Say It Again (First Wives)

by Catherine Bybee

  The phone rang, piercing the silence in the room.

  AJ and Sasha both stared at it. When he moved to answer, she held up a hand, stopping him. The answering machine picked up in three rings, a woman’s voice Sasha assumed was Amelia’s greeted the caller. “You’ve reached me, you know what to do.” A computer generated voice told Sasha that a solicitor, and not a person, was on the line. “This is the League of Disabled Veterans, we have you on file as a concerned patriot who has donated to our organization in the past. With the holidays fast approaching, we would like to reach out and—”

  AJ moved to pick up the line. “Damn money sucking—”

  Sasha stopped him before he could say more. “It’s okay, honey. They don’t know.” She adopted her Jennifer voice and placed a finger over her lips to shush AJ before he asked any questions.

  The answering machine finished the recording, and Sasha pressed the playback button. “You have two unheard messages.” They listened to the first message, which was a series of tones, as if a fax machine had called in, and then the veterans call they’d just heard.

  “What?” AJ asked.

  Sasha picked up the phone, listened for the dial tone. Nothing.

  “Does your sister have a radio? I think music will help us get through this, don’t you?”

  AJ moved through the room, ducked into the hall, and returned with a portable speaker and proceeded to connect his cell phone to the Bluetooth. Within two minutes music drowned out the silence.

  She moved closer to AJ, lifted her lips to his ears. “Someone has been checking and erasing Amelia’s messages remotely. We need to check for surveillance.”

  He nodded. “I’ll go get the boxes.”

  The moment AJ left, Sasha turned her attention to the space. Where would she place cameras, bugs . . .

  The minimalist furnishings didn’t give her many options.

  She removed her cell phone from her back pocket and moved through her built-in security and found the application she needed. Without being obvious, she turned on the scanner and walked around the room, pointing her camera at the walls, vents, and electronics. Sure enough . . . in the air return vent on the ceiling, a tiny red dot suggested a camera was watching. The question was who was on the other end, and if they were still watching. Turning her phone on mute, she started walking around as she pretended to be texting someone.

  AJ walked back in, boxes overflowing his arms.

  “We forgot tape,” AJ said as he dumped the boxes in the center of the room.

  “Maybe Amelia had some.” Sasha knelt behind the counter and followed the glowing red lines on her phone, telling her there was some type of audio device close by.

  “I don’t think she was planning on moving.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have duct tape or some kind of thing like that. If not, we can just fold the boxes and tape them later.” She opened and closed the cabinet under the sink and kept moving. The red lights pegged out a small basket filled with pens and highlighters.

  “The dust in here is starting to affect my allergies.” Sasha turned on the faucet and filled the kitchen sink.

  AJ watched her from across the room, lifted a palm to the air, and questioned her with a silent lift of his eyebrows.

  She pulled several sheets from the paper towels by the sink and proceeded to dunk them in the water and wipe off the countertop. She moved a wooden block filled with knives, cleaned up under them, shifted to the basket of pens, set it close to the edge of the sink, and dusted under it. “How about an outside storage? I bet there would be box tape—” Sasha moved quickly and the basket of pens, the one that held an audio bug, was dumped into the sink. “Oops.”

  AJ walked up behind her, looked in the sink while turning off the water. “We don’t have to do this. It can wait.”

  Sasha removed the pens that were not bugged and took her time with the one in question.

  “No, we should pack up a few things and take them with us.” She picked up the pen, removed the cap, and knocked out the tiny microphone.

  AJ stared into the sink, his lips pressed together.

  Sasha turned into his arms, told him about the camera with a soft whisper in his ear. “Wash this down the sink, I’m going to check out the rest of the place.”

  He kissed the side of her neck and she left the kitchen in search of the bathroom. After searching the bedroom, small office space Amelia had made out of a nook, and the bathroom, Sasha determined the only device left was the camera that they couldn’t disassemble without it being obvious that they had found it.

  Not that it mattered, they couldn’t linger.

  “Honey?” Sasha called AJ from the bedroom.

  He walked in with a box.

  She closed the door behind him. “What the hell?” AJ asked, tension filling his shoulders.

  “We have no way of knowing if the camera is still in use. Or who was watching. Pack up her computer, grab her files and photographs. I’ll forward the calls from her phone to Neil, find out who is policing them.”

  “You can do that?”

  She patted his chest. “Are you taking notes?”

  “Wouldn’t the police have found the camera and bugs?”

  “The murder didn’t happen here. Looks like they went through the place, but it’s not completely trashed. And there is no way of knowing if these things were here when the cops came through.”

  He offered a slight grin. “I don’t like this.”

  “Me either. We need to get out of here.”

  They doubled their efforts, filled three boxes, and then she pretended to start sneezing and they backed out of the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “This is not on me.” Linette stared across her desk at Geoff. “You’re the one who decided to make a media circus out of Claire and Sasha’s departure.”

  “One more day was all I needed,” he growled.

  Linette played innocent. “For what? Sasha declined. Like the students before, she has the right to say no.”

