Parker Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  “Listen,” Emmy said. She took a step forward and reached out, touching the guy’s arm. He flinched. “Listen,” she repeated, her voice low and calm, as if she were talking to a frightened child or a scared animal. “I’m not Isa. I’m her twin sister. My name’s Emmeline. Emmy.”

  “Prove it.”

  “You’re going to have to take my word for it; I don’t have my purse on me so I can’t show you my license.”

  “Lift up your dress.”

  “Now, hold on a minute,” I said. “We’re standing in the middle of the BART station; she’s not lifting up her dress. What—are you nuts?”

  The guy gave me a defiant look. “Isa has a tattoo on her bikini line. Right side. About yay long.” He held his hands about six inches apart. “Musical staff and a bunch of notes. A tasteful tattoo, if you can consider any sort of tattoo tasteful.”

  “It’s okay, Jason,” Emmy said, turning to me. There weren’t that many people in the station at this early hour, so I supposed if she was going to do something like that, now would be the time. But I still didn’t like it, didn’t like the idea of this guy going around demanding that my girlfriend show him her bikini line in order to prove she was who she said she was—or, rather, prove she was not who he thought she was.

  Emmy stepped closer to me and then lifted up the hem of her dress. She didn’t stop there, though—she pulled down the top of her underwear, and let the guy take a long look.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “See? No tattoo. She is who she says she is.”

  Emmy let her dress fall.

  “Now that I’ve shown you that,” she said, “you have to tell me who you are and how you know my sister.”

  “My name’s Morgan Carson.” He held out his hand to her, and she shook it; then he did the same to me. I hesitated but then shook it, too.

  “Jason,” I said.

  “If you want to know how I know your sister, I’m afraid that’s going to at least require some coffee. And definitely sitting down. So why don’t we leave this station and find the nearest café and I will tell you what I can.”

  Emmy glanced at me. I was tired; I wanted to get home, take a shower, drink a glass of water, and then go to sleep for the foreseeable future. But this—this would have to happen first.

  ***

  Luckily, there was a café within sight of the BART station, once we made it above ground. I squinted against the bright sun, shielding my eyes with my hand. I could feel a headache coming on, and my brain felt slow, like it wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Whatever this guy was about to tell us, I hoped that it wasn’t going to be anything that would require a great amount of brain power to process, because I just didn’t have that capacity right now.

  Emmy and Morgan both got coffees, but I opted for a water. The sound of the espresso machine seemed to fill the entire café, drowning out almost all of the nearby chatter. Morgan led us to a table near the back, a grim look on his face. He kept looking at Emmy and then looking away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just really... it’s really a trip to be seeing you, because you look just like Isa. She wouldn’t wear an outfit like that or anything, but... Christ, your faces are identical.”

  “Well, they are twins,” I said.

  Morgan looked at me as though he was trying to decide if he should bother to respond to that or not.

  “So, how do you know my sister?” Emmy said. She put her hand on my leg underneath the table, as if to tell me that my commentary wasn’t needed.

  “I’m a financial advisor at Markham Wade. Isa was a client of mine.”

  “Isa had a financial advisor?” Emmy said.

  Morgan nodded. “Don’t sound so surprised. Your sister is worth a lot of money. She’s good at what she does. She’s not the best at managing her money, though. And that’s where I come in.”

  “If you’re her financial advisor, you must have access to her accounts, then—right?” Emmy said. “Has she used them? Can you tell where the money’s being drawn from?”

  “I don’t have access to her personal checking account or anything like that,” Morgan said. “I handle her stocks and bonds, that sort of stuff.”

  I twisted the cap off my water bottle and took a sip. Something was not quite adding up here, that was for sure. Yeah, maybe Isa was one of his best clients and he was now having a really hard time coping with the fact that his star client was missing, but... there was definitely something else up with this guy.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Emmy was asking.

  “That night at Heathens. The night she disappeared.”

  “You were there?” I couldn’t help asking. He definitely did not seem like the sort of guy who would go to a place like that.

  “Yes, I was there. It was supposed to be a night of celebration for us.”

  Just by the way he said “us,” I suddenly understood.

  “Celebration?” Emmy asked. “What were you celebrating?”

  Morgan took a deep breath, drank a sip of his coffee, then took another deep breath once he’d put his cup back down on the table. “You have to understand that this isn’t easy for me to talk about. I’ve been having a really hard time with this whole thing. It’s been harder for me than anything I’ve had to deal with before, and that includes the Great Recession.”

  “Anything you can tell us would be helpful,” Emmy said in a soothing voice. “I really just want to know what happened to my sister. I want to see her again.” She paused. “Wait a second. Are you the guy who was tearing down the missing posters? In the park one morning?”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, but from the wary expression on Morgan’s face, he definitely did.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “How did you know that?”

  “Someone saw you doing that, and they told me to watch out for you. Because they thought it was me on the flyer.”

