The personal concierge business was still new, and she had to explain it to a lot of people before they signed on, but Ginny was good at it—calm, focused, and tenacious in getting things done. She was capable of handling two or three clients at a time, but disdained multitasking, preferring to deal with each project in order.
That disdain didn’t mean she wouldn’t use tools that multitasked, though. A concierge’s best tool was her brain, but her second best was a fast Internet connection.
Checking her email, she found that DubJay hadn’t wasted any time: there was an email from someone named Elizabeth at JacobsRealty.com with the information she’d asked for, no questions asked.
“And that, children, is how you get your identity stolen. Tsk-tsk.” Still, she supposed when the Big Boss told you to send info, you sent it.
With that, and the details on the digital card that Walter Jacobs—DubJay—had sent her the night before, Ginny could start the hunt.
Opening several more browser windows, she accessed a few of the national databases she maintained accounts with, typed in Joseph Jacobs’s full name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number, and hit ENTER.
“So now we find out—who are you, and what have you been up to, Mr. Jacobs?”
If he had any outstanding legal issues, public financial difficulties, or had appeared in the news—either local or national—in the past three months, her sources would tell her. Odds were, nothing would show up—or what came up would be useless in this particular search—but she didn’t get her reputation by being sloppy.
Acting on impulse, she also entered the name of the company itself. Real estate, yeah, but what kind, and what kind of reputation did they have? It wasn’t germane to the job, but . . . Ginny liked having information. You never knew when it might be useful.
“Which reminds me . . .” She entered their URL into the browser, brought up their website, and studied it. Smart and to the point, with very little clutter. There were drop-downs for market research, properties, and a section for clients that required a log-in. The splash page merely identified who they were—commercial real-estate brokers, working with small- to medium-sized clients in the Seattle-to-Vancouver area—and how to reach them if you were interested.
They didn’t market themselves to the general public, clearly.
DubJay was listed first. Interesting, considering his uncle had founded the company. But she supposed, from what the client had said, that the older man was getting ready to retire, leaving more and more of the front-office stuff to his nephew. That would explain why he felt free to disappear, assuming that DubJay would handle any problems. It didn’t explain why he forgot to leave the papers with his nephew, but she supposed things did get overlooked, or shuffled into the wrong pile. . . .
Letting the background searches run, Ginny swiveled in her chair, her bare feet resting on Georgie’s warm, sleeping back, and picked up her cell phone, dialing the first credit-card company’s number listed in the email.
The phone tree options were listed in a mechanical voice, and she pressed 2, then 4, and then entered in the credit-card number.
“It’s nice working with a client who has their shit together, Georgie,” she said to the sleeping form under her desk. “All the things I need, and none of the fuss I don’t. And pays without a fuss.”
Assuming she accomplished the task, a small voice that sounded a lot like one particular bartender told her. By Monday.
“Shut up,” she told the voice, then heard the click that told her a live person was about to join her on the phone call.
“Hi,” she said, aiming for brightly cheerful but obviously worried, “I can’t find my card and I want to make sure that nobody else got their hands on it. . . . Yes, the Social Security number is—” and she rattled off the number smoothly, praying that they wouldn’t notice it was associated with a male name, rather than a female. She had no problem claiming to be Mrs. Client, if needed, but the fewer white lies she told, the fewer she’d have to confess later.
Not that she went to confession, but childhood training had left its mark.
As expected, the man on the other end just assumed she was Mrs. Client, and gave her the last three purchases on the card. If it was an innocent query, he was doing good customer service. If she was trying to make sure hubby wasn’t buying flowers or undies for another woman—or another man, for that matter—well, he didn’t want to know.
The desire for a lack of fuss made Ginny’s job easier, on a regular basis.
She repeated that question three more times, for three more credit cards—two more personal cards, one corporate—only once having to fall back on her little white lie.
When she hung up the phone after the last call, Ginny looked at the notes she had compiled, and chewed on the end of her pen, thinking.
“A man goes missing, Georgie. And the last things he spends money on are a fancy dinner, a car service, dry cleaning, and his monthly parking validation downtown. Not a single suspicious thing in the lot, and nothing that indicates he’s about to flit. Unless he’s been doing a lot of cash-only business. . . .”
Banks were harder to get information out of than credit-card companies. Normally, Ginny approved of that.
She opened her email again, and started typing.
Dear Mr. Jacobs,
He might have said call me DubJay, but she was on the clock, and business communications should stay formal.
It would help my search greatly if I knew if your uncle’s ATM card was used in the 36 hours before his disappearance, and how much money was withdrawn. Also, if he is using it as a debit card. I realize that you might not have access to this information but if you do, it would facilitate my search considerably, and speed up the end result.
Sincerely,
She checked the email for typos, then hit SEND, just as her cell phone rang. She grabbed it up off the desk, and checked the number before answering.
“Oh God, no.”
The temptation to ignore it was intense, but she knew from experience that that only made things worse.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Dad.”
