by Camy Tang
“Um...we’re not sure,” Joslyn said carefully. She looked briefly at Clay, but he somehow knew what she was thinking. The less they told the neighbors, the better.
“We were opening the door when it blew up,” Clay said to Mary.
“My goodness, are you two all right? You don’t look injured, but...”
“We’re fine,” Joslyn said.
“You better make sure you get seen by a doctor,” Mary said.
“What happened?” People started to arrive from other streets in the area, gaping at the house. Mary was only too happy to tell them a dramatized account of the explosion.
Clay pulled Joslyn aside. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked her. She was tall but slender, and she seemed so delicate.
She nodded, although there was worry in her face. “Who rigged Fiona’s house to explode?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. But whoever did it is a ruthless killer.” He sighed and eyed the ruined shell of the house.
Joslyn shivered, even in the sweltering heat.
Clay had dealt with men just as ruthless when he’d been a street thug for that mob family in Chicago. He hadn’t killed anyone, but if he’d kept going down that road, who knows what he might have become?
That thought was like a dark blot on his soul.
Police sirens blared, and soon a squad car turned the corner and barreled down the street toward them, followed by paramedics. Clay’s shoulders tensed out of habit, and he relaxed them. He wondered if there would ever be a time when his past wouldn’t crop up in his present.
He answered the officers’ questions evenly, but that only seemed to make them suspicious, if the curious looks they threw at him were any indication. He submitted to the paramedic’s exam, but other than a few minor cuts from flying glass and debris, he was unhurt. Part of the door frame had hit him on the side and a chunk of plaster had glanced off his shoulder, but he shook off the bruises. He’d had worse.
He knew the exact moment the officers had looked him up and found out about his prison record. They had hard glints in their eyes as they approached him. “So Mr. Ashton, what are you doing here in Arizona? You’re a long ways from Illinois.” The officer’s name badge read Campbell.
“I came to see my half sister, Fiona Crowley.”
“And that’s it, huh?” Officer Talbot, the younger man, squinted up at him. “Nothing else?”
“Nothing else,” Clay said through a tight jaw. He might have been tempted to mention the phone call from his sister if it hadn’t been for the suspicion in their tones. Anything he said to them would only make things worse for himself, and he needed to be able to find Fiona and make sure she was safe.
“So you just opened the door and the house exploded? Kind of odd, don’t you think?”
“It might have been a gas leak or something like that.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with it?” Officer Talbot gave him a look that said, Yeah, right.
“I had nothing to do with this.” His voice came out a bit harsher than he intended.
“And Miss Dima...Dia...” Officer Talbot squinted at his notebook. “What’s your relationship with her?”
Clay gritted his teeth. “I just met Joslyn when we both arrived at the house at the same time. To see Fiona. Why is it that the police didn’t contact me, her brother, when her neighbor filed a missing persons report?”
Officer Talbot’s face turned pink and he glanced at his partner. “It’s under investigation,” he snapped.
Calm down. Clay had to calm down. His temper had gotten him in enough trouble in the past. He couldn’t afford to get in trouble now, when Fiona might be in danger. He wanted to walk away from these two men and the insulting ring to their questions, but he forced himself to stand in a relaxed stance.
Officer Campbell gave him a hard look, but then he said, “We have your hotel information and phone number. We’ll be in touch.” It was almost like a threat. However, the two men turned and left him. They began addressing the other people gathered on the sidewalk.
Joslyn came up to him, but paused when she saw his face.
“They were giving you a hard time?”
“Nothing unexpected.” Considering his prison time. But it still bothered him.
Her eyes sparked amber. “But you were visiting your sister.”
“Look, I don’t know how much Fiona told you—”
“She knew about your time in prison,” Joslyn said quietly.
“Well, it’s not something officers of the law can forget about.”
“I suppose you’re right, but you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“They don’t know that.”
She sighed and looked away. He could almost hear her thoughts. She knew he was right. “Mary was able to give me the exact date she went to collect Poochie. Fiona’s been gone for three weeks, about the time of the stamp on the postcard she sent me.”
Clay frowned. “I just can’t imagine where she would go. Why did she need to leave? Is she really in trouble?” He wondered if it was even Fiona who’d reached out to him and Joslyn.
“I was going to drop by her workplace. Since it looks like Fiona doesn’t want to be found, I want to gather as much information as I can about her life here in Phoenix to try to predict where she’d go.” Joslyn eyed the officers. Talbot was flirting with a young woman, while Campbell was speaking to two men in business-casual clothing. “They say, out of sight out of mind, so did you want to come with me?”
Maybe the less the cops saw of him, the less likely they would be to blame him for the explosion. “Sure.” Right now, it was the only lead they had on where Fiona might be. After that explosion, he had a feeling this wasn’t a case of his sister going on a spontaneous vacation. He’d been worried before, but now his fear for her was like a boiling pot in his gut.
If there was something dangerous going on, he wanted to make sure he was there to face it head-on.