  “Don’t play coy with me, Linette. Claire and Sasha were mine. You know it, I know it. I want the girl back.”

  By girl, she knew he meant Claire. “You might have thought of that before calling a press conference. With Sasha, Claire won’t need the life you offer.”

  He held her gaze. “You sound pleased with that.”

  Linette kept her emotions in check. “Recruitment is down and demand is high . . . isn’t that right?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You need us, Geoff. Blowing up the credibility of this school with false accusations against its students and alumni will only backfire on us all. An investigation will open up questions neither one of us wants to answer. I suggest you leave this one alone.”

  “Letting them walk is not an option.”

  “Going after Sasha is operational suicide.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Geoff turned on his heel and left.

  Once her hands stopped shaking, Linette donned her robe and left her office. She crossed the campus and made her way to the lower classrooms.

  Brigitte worked alongside her students without noticing her for several minutes. Once their eyes met, Linette nodded toward her office.

  “Pohl just left. He’s going after her,” Linette told her when they were alone.

  “Sasha . . .”

  “Just like I said he would.” Sasha showing up when she did had not been part of Linette’s strategy, but she couldn’t be happier for it.

  Brigitte smiled. “Time to activate our contingency plan.”

  “I’m calling an emergency board meeting for a couple of days from now. By then we’ll have the cleaners in and everything scrubbed.”

  “He isn’t going to take it well.”

  “Pohl has ruled this school far too long,” Linette told her. “We play into the fear of exposure and the board will fold.”

  “And Sasha?” Brigitte asked.

 
“You said it yourself, she’s the best this school has ever produced. Pohl making her a target will only encourage her to expose him herself. We won’t have to do anything.”

  “If only we could warn her.”

  “I already sent word.”

  “How?” Brigitte asked.

  Linette smiled. “I can’t tell you all my secrets.”

  Brigitte licked her lips. “I already know your biggest secret.”

  They holed up in a hotel that night just outside DC, combing over Amelia’s computer. Sasha uploaded images to Neil to see if any of the faces in her many pictures could be traced back to Richter.

  AJ found himself taking notes, watching the ways information moved in and out of Sasha’s brain like a computer. Her hyperfocus when on task was impressive. There was a point when the glow of Amelia’s laptop lit up her face and she muttered in Russian. She dug a little deeper in the files, smiled, nodded, and went at it again. Outside of a gun being cocked, AJ didn’t think anything would take her off task.

  By the time she looked up from the computer it was one in the morning. “Your sister was good,” she’d told him.

  AJ crawled up next to her on the king-size bed and looked down at the computer, which was in some kind of green screen mode. “Oh?”

  “I finally cracked her security. I’m uploading all her files to Cooper, let him do the legwork on this while we’re at your parents’.”

  “You think there’s something to find?”

  “She put up a lot of firewalls. I doubt she was just trying to hide her porn habit.”

  He cringed.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Not really.

  “Everyone has secrets, AJ. Even if it’s just kink. Maybe she liked being able to keep her files hidden. Use a skill Richter taught her in her private life that she didn’t use in her professional life.”

  “Or maybe my sister had a reason for someone to murder her.”

  Sasha kept silent, his words a shout in his ear.

  “If you know something, you need to tell me.”

  “I’m not going to burden you with suspicion. That invites pain.”

  “There’s something.” He could see it in her eyes.

  “Nothing concrete.”

  “Sasha?”

  “There’s a lot of firewalls. That’s all. Maybe by this time tomorrow we’ll know more. Right now, I’m curious as to why an analyst for the UN would need this much cloak-and-dagger. We have hidden surveillance in her home and someone catching her messages and keeping her answering machine from clogging up. It points to something.”

  “Not to mention she’s dead. Why would someone need to clear her messages if she’s dead?” AJ asked himself more than Sasha.

  “Exactly. They’re waiting for a message . . .”

  “From someone who doesn’t know she’s gone.”

  “Perhaps. Or someone who wants to throw us off.” Sasha ran a hand through her dark hair. Her wig had long since made its way to the side of the bed. “More questions than answers, but we’re on the tip of something.”

  “Why isn’t my father looking closer?” This was so obvious to him from day one, why not to his father?

  “How do you know he isn’t? He could have placed the taps.”

  AJ didn’t see it.

  “You have to consider every possibility. Everyone is a suspect.”

  “My father didn’t kill my sister.”

  Sasha hesitated.

  AJ’s heart dropped hard.

  “You both have trust funds, right? You and your sister? Grandmother’s money, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Did your sister have a will?”

  He blinked.

  “I’m guessing since she wasn’t married and didn’t have children, the answer to that is no. Which means the money reverted back to her parents. Your parents. Uncontested, your sister’s accounts will be pushed through in six to eight months. The first place the authorities look when a murder has taken place is who has a motive. Money is a great motivator.”

  “It’s not that much,” AJ said.

  “Four million dollars isn’t chump change, AJ.”

  “How do you know how much we were given?”

  “I know the name of the arresting officer when you were caught stealing a car.”