She leaned back and put her feet up on the desk, balancing carefully in the chair. She’d lucked out. Her mother called to fuss at her, usually with the deep sighs of, “I only want what’s best for you.” Her stepfather tended to call when he had something to say—usually a rant—and he was looking for an audience, not a partner. All she had to do was grunt at the right moments, and not fall asleep, and she was golden.
This time, it was about an increase in property taxes, something Ginny tended to treat like an act of God—they would come no matter what she did, and there wasn’t much point griping about it. But her stepfather had never met a topic he couldn’t grouse about.
Finally, he ran down enough to ask her how she was doing.
“All right. Got a new client, interesting work. No, I’m not seeing anyone. And don’t tell me you weren’t going to ask, because you totally were.”
It didn’t grit quite so much when her stepfather did it. Her mother . . . better to tell him, and let him tell her.
“All right. Yeah, I love you, too. Look, I’m in the middle of something, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.”
She hung up the phone and let out a sigh, the kind that had “parents” written all over it. She had been perfectly comfortable being an only child, growing up, but as an adult she often wished there was someone to share the weight.
“Georgie, I promise, I will never grow old and drive you crazy like that.”
Her dog snored in response, fast asleep.
“Yeah. Good to be a dog.” She swiveled in her chair, and checked the computer screen. Her searches were still running. “Okay, dry cleaning. If you’re going away, you might pick up your suits, yeah. And go out to dinner. But it doesn’t tell me where he might have gone. Seriously, guy, would it have been so difficult for you to have—I don’t know—booked a plane ticket, or a hotel room? Ordered a pizza?
”
Underneath her feet, Georgie moaned in her sleep, and let out a nearly toxic fart.
“Oh God.” There was only so much love could excuse, and that wasn’t it. “Thanks, puppy.” Ginny opened the window behind her, noting that the rain had, in fact, ended, and used the need to let the air clear as an excuse to get another cup of coffee.
On her way back from the kitchen, refilled mug in hand, she had a thought. Sitting down again at the desk, setting the mug safely out of the spill zone, she picked up her cell phone and sent a quick text to the number she’d gotten from Tonica last night, before leaving Mary’s.
Find what you can abt Joe’s rep—or DubJay.
She was working the financial and legal aspects, the obvious first routes, but Tonica might have contacts in areas she couldn’t touch. Not that she believed he had any illegal contacts . . . slightly off-straight maybe, but not illegal. Probably.
She wouldn’t ask, that was all.
The point was, he might be able to dig up something she couldn’t, something that Jacobs senior wouldn’t have expected to be under scrutiny, and therefore hadn’t been so careful about.
“If I could get my hands on his computer . . . okay, if Darren could get his hands on that computer.” If someone had been dumping emails or trying to erase files, her on-call tech guy would know, and for the price of a decent bottle of wine, he’d find it. But the chances of DubJay letting a stranger in on a company computer on her say-so . . . ? Not going to happen. And that was assuming she could even find Darren over the weekend.
No, her best bet to dig up actual dirt was through Tonica’s contacts. Although mainly, Ginny admitted to herself, she just wanted to let him know that some people were awake and working at 8:00 a.m. It was probably petty, but she just could never resist the urge to get a good verbal hook in. Not when it was Tonica, anyway.
In her defense, he not only took the hook, but tossed it back at her, each time.
“He’s not bad, Tonica isn’t,” she said, settling back at her desk. “Tall, strong, reasonably smart, reasonably easy on the eyes, and he shakes a mean martini. I’d marry him if it didn’t mean having to put up with him twenty-four/seven.”
Georgie, who had woken up at some point, rolled over onto her back so that Ginny could rub her belly, the dog seemingly unimpressed by Ginny’s admission.
Ginny obliged the request for a few minutes, then tucked her left foot under her, telling Georgie that the belly rub was over, and took a deep sip of her coffee. “Think about the checklist. Credit cards, done. Bank info, pending Jacobs. Legal write-up, pending reports. Personal gossip, pending Tonica. Is there anything you can think of right now that would be useful, not just spinning your wheels?”
There wasn’t.
“I swear, at least half this job’s always waiting.” Still, it wasn’t as though she didn’t have anything else to do. There were reports to generate on another job, and invoices to file, and—being an office of one still seemed to generate enough paper to drown five people, and much of it was of the time-sensitive financial sort.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo. Which of these piles do I most want to go?”
Her finger settled on the one closest to her, and she placed her palm down on the top and pulled it to her. “Oh, goodie, financial filing. My favorite.”
She’d gotten through about half of the pile, muttering dire things about state bureaucracy, when a beep from the computer behind her indicated the first of her searches had returned results.
“That was fast.” She frowned, tapping the screen to bring up the results. “Too fast.”
Too fast meant either there wasn’t anything to find, or there was so much junk floating around, it would require hours of wading through to find anything useful. Neither was good.
The too-loud beep of his phone had woken Teddy out of a pleasant, dreamless sleep, and he was particularly annoyed about it.
“I should not have given that woman my number.”
It had seemed a reasonable request when she made it, but he had thought she might call him, maybe. At a reasonable hour. Not blip an incomprehensible message into his ears at oh-my-God-early.
