by Beth Yarnall
“I told her that I was a PI, working with the police on cold cases. You’re my assistant by the way.”
“I’m your— Why?”
“I thought I covered that with the whole can’t-tell-her-that-her-husband-screwed-up explanation.”
“Do you lie often in your line of work?”
“Almost constantly. This might shock you, but people generally don’t want to talk to PIs. We’re not like cops where people feel compelled to spill their guts. So sometimes we have to improvise. This is me improvising and getting us info we might not get any other way.”
“Any legitimate way you mean.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“It’s that easy for you to lie?”
“No. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary. It’s taken me a while to get used to it. I’m not all that sure I’m very good at it.”
“You have a point about the wife,” she concedes. “She definitely wouldn’t let us near her husband’s files if she thought we were going to discredit him.”
“I was thinking of subtly suggesting that her husband’s disappearance might be linked to one of his cases, hoping she’ll open his files to us. If there are any files. It’s been long enough since he disappeared that his office files are probably in storage somewhere. His law office would never let us look through them. I’m betting everything that he kept a second set at home.”
“The files I keep at home are a limited version of my office files, but there might be enough in there to give us some clue as to why he didn’t put up his best defense. Before Carla’s trial he had a pretty good record as a public defender.”
“The wife also might know who the mystery man was who used to pay Carla for sex.” I gesture toward the freeway exit. “Get off here and turn left.”
“Good point. She’d know his coworkers.” She eases the car off the freeway, stops at the light, and turns toward me with a slight smile. “Why can’t you be my assistant?”
“Because I’m the PI.” I considered her for a moment. “Is it going to be tough for you to let me be in charge for a while?”
“Maybe.”
I laugh. “I didn’t have an issue with you being in charge back at the office or driving us today or with Carla. Does that make me more evolved than you?”
“Probably.” The light changes and I get her profile again as she makes the turn. “I prefer being in control.”
“Noted.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What’s not what you meant?”
“You took that to mean sexually.”
“I took it to mean in every situation. In bed, out of bed. In the car, out of the car. In the office, out of the office. I have no problem with you being in charge by the way.”
“Stop it.”
“Make a right at the next light.”
“I mean it. This thing, this whatever you think it is between us isn’t a thing.”
“So you admit there’s something between us.”
She makes an exasperated sound at the back of her throat. “I’m not doing this.”
“Just because we’re attracted to each other doesn’t mean we have to act on it. I think you’re right.” I turn my head to look out the window like I’m bored when I’m really trying not to smile. “We should ignore it. Pretend there’s nothing there. That kiss was a one off never to happen again.”
I can feel her gaze on me. Taking a slow breath in for composure, I turn to look at her. There’s a puzzled crease between her brows as we wait at another light. She studies me with the concentration of a scientist examining a specimen. I don’t fit her mold for me. Good. I’m glad we’re both at a loss as to how to deal with each other. I’d hate to be the only one struggling here. I also think she’s right to a certain extent. I have a lot to prove with this case, a lot to make up for. Trying to get into the pants of a lawyer from the Freedom Project would probably be a really bad way to prove I’m a professional.
Not that she’s not worth the effort. I just can’t afford to give into the temptation that is her gorgeous, curvy body and beautiful face. But damn. What I’m giving up for my career.
“I’m glad you agree.” But she doesn’t sound like she agrees. She sounds like she wishes I’d try to talk her into another kiss. Or three. Or something beyond kissing.
“Make a left where that white car is.”
We ride the rest of the way in silence broken only by the directions I give her.
John Martin’s house looks like every other house on the block only more run down. Like its occupants went on vacation for a month or two. The lawn is mostly dead except for the nearly knee-high weeds here and there. The screen door hangs loosely from its frame at a slight angle. There are two cars parked in the driveway. As we walk past them I notice one of them is covered in dust. Probably Mr. Martin’s car. A trail of faded ceramic gnomes runs along the walk. The last one’s been decapitated, the head totally gone.
I ring the bell, scanning the neighborhood. “We might want to talk to some of the neighbors,” I whisper to Lila. “They might give us more info than the Mrs. You never know. Nosey neighbors can be a PI’s best friend.”
A woman answers the door. She’s younger than I expected. More attractive too. But then I’m not really sure exactly what I expected.
“Hello, Mrs. Martin,” I say. “I’m Nolan Perry from Nash Security and Investigations and this is my assistant Lila Garcia.”
She holds the door open for us. “Come in.”
The inside of the house is in much better shape than the outside. Everything’s clean and tidy. The air smells like fresh baked cookies.
“Can I get you two anything to drink,” Mrs. Martin asks. “I made some cookies. Chocolate chip.”
Lila’s stomach rumbles followed closely by mine and I realize that we never stopped to eat lunch.
“They smell wonderful,” Lila says. “I’d love some cookies and milk if you have it.”
“That actually sounds amazing,” I tell her. “I’d love some too. Thank you, Mrs. Martin.”
She laughs. “You sound like my kids. Please have a seat and call me Debbie.” She waves toward the living room sofa. “I’ll be right back.”