  “Who saw me?”

  Emmy shrugged. “I don’t know his name. Just some guy that I happened to run into the other day.”

  Morgan ran his hand through his short hair, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. I began to feel a bit of compassion for the guy—he really did look like he wasn’t coping with this at all.

  “So, you saw Isa at Heathens that night?” Emmy said.

  “Yes. I saw her at Heathens.”

  “You weren’t in the VIP room, were you?” I asked suddenly. I didn’t remember seeing him there.

  “I was, but only briefly. I had taken... I’d taken something—that I normally don’t usually take—and so I wanted to go out on the dance floor. Like I said, we were supposed to be celebrating.”

  “What were you celebrating?”

  Morgan pressed his lips together into a thin line, his eyes darting from Emmy to me, then back to Emmy. “We were having an affair,” he said finally. “And what makes an affair an affair? When one or both of the people are in a relationship. I was married. Am married. Shit, I don’t know. We were celebrating the fact that I had told my wife I was leaving her, so Isa and I could go public with our relationship. I was sick of sneaking around, making sure no one got a picture of the two of us in some compromising position. It’s exhausting. I couldn’t believe that Isa and I were finally just going to be able to have a normal relationship. That’s all I ever wanted. I was in love with her.” His voice cracked. “I am in love with her. Still. After all this. How could I not be? The best times of my life were with her. I went with her to Ibiza. Paris. Thailand. British Columbia. All over the United States.”

  Emmy was frowning. “And you had a wife this whole time?”

  “And two kids, too. Yes, I know, I’m the scum of the earth. Don’t worry—you’re not thinking anything my wife hasn’t already said to me. But I was married with children long before I ever met Isa—and what are you supposed to do then? When you’re in that deep with someone else but wind up meeting your soul mate?”

  I tried to hold back my snort but wasn’t entirely successful. Emmy tight
ened her grip on my thigh.

  “I wouldn’t know much about that,” she said. “I’ve never been married and I don’t have any kids. But... I have to assume that you and my sister really did mean something to each other, otherwise you wouldn’t have been willing to ditch everything that you have.”

  “We did,” Morgan said, looking down at his hands. No wedding band on the left finger, I noticed. Having never been married or fathered any children myself, I couldn’t quite speak from personal experience, but I didn’t care who it was I met—if I had a wife, if I had a family, I wouldn’t just bail on them because I met someone better. The man did look truly downtrodden by this whole turn of events, but it was hard to muster much sympathy for someone who would do something like he’d done.

  “I’ve tried looking for her myself,” he continued. “Obviously with not much success.”

  “I really didn’t know that much about Isa’s life,” Emmy said. “I didn’t know that she was involved with you.” She frowned. “Well... maybe I did, a little bit. I think you’re the person she mentions in her journal, but she never refers to you by name.”

  Morgan visibly perked up at hearing this. “She wrote about me?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Well, my life is all but ruined now. What can I do, though? I’ve got to move on. It’s that or jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  I would’ve thought he was being hyperbolic, but the expression on his face told me he was not.

  “Please don’t do that,” Emmy said. “There are plenty of other people out there. And even if you don’t end up with someone, you have kids. That would be really hard for them to deal with.”

  I pressed my lips together to refrain from mentioning that what their good old dad had already put them through was probably plenty hard enough.

  Morgan pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at the time. “I better get going,” he said. He handed Emmy a business card. “Please be in touch if you hear anything from Isa. At the very least, I’d like to speak to her once more.”

  “Sure.” Emmy slid the card across the table towards her and looked at it. “I’m sorry,” she said. We remained seated at the table for a few minutes after Morgan left.

  “Why’d you apologize?” I asked.

  “It just seemed like the right thing to do,” she said with a shrug.

  “But you’re apologizing to someone who did something shitty, for someone who’s not even here.”

  “I know.” She put her hand on top of mine. “I guess I kind of feel for the guy, regardless of what he did. I think my sister probably used him, or led him on, or something. I mean, obviously she did, if he was ready to break up his marriage for her.”

  “He did just unload a whole lot of information,” I said, yawning. “Unfortunately, my brain isn’t up for processing most of that right now. I really need to sleep. My bed is calling. You are more than welcome to join me.”

  She yawned, too, smothering it with the back of her hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever stayed up all night before,” she said. “My brain is starting to feel a little fuzzy. I think sleep would be good.”

  I smiled and took her hand as we stood up and started the trek up Market Street toward my place.

  Chapter 22

  Emmy

  I had a dream that I was at a club, a hybrid of all the clubs that I’d been to so far—there were cages like at Oddlands, and the mezzanine like at Heathens. There was music playing, but it was more in the background. I was up on the main stage, a spotlight shining directly on me, and the room was full of people, though no one was really looking at me, which I was fine with. I couldn’t see any of their faces; they all blurred together. What was crystal clear, though, were the conversations—except there were way too many words being spoken for my brain to process all of them. Jason was there, and so were Morgan, Les, Laurel and Flax, my parents, Ian from Heathens, Lucas Oddland, even that woman who had worked at Oddlands and let us in that first time. They were all talking, all talking about Isa, and I wanted to say something, but it was as if someone had put superglue on my lips. I couldn’t open my mouth.