TWO
“We’re being followed,” Clay said, looking in the rearview mirror.
“Are you sure?” Joslyn angled herself so she could get a better look behind them through the passenger-side mirror, but all she saw were several white cars, a couple minivans, an SUV.
“The white Taurus, about four cars behind us.”
Joslyn tried to get a look at it, but could only see half of the blurry face of the man in the passenger seat of the Taurus. Still, the brief glimpse made her heart race.
“Do you recognize him?” Clay asked.
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
“How long have they been following us?”
“I didn’t see them on the way to Fiona’s workplace, but they appeared behind us when we started for the museum.”
They’d gone to the air-conditioning parts manufacturer Fiona worked for, only to hear that three weeks ago, a man had called, claiming to be her brother, asking for extended leave for her, citing a family emergency. However, the manager hadn’t been able to get in touch with her after that and she’d been fired.
Who had called? It obviously wasn’t Clay. That may be why the police hadn’t followed up on the missing person’s report—if they checked with Fiona’s company, the manager had heard from her and so there wasn’t a problem, at least at the time Mary notified them of her disappearance.
Perhaps that had been the point of calling in to Fiona’s workplace—to forestall the filing of the report. Joslyn and Clay had exchanged tense looks. Did someone have Fiona?
They’d spoken to a couple of her coworkers who had been outside for a smoke break, but they hadn’t learned much—Fiona apparently wasn’t close with anyone at work, even though she’d been working there about fifteen months. It had seemed like a dead end.
But Joslyn rememb
ered that Fiona often visited art museums in Los Angeles. She’d been friends with the guards at the museum and had formed friendships with other people who visited the museum regularly, mostly artists and critics. Clay had agreed that she’d done the same in Chicago, when she had lived with him in the years during college and after she’d graduated. So they’d left Joslyn’s car in the business parking lot and headed to the largest art museum in Phoenix, the Kevin Tran Museum of Art and Art History.
But they apparently weren’t alone.
Were their pursuers aiming to finish the job, since the explosion at Fiona’s house hadn’t gotten rid of them, or did they simply want to question Joslyn and Clay? “I wonder if they want to stop us from finding Fiona, or if they think we know where she is,” Joslyn said.
“It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to stop and ask them.” Clay signaled and switched lanes.
Joslyn had been in this exact situation barely a year ago, running from her ex-boyfriend, nervously looking behind her to make sure she wasn’t followed. Feeling as if her life wasn’t her own anymore. She had thought she’d put those days behind her, yet here she was again. “Phoenix is a grid. How are you going to lose them?”
“I have to get onto a freeway.”
He got onto the 101 almost casually, as if he’d always meant to head in that direction, and moved into the leftmost lane. He then slowed down, and soon the white Taurus was directly behind them. Clay was driving so slowly in the fast lane that cars were passing them on the right, and the Taurus couldn’t stay hidden. There were two men in the sedan, both with sunglasses on. The shorter one had curly, dark hair, while the other had close-cropped, dark hair. They also both had identical frowns.
“They know you’re on to them,” she said.
“It won’t matter in a moment. Hang on.” He cranked the wheel hard to the right and cut off an SUV. Its driver honked at them as Clay swerved right again and cut off a Toyota. He then zoomed right in front of a Mustang in the freeway exit lane only a few feet before it split from the highway, separated by a concrete divider. Joslyn knew the circumstances were extreme, but the sight of the cars looming so close in front of them made her heart shoot up to her throat.
His aggressive driving had carried them too quickly across the lanes for the Taurus to keep up. The driver couldn’t make it to the right hand lane in time to exit, and Joslyn saw both men glaring at them as they were forced to continue on the freeway.
“You lost them.” Joslyn had always been rather cautious behind the wheel, trying not to annoy anyone around her. Clay had cut off three cars in fewer than three seconds.
“Not yet.” Clay wove his way through the traffic and began driving in random circles.
He was a good driver, his motions controlled and precise, the car moving smoothly, almost effortlessly through traffic. But there was tension radiating from the corners of his eyes as he glanced in his rearview mirrors.
Joslyn kept an eye out behind them, also, and her heartbeat continued to gallop in her chest as she waited to see if the white Taurus or some other car would suddenly appear. But after several miles, she never saw the same car twice.
Clay finally nodded. “I think we did lose them.”
“How did they find us? Why are they following us?” She didn’t like not knowing. “Are you sure they followed us from her workplace?”
“They could have followed us from her house and we just didn’t see them,” Clay said. “Although I don’t like the thought that they were watching us the entire time.”
“I don’t, either.” It made her feel vulnerable, right when she had been working so hard to get back control in her life.
Clay’s mouth grew hard. “Maybe they were the ones who rigged her house to explode and they were waiting to see who would show up.”
For a moment, he looked so much like her ex-boyfriend that Joslyn had to look away. Tomas had hated being trapped by other men, and it had brought out an ugly side of him. He’d had many ugly sides.
