting.”
“How is that insulting?”
“I guess it’s the fact that you’re so damn surprised every time you’re impressed.”
“What can I say? I like it when you surprise me.”
Evan’s apartment was a bit of a drive from the SoHo coffee shop. If Evan had been a regular there, it must’ve been to meet Lily. It sure as hell wasn’t for the convenient location.
As far as New York buildings went, it was in terrible shape. The old brownstone had some crumbly bits here and there, but, in its favor, there were no bars on the windows or trash piled up outside.
“You said Evan made an investment with you, right? Where did he get his money from?”
“Nowhere fancy. A grandmother died and left him an inheritance. Not enough to make them rich for life or anything, but enough to have a fun year. But since Evan wouldn’t know the meaning of fun if it bit him in the ass, he chose to get in business with me.”
To her amazement, the landlord really did meet Lucas outside with the key. He didn’t seem skeptical at all about Lucas’s desire to get into the apartment. If anything, he seemed annoyed that he had to go through the effort. She really did enjoy lazy security when it made her job easier.
There was an elevator, but Lucas went for the stairs, and she followed him. She supposed the fewer people who saw them, the better. Besides, Evan’s apartment was on the fifth floor so the stairs were doable. Harper considered herself physically fit, but she had to work to make sure Lucas didn’t hear her trying to catch her breath. As soon as they walked onto the fifth-floor landing, he held out an arm to stop her.
“What?” She didn’t see anybody in front of them, so she didn’t know what had spooked him.
“That’s his door.” Lucas pointed to the apartment that said 5D.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you see that little box next to the door?”
“You mean the doorbell?”
“That’s one of those fancy doorbells. It has a motion-activated camera.”
Odd. She dealt with those things all the time in her line of work, a staple of the paranoid sort she was usually hunting down. But they weren’t exactly common in apartments. “So much for the element of surprise.”
“We still have some surprises.” Lucas set a hand on her shoulder.
She stiffened. Lucas had touched her enough that she should be used to it by now. But the opposite was true since their time together. He seemed to realize it, too, because he awkwardly pulled his hand away. “I mean, Evan doesn’t know you. Neither does Lily.” He held the key out to her. “You need to go unlock the door. Try to block the camera while you’re doing it so they can’t tell what you’re doing, but don’t make it obvious that you’re trying to block the camera.”
Harper shook her head. “There’s two of us. We can work together. I’ll go and block the camera and knock on the door. You sneak around behind me and work on the lock. We will both be in his apartment and he won’t know any better.” Of course, none of this would do any good if Evan had skipped town. Harper didn’t know Evan, but she knew that if she had stolen a bunch of money, the last thing she’d want to do is hang around her apartment.
“You really want to work together?”
She rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”
He shrugged. “I mean... I figured if you could do something on your own, you’d rather do it on your own.”
“That’s ridiculous....” She trailed off as she realized he wasn’t exactly wrong. If Harper could do something without anyone’s help, that’s exactly what she would do. And it was totally possible that she could walk in front of the camera and get into the apartment without too much of a hassle at all. But somehow it just made more sense to have Lucas help her. Dammit, they didn’t have time to deal with this right now. She didn’t take the key from him and started down the hall. He would just have to figure this shit out on his own. When she reached the door, she purposely put her hip very much in front of the little camera lens. She wasn’t sure whether there was sound, so she made a show of it. She banged loudly on the door. “Excuse me? I have a few questions. It won’t take more than a second.”
If this Evan guy was home, it was officially too late. Lucas got the door open and swooped inside. Harper tried to make it look as if she were walking away from the camera before ducking in. Without knowing the range the camera picked up on, she had no idea whether their efforts paid off or not, but it was worth a try.
Lucas was already deep inside the apartment, leaving her to shut the door behind her and follow. The place looked like a bachelor pad. There was a pile of shoes by the front door and a bench filled with jackets. The floor looked as if it hadn’t been vacuumed in months. There was basically no character to the place at all. Besides that, the apartment wasn’t that bad. There was a defined entryway that led into a living area. There was a hallway that looked as though it had at least two bedrooms off of it. Whoever this Evan guy was, he wasn’t doing too bad for himself. An apartment with multiple bedrooms, or any bedroom at all, didn’t come cheap in New York City. It didn’t necessarily look as though he’d just stolen a hundred thousand dollars nice, but in the scheme of things, a hundred thousand wasn’t all that much. It would keep someone happy for a year, maybe two or three if they lived frugally, but it wasn’t exactly the score of a lifetime. She would think Lily, who obviously came from a decent background, would know that much.
“Do you want to wait around?” asked Harper when she found Lucas in the kitchen, going through the refrigerator.
Lucas pulled out a bag of leftovers and looked carefully at the receipt. “This is from yesterday. Looks like our boy’s still in town.”
Harper walked up closer and took the bag from Lucas. She looked at the receipt in detail. It appeared to be from some sort of Italian diner. “Two entrées and one dessert.”
“You think it was from a date?”
Harper shrugged. “Depends on if they shared the dessert or not. You know your boy better than I do. Is he as much of a ladies’ man as you are?”
“Well, he’s not as charming as I am,” he said, getting a snort out of Harper. “But he does have more money.”
“What is it with you and money?”
Lucas slammed the food on the counter a tad too hard as he glared at her. “I’m sorry that not all of us had our lives work out just like we planned.”
“Hey, you know me. I didn’t live in the biggest house in town. I might’ve had my life laid out for me, but I sure as hell didn’t go by the plan my parents set out. Besides, I didn’t mean it as an insult. I mean.... You kind of have everything going for you. You’re obviously smart, you’re resourceful, and yes, I admit it, you can be charming when you want to be. It seems like if anybody should have it made, it’s you.”
Lucas seemed taken aback by the compliments. Harper had a feeling he didn’t hear them often. “I.... Like I said, things got derailed. What little money I did have set aside immediately went to legal bills, and then I ma
xed out three more credit cards with the appeals process. None of which worked, by the way. Now I’m a felon with no college education and debt.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“No, you brought this up and now you have to hear me out. I was an angry, vengeful person when I got out. I didn’t make very good financial decisions. It’s kind of a miracle I didn’t end up right back in jail.”
“Well, if you’re interested, I know a few people who can use somebody with your skills. You work a few jobs like mine, you won’t be worrying about bills. I promise.”
“You want to be my partner?” he asked skeptically.
“Of course not!” she said much too quickly. She wasn’t naïve enough to think they could ever work as partners. Rather, she had a feeling it would work very well, but she wasn’t naïve enough to think he’d want her as a partner. He made his stance on relationships very clear. He liked to love ’em and get the hell out as quick as possible. It was only their odd circumstance that caused him to be stuck with her for a little longer. “I’m just trying to be nice. Please don’t let it go to your head.”
“Hey, I’m not about regrets. If anything, I can think of a few ways to say thank you real good,” he said with a quick wink.
“Oh my God, I’ve made things weird, haven’t I?”
“What the fuck? I’m not being weird.”
“Yeah, you are. All day, you’ve been keeping as much distance between you and me as possible, and now you’re back to your default of flirting. It means you’re uncomfortable.”
“I don’t only flirt when I’m uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, but you’ve already slept with me. Thus, there is no more reason to flirt. So you must be uncomfortable.”
“For fuck’s sake, just because I slept with you doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep with you again.”
Oh God. This was quickly morphing from frustrating to mortifying. “Please don’t think this is some underhanded way to fish for compliments from you. I was merely pointing out that you’re acting differently and I’ve noticed. You don’t have to pretend or put on a front for me.”
Lucky Girl (Lucky Alphas Book 2) Page 11