  He paused.

  “Most people can live their entire lives without working a day on that kind of money. Amelia had a good paying job, invested her money. Her accounts had grown. Now all of that is in someone else’s pocket.”

  “My parents didn’t kill my sister for her money.” His back stiffened.

  “I didn’t say they did. I’m saying you need to be open to all possibilities in order to see the evidence as it unfolds. If your sister had left the money to you, you’d be a suspect.”

  AJ felt instantly thankful Amelia hadn’t felt the need to write up a will. He shook his head, leaned back against the headboard. “What an exhausting way to live.”

  “Thinking everyone is after you? Everyone has a motive to do harm? Yeah . . . it is.”

  He rolled his head to the side, took in Sasha’s profile. In that moment he saw a sadness he hadn’t seen in her before. “Tell me something about you that no one else knows.”

  Confusion marked her brow. “What?”

  “Anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know you better.”

  She cocked her head to the side as if contemplating whether or not to answer him.

  Silence stretched out between them.

  “It’s okay, I’m being pushy—”

  “Thunderstorms,” she rushed out. “I love thunderstorms. I’ve walked into the middle of a field, or the courtyard at Richter, in the middle of a thunderstorm just to be a part of it.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Part of the appeal. I’ve never feared lightning or the sounds of gunshots or the screech of tires on pavement.”

  AJ reached for her, tugged a little when it became apparent she wasn’t used to being held. “This won’t hurt.”

  She shifted into his shoulder without relaxing.

  “I love the smell of snow,” he told her.

  “You live in Florida.”

  “Yeah. Much harder to get laid living in the mountains alone than in a condo on the beach.”

  She chuckled, tucked in a little closer. “When was the last time you managed that?”

  “Getting laid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Last night,” he teased.

  The comment was met with her elbow in his ribs. “Fine . . .” He thought back, answered honestly. “Three months ago. She was with her girlfriends for a beach vacation. What about you?”

  Sasha ran her bare foot down his leg. “Rome, right before I went back to Germany.”

  He shouldn’t feel jealous.

  “Do you plan on seeing him again?” He regretted the question the moment it left his lips.

  “That would require me knowing his name,” she told him.

  He wanted to ask if she was kidding but knew she wasn’t.

  “Does that bother you?” she asked.

  “Should it?”

  She unfolded from his embrace and swung a leg over his hips to straddle him. Looking down, it became apparent exactly where her thoughts were headed.

  He lifted his hands, circled her waist.

  His cock stirred.

  “I know your name.”

  AJ dug his fingers into her hips, pulled her close. “And I know yours.”

  The Hofmann home sat in a Virginia suburb filled with pristine roads and manicured lawns. The houses were a mix of Georgian and Victorian, colonial, and somewhere in between. Sprawling landscapes with small clusters of dense trees framed the edges of properties.

  The large brick home AJ pulled into wasn’t modest by any means, but it didn’t quite fit the description of a mansion or an estate like that of Trina and Wade.

 
Still, it wasn’t without its charm. “Impressive,” Sasha said, peering out the window.

  “A regurgitated replication of every home my parents have ever lived in.”

  “You never lived here?”

  AJ turned off the engine. “No. They bought this after returning from Germany. Dad wanted to be close enough to DC so he could work during the week and come home on the weekends.”

  Sounded like marriage trouble to Sasha’s ears. “Does Daddy have affairs?” she asked without thinking.

  “No . . .” AJ paused. “Shit . . . I don’t know.”

  Good, he was starting to think. “If you were happily married, would you want to stay away five nights a week?”

  AJ looked through the windshield. “Next thing I know, you’re going to tell me there isn’t a Santa Claus.”

  She grinned, grasped the handle of the car door. “Remember, keep it simple and as close to the truth as possible. If you get stuck, punt to me.”

  “Got it . . . Jennifer.”

  “Let’s do this,” she said, pushing out of the car.

  They walked to the front door, hand in hand.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he whispered right before he knocked on the door hard and followed it up with a ring of the doorbell.

  They waited several seconds.

  “Maybe we should have called,” he said before pushing the doorbell a second time.

  She heard the sound of footsteps rushing down stairs and a woman’s voice saying she was coming.

  The door swung open and AJ’s mother’s stunned expression turned quickly into a smile. “Oh, my . . . AJ, what are you doing here?” She opened her arms to him, glanced over his shoulder toward Sasha. “Did I know you were coming?”

  AJ let go of Sasha’s hand and pulled his mother into a hug. “Hey, Mom. We were in the neighborhood and thought we’d stop by.”

  “In the neighborhood my rear end.” She hugged him tighter, kissed the side of his cheek.

  He stepped away and turned to Sasha. “This is my girlfriend, Jennifer.”

  Sasha stuck her hand out. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mrs. Hofmann.”

  Mrs. Hofmann looked between the two of them, eyes wide open. “It’s Marjorie, please.” They shook hands. “Please, come in.”

  AJ let Sasha walk in first, closed the door behind them. “Is Dad here?”