She took a deep breath. That chapter in her life was over. Tomas was in jail. She was safe. She had been doing everything in her power to make sure she stayed safe.
Except that it hadn’t saved her from walking into this situation. “If they did rig her house to explode, they either wanted to kill her or anyone after her.”
“I don’t think anyone would expend manpower to watch an empty house for weeks, just to make sure the explosion killed someone looking for Fiona,” Clay said. “If they were staking out the house, it’s because they want to find Fiona, dead or alive.”
“So Fiona might be alive. On the run.”
“Let’s hope so. But if those men weren’t staking out the house already, it could mean they followed one of us to Fiona’s house.”
Joslyn thought back to what she’d had to do to find Fiona’s address. Had her digging around alerted someone that she was after Fiona? But who? What in the world had Fiona gotten into? “Did you have any idea Fiona was in serious trouble like this?” Joslyn asked.
He shook his head slowly. “I hadn’t talked to her in years. I didn’t even know where she’d gone after she left Chicago. I tried to find her but then...”
He’d gone to prison. Joslyn wondered why Fiona hadn’t reached out to him, especially when it seemed that he still loved her. Fiona hadn’t indicated there had been any bad blood or grudges between them, so why hadn’t she wanted to see her brother again?
“I didn’t know, either,” Joslyn said. “Fiona was just like any other girl when I knew her in Los Angeles, going to classes, hanging out with friends. Except...” She thought back. “She seemed a little sad sometimes, but I knew her mother had died and she didn’t like to talk about her father. I thought she just missed her mom.”
“She and Mom were close,” Clay said quietly.
“I still can’t get over the job she got here in Phoenix. She was qualified for a position that paid so much more.”
“She must have gotten into some kind of trouble, something that made her need to take a different job than she normally would have.”
“She didn’t have many friends at her workplace, so maybe the answer isn’t in her job, but in what she did outside her job.” Which meant that if she did visit the museum here, as she had done in Los Angeles and Chicago, they might find something about what she’d been involved in. A standard tactic for skip tracers was to find out as much about the person as possible to figure out where they’d go.
The Kevin Tran Museum of Art and Art History was a beautiful sandstone building that rose out of the desert like a castle, surrounded by artfully arranged rock formations and different types of cacti. As they paid the entrance fee, Joslyn grabbed a pamphlet about becoming a season pass holder or a museum patron.
“If I’m right, Fiona would have gotten at least a season pass for the museum. She had a season ticket for one of the museums in Los Angeles that she enjoyed going to. She got invited to private showings and a few art galas.”
“She had a season pass for one of the museums in Chicago, too,” Clay said. “She took me to an art opening once. I had to wear a suit.” He grinned, suddenly. “She told me I looked like a bouncer.” But then something, some memory, made the light dim from his eyes and his smile. Joslyn had to stop herself from asking him what had made him so sad.
She consulted the pamphlet and saw that the patron services department was in charge of handling business with season pass holders. “This way.” There were signs pointing the way to the patron services office.
They passed through several galleries. Some had ethnic themes, such as one long room with art from several premier Chinese American artists who had first settled in Phoenix at the turn of the century, and another room with huge murals of Native American art. One gallery housed a display of sculptures that looked like they were made from desert rocks of various colors.
<
br /> “This is a museum Fiona would love,” Clay said as they crossed a room where Native American woven blankets hung from the walls. “She always talked about how art can tell you all about different cultures and periods of history.”
“I have to admit I didn’t always see it,” Joslyn said. “But then again, when Fiona went with me to a concert, she didn’t go into raptures about the musical nuances the way I did.”
“What kind of concerts?”
Out of habit, Joslyn hesitated before answering. “Mostly classical music. Fiona was my only friend who’d go to concerts with me and not fall asleep in the middle.”
“I like classic rock, myself. But I’ve been known to listen to some instrumental movie scores, too.”
She blinked at him, then laughed. “The classic rock I would have guessed.”
His smile was open and charming. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
It would be so easy to fall for that charm. But then again, Tomas had been charming, too, at first.
They arrived at a door marked “Patron Services” and went inside. A woman sat behind a desk with horn-rimmed glasses and smiled at them. “May I help you?” Her name plaque read Ruby Padalecki.
Joslyn gave her one of her new business cards. “I’m an investigator with the O’Neill Agency. We’re looking into the disappearance of a young woman who might have been a season pass holder with the museum, Fiona Crowley.”
Ruby’s mouth grew pinched. “I’m afraid I can’t give any information about our museum patrons.”
“We’re just worried about her,” Clay said. “I’m her brother.”
The woman looked at him with her brow furrowed. “Oh, my, you look exactly like...” She swallowed and lowered her voice. “I’m sorry, but I could lose my job.”
“No, we don’t want you to do anything to jeopardize that,” Joslyn said quickly.
Clay held his hands up. “We’re just museum patrons chatting with you, okay? We’re not after any confidential information that might get you in trouble.”