Teddy stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom, one hand behind his head, the other resting across his stomach, clutching his cell phone. The digital clock by the side of his bed told him that it was 8:09 in the morning. Mary’s closed at 2:00, but he had been there until 3:00 a.m., had made it to bed just before 4:00 a.m., and normally would still be asleep until the alarm got him up at noon.
Noon was a reasonable hour to wake up, when you kept bartender hours. Especially after working a double shift. Did the woman have no clue? No couth? No kindness?
He lifted the phone again, and squinted at the message, which this time was reformed into legible words. “ ‘Find out something about Joe.’ Right. Who the hell is Joe?”
He let the hand holding the phone drop back to his side, and rubbed his eyes with his other hand, as though that would make the missing Joe show up.
“Oh, right. DubJay’s uncle.” They’d never mentioned a name, not that he remembered, but clearly she’d gotten more information, and forgotten that he didn’t have it.
Forgotten, or just not thought to tell him. Or was she trying to screw with him, seeing how fast he was on the uptake? No, this wasn’t trivia night, they weren’t competing, they were working together. Which meant sharing all their information. Right?
“Right,” he said out loud. “I hope to hell she remembers that.”
He also hoped she was going to cut him in for some of what DubJay was paying her. Although she was a good tipper, he’d give her that. Not stingy the way so many regulars got, like the fact that they were there all the time meant they didn’t have to play fair.
Not that he was working for her. He was helping her out. Did helping out include payment? He really should have clarified that before he agreed.
Teddy uncurled his fingers, letting the phone drop to the mattress, and closed his eyes, trying to go back to sleep. Too early to be awake. Too early to be poking into someone else’s problems.
Unfortunately, lying there, he became aware of every single noise, from the sound of the mattress creaking slightly underneath him to the occasional rumble of traffic outside his window. There were blackout shades and curtains drawn; these muffled the light and most of the noise, but nothing was perfect. And the moment he became aware of how aware he was, the noise slipped in further, making itself at home, until his ears, his skin, felt oversensitized.
He pulled the pillow out from under his head and put it over his face. It was no use. The damned woman had woken him and he was up now. Too many years of training: even now he couldn’t even bring himself to hit the mental snooze button, even though he had every right to be sleeping.
“Damn it. All right. Fine. You win.” If she ever asked, he’d swear he didn’t pick up the message until he woke up at noon.
Swinging his feet off the mattress, Teddy pulled on the pair of jeans he’d dropped on the floor the night before, then padded across the apartment to the kitchenette, pausing to look out the window. Cloudy, with a chance of gray. He pressed the START button on the coffeemaker, overriding the timer, and opened the fridge, pulling out eggs and a loaf of whole wheat bread. It was earlier than he usually ate, but be damned if he was going to work on an empty stomach.
A quick fried egg and toast later, Teddy pushed his plate aside, finished the coffee that had gone cool in his mug, and stared across the apartment. Weak sunlight was starting to filter in through the windows at the far end of his studio, dappling the bare floor. He really should buy a rug, or something. Eventually.
He’d lived in this apartment for two years. He was never going to buy a rug for the floor. Teddy was well aware of that fact. But he still thought about the fact that he should, eventually.
He’d been raised to live better than this. The fact that he’d chosen to walk away from that life . . . “There’s a difference between living a simple
life and punishing yourself with cold feet,” he said, not for the first time.
“ ‘Find out what you can about Joe’s rep,’ she says. His reputation? How does she expect me to do that, start looking up his old college buddies? Start asking the bank teller? Or, I know, invite all his country-club buddies in for a drink, and get them to spill their guts. I’m sure I have a tux in my closet somewhere. . . .”
What he should do was go for a run. Or hit the gym. He was pushing thirty-four, and the body wasn’t as easy to maintain as it used to be. Or he could try to go back to sleep: Friday nights were hell, and coming in exhausted tonight was not the way to start a weekend. But the look in DubJay’s eyes when he gave Ginny that deadline kept him in his chair. He would refuse to pay her, if she didn’t come through, no matter how hard she tried. And Teddy was pretty sure that yes, Walter Jacobs would bad-mouth Mallard Services if he didn’t get what he wanted.
“His reputation, huh?” Maybe she was thinking of a counterstrike, in case he . . . no, that wasn’t Mallard’s style. She was a straight shooter.
Things had gotten hectic last night, as usual at the start of the weekend, and they hadn’t talked much once he’d agreed to help her. Despite the text message this morning, he wasn’t sure what she wanted from him, or how much time it was going to take. Well, he knew how much time, because there was a deadline.
Teddy got up and poured himself another cup of coffee, more for something to do than because he really wanted it. This wasn’t going to end well. He knew it, even if Ginny was too damn stubborn to admit anything could possibly be wrong. The entire thing was wiffy, like fish that hadn’t quite gone off—yet. If it was just a matter of finding the guy, someone like Walter Jacobs could hire a PI without blinking. Hell, he probably had ’em on retainer, or something. But DubJay didn’t do that, didn’t want to do that. Which meant he had a reason to go outside his usual circle, which meant . . .
Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Page 4