Lila sits on the couch, but I roam the room, getting a feel for how the Martins lived. There’s a neat little row of photographs on the mantel. Family vacation pictures from before Martin disappeared I’d guess since he’s in them. There are two children—a boy and a girl. The four of them pose together in one frame. Another is of Mr. and Mrs. Martin alone, their arms around each other. This was clearly a happy family. Not the kind of family a man willingly leaves.
My mind circles back to the conversation I had with Cora and Lila about what might have happened to Martin. He’s either dead or is unable in some other way to return to his life. I hope we find him for a whole set of new reasons. One of which is approaching us now.
Mrs. Martin—Debbie—returns with a tray filled with a plate of cookies and three glasses of milk. She sets it on the coffee table. I take a seat next to Lila in time to be handed a napkin and a small plate. Debbie sits in a chair to my left.
“Thank you,” I say. “I was just admiring your family photos. That was Yellowstone, wasn’t it?”
She looks wistfully at the mantel. “Yes. We took that trip just before John disappeared.”
“How exactly did he disappear?”
Debbie examines a cookie like she’s going to take a bite before laying it back down on the plate in her lap. “He left for work one day and just didn’t come home. I called him in the afternoon, but he didn’t answer. He’d do that if he was with a client or in the courtroom so I didn’t think anything about it. Then when he didn’t come home around the time he usually did I called him a second time. He didn’t answer that call either. I didn’t start to panic until a few hours later when he hadn’t called or returned any of my texts. I knew something was wrong.
“I called the police and filed a missing persons report right a
way. They found his car parked where he usually parks at work, but no one in the office saw him come in. Somewhere between the parking lot and the office he vanished. I’m hoping you coming here today means that the police are looking into his disappearance again. Since the trail grew cold it seems like they gave up trying to find him.”
“We’ll do our best,” I tell her. “Had he gotten any unusual phone calls in the days before his disappearance?”
“No. Not that I noticed.”
“Did the police find his cell phone?”
“No. They tried to see if they could catch its signal, but the phone seems to have vanished with John. Don’t you have all of this information from the police?”
“Some, but it doesn’t hurt to go over it again with you. You knew him better than anyone. What was his mood in the days before he went missing? Did there seem to be anything bothering him?”
“No. Not that I noticed. Just the usual stresses.”
“Did he have any visitors or change his schedule in anyway?”
“No. Everything was exactly as it always had been until the day he vanished.”
I thought about this next question during the ride to the Martin house and just how I could phrase it to accomplish what we are really here to do. “Did he ever talk to you about any of his cases? Were there any that might have bothered him more than the others?”
“He talked to me about them in general terms. Mostly about his frustrations with a judge or opposing counsel. No specifics about the cases themselves. He believed deeply in privilege and had very high ethical standards for himself and those he worked with. It was one of the things I really loved about him, his devotion to his clients.”
Beside me Lila chokes on her cookie and starts coughing.
I give her a couple of thumps on the back. “Are you okay?”
She nods and takes a sip of milk.
I turn back to Debbie when I’m sure Lila’s okay. “Did he keep a home office?”
“Yes.” She gestures over her shoulder. “Down the hall.”
“Would you mind if we had a look?”
“The police already went through it.”
“There might be something they overlooked in their initial investigation. You never know.”
“I haven’t touched it since…” She gives the hall a troubled look. “I suppose a fresh set of eyes couldn’t hurt.”
I have to put a hand on Lila’s lower leg where Debbie can’t see so she doesn’t bolt up off the couch. “We’ll be respectful of his space. We don’t want to disturb anything just have a look around.”
Debbie rises without a word and goes down the hall. Lila and I exchange a look in which I try to warn her to have patience and let me continue to lead. She looks up at the ceiling like she’s searching for that patience and then nods her head in agreement. We follow Debbie to a closed door at the end of the hall.
“I haven’t touched it,” she says. “Not even to dust. I just can’t bring myself to go in there.”
“We understand.” Lila rests a hand on Debbie’s shoulder. “Thank you for letting us have a look around.”
Debbie pulls a wad of keys out of her pocket, selects one, and unlocks the door. “I’ve got some things to do in the kitchen.” She tears up a little. “Let me know when you’re finished.” She darts back down the hall without a backward glance.
Lila eyes the door like it’s the entrance to a tomb.
“At least she won’t know if we moved anything since she never goes in there,” I say.
She gives me a look.
“What?”
“I know you’re right and there’s a bigger picture here, but there’s something about what you just said that just isn’t right.”
“If you’re doubting my sincerity just know that it’s not with John Martin. It’s with Carla. I’m not callous. I’m a realist. I feel bad for Debbie, but I don’t give three shits about her worthless husband.”
Turning the knob, I go into the room without waiting for her response. Just like the car, the entire room is covered in a fine layer of dust. Not only has Debbie not been in this room since Martin disappeared, her kids haven’t either. There’s a desk at the far end of the room facing the door. Behind it is a series of file cabinets. Martin was a pig. Candy and fast food wrappers clutter the desktop and overflow the trashcan. He must have chucked his soda bottles as he emptied them across the room because there’s a pile of them in the corner.
“I’ll be surprised if there aren’t any rats or cockroaches in here,” Lila whispers as she closes the door behind us with a shudder. “The rest of the house is so clean.”
“Yeah, it’s strange. You’d think she would’ve kept up with the trash. She wasn’t joking that she never comes in here. I can’t see her leaving this room like this if she knew how bad it was.”
“Definitely not.”
I immediately move to the file cabinets. They aren’t labeled. I slip on a pair of latex gloves and try a few of the drawers, but they’re all locked. I glance back at Lila. She’s surveying the room like she doesn’t know what to do.
“Lock the door, will you? Just in case.” I pull out my set of lock picks and examine them, trying to decide which to try first.
“What are those,” she asks in a stage whisper.
“Lock picks.” I gesture toward the door. “Would you? I don’t want to get caught by one of the kids or Debbie if she suddenly decides she wants to watch us.”
“But won’t it be weird if she tries the door and it’s locked?”
“It’ll be a lot less weird than walking in on me picking these locks.”
6
Lila
Nolan clearly has no problem crossing lines I’m not comfortable with. I hesitate, wondering if I’m this person. If I’m someone who will do anything—including breaking the law—for my client. Nolan waits for me to decide. He’s impatient, but not with me. He seems to know himself and is totally fine with bending the rules for a good cause.
How can he be so confident? Maybe because he’s done this before and knows he’ll do it again. It’s part of his job—the lying and the law breaking. It’s not part of mine. I’ve spent my whole life following the rules and trying not to stand out. This would be a huge change of character for me. Is this who I want to be?
And then I think of Carla and the look on her face as she went back to her cell. She’s depending on me. I can’t choke when things get hard. I have to live up to that trust even if it means doing something I’m not comfortable with. My hand moves toward the door. I watch it as though it’s not mine. It’s a traitor’s hand. I flinch at the click of the lock. It’s unusually loud in the quiet, dusty room.
When I look back at Nolan he’s watching me with a knowing half smile. In the dim light filtering in through the half closed blinds he doesn’t look as confident as I originally thought. Could what he does for his job bother him on some level? Is he just as conflicted as I am about what we’re doing? As soon as I have the thought the look on his face changes to determination as he pulls a slim tool from the pouch in his hand and turns to the file cabinets.
“Why don’t you take a look at the desk,” he says over his shoulder.
The pop of the lock and the subsequent sliding of the file drawer makes me glance back at the door sure that Debbie must’ve heard the noise. After a moment or two I realize that no one is coming in to catch us.
“If you’d be more comfortable hanging out with Debbie or in the car, I’d understand.”
“No. No. It’s okay.” I move toward the desk, curling my lip at the filth. “I just wish I had a pair of gloves.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wad of something. “Here. I always carry two pairs.”
It’s then that I realize he’s already wearing what look like surgical gloves. The wrongness of what we’re doing washes over me again. I force myself to take the gloves and struggle to put them on. Nolan is already back flipping through the files by the time I manage get the gloves
on. I want to look over his shoulder and at the same time I know that would be a step too far past my law-breaking threshold.
I eye the desk again. Disgusting. There are dried bits of food and liquids all over everything as though he ate every meal at this desk for years and never cleaned up. I lift a stack of folders and leaf through them. None of them have Carla’s name or anything related to her case on them so I put them back careful match them up again with the blank spot in the dust. A tablet of paper rests next to his computer keyboard. I flip the pages that are folded back forward so I can look through them.
Behind me, Nolan closes a file drawer and opens a new one. I turn my attention back to the tablet. Martin’s handwriting is as messy as his workspace. On the fourth page in I’m able to decipher a word that looks like ‘Ruiz’, Carla’s last name.
“I think I’ve got something here,” I tell Nolan.
“Take a picture with your phone and move on. We don’t have a lot of time here.”
I snap pics of the page and several more after that, then fold the pages back the way they were and put the tablet back. There’s another scrap of paper with Diego’s name on it half waded up. I smooth it out and take a picture of it before crumpling it up again. The interior of the desk yields absolutely nothing except an old fashioned phone book the kind my parents use to keep our relatives address and phone numbers in. I photograph every page, having no idea if any of it is even relevant to what we’re looking for.
“What about the computer?” I ask.
He looks up from the file his taking pictures of. “Jiggle the mouse. See if it comes to life.”
I do as he says and am shocked that the screen lights up. There’s no password to get into it. I minimize the Word doc he had open for a summation he was writing for another case and check out the desktop, looking for something with Carla’s name on it.
Nolan bumps my hip. I look down to find him holding out a thumb drive to me. “Download anything that looks important. Start with his emails if you can.”
Another threshold to cross. I try not to think about it as I take the flash drive, at the same time ignoring how prepared for stealing Nolan is. Armed with the little gadget I turn back to the computer. There’s an Outlook icon on the desktop. I click it and am shocked that it’s not password protected. I make note to firm up my own security. I bet Nolan could help me with that.