  ***

  I woke up with a start, my heart thudding. It wasn’t as if it had been a nightmare or anything, but something had definitely jarred me awake, something that was there at the outermost edges of my brain. If I tried too hard to recall it, it would be gone in a flash, I knew, so I’d need to be careful. I needed to just wait, to let it find its way back to me.

  And it did: all those talking voices, everything that anyone had ever said to me about Isa, this cacophony of sound, until two of them matched up precisely: British Columbia.

  Morgan had said that yesterday, when he’d been rattling off the many places that he and Isa had apparently gone to together. And the other person... what was his name? I couldn’t remember, but I could recall his orange hair, and the matching orange shirt he wore. He had mentioned British Columbia, somewhere specific in British Columbia, though I couldn’t recall that name, either. If I heard it again, I would recognize it. He’d thought I was Isa; he’d thought I’d recognize him because we’d seen each other in British Columbia...

  Next to me, Jason continued to slumber peacefully. I didn’t want to wake him, so I slid out from under the covers and went out to the living room. My phone was on the coffee table, and I grabbed it and curled up on the couch. I looked up British Columbia, and then cities in British Columbia. Vancouver. No. Victoria. No. Whistler. No. I continued to scroll through. Squamish. No. Revelstoke... Yes. Revelstoke. That was it. That was the place the orange-haired guy had mentioned.

  Revelstoke was a small city right near the Columbia River. There was a little airport where you could charter a flight from Vancouver. If you were going to fly a major airline in, though, you’d have to fly into Calgary, where you could rent a car and then drive about four hours to get to Revelstoke. I hesitated only a moment before booking the tickets. Maybe it was stupid to think that I could just show up there and possibly find my sister, but I was willing to try anything at this point. It might’ve seemed like a long shot, but I was suddenly certain that she was up there, somewhere.

  ***

  I must’ve fallen back asleep on the couch, because when I opened my eyes, I could hear sounds in the kitchen and the sun was trying to muscle its way through the closed blinds. I got up, bleary-eyed, and followed the aroma of coffee to the kitchen, where Jason was standing at the stove, taking what appeared to be poached eggs out of a pot of hot water.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw me. I went over and he dropped a kiss on the top of my head. “Sorry if I woke you with all the banging around out here; I haven’t really used the kitchen much lately.”

  “It certainly looks like you are now,” I said. There was a smaller saucepan on the stove, too, with a thick, creamy-looking substance simmering; a fry pan with some slices of Canadian bacon; two plates on the counter, each holding a sliced English muffin; and a cutting board with something green chopped up in little piles.

  “Is this eggs Benedict?” I asked. “It sure smells good.”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s one of the first things I ever mastered cooking; figured it’d be a good thing to start with, seeing as I haven’t really done much cooking the past couple of years.”

  “What’d you do for food?”

  He shrugged. “Takeout, frozen dinners—the healthy kind, but still. There was a part of me that wanted to get back into it, but... I kept putting it off, even though I missed it.”

  I watched as he arranged the food on the plates with methodical precision, the end result looking as if it were ready to be photographed for Instagram.

  “Wow,” I said. “It looks amazing.”

  “Thanks. Hopefully it’ll taste good. I’m a little rusty. But it felt good to be back in the kitchen again, cooking for someone.”

  We went and sat at the table. I used the side of my fork and cut through the egg, the Canadian bacon, the saturated English muffin. Bright-yellow yo
lk burst out from underneath the tines of the fork. I took a bite and it felt as if my taste buds jumped for joy—the combination of flavors, the contrast of textures. I’d had eggs Benedict before, but this tasted phenomenal. I closed my eyes and chewed, then swallowed.

  “I think it tastes even better than it looks,” I said. I took a few more bites, then had a sip of coffee. “So,” I said after a minute, setting my fork down, “in case you were wondering why I was out on the couch when you woke up this morning—it’s not because you were hogging the bed or anything.”

  He smiled. “I was wondering about that. A little bit. Was I snoring too loudly?”

  “No, not that either. I actually woke up because of this dream I was having. And then I sort of had an epiphany. I think I know what happened to Isa.”

  He gave me a curious look. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Based on something Morgan happened to mention yesterday, and then this guy I ran into at Laurel and Flax’s party... I think Isa’s in British Columbia.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because that guy I ran into, he came up to me and said what a coincidence it was to run into me again, after seeing me in Revelstoke. Which is in British Columbia. And I didn’t think too much of it at the time because... well, you know why. I was too busy feeling good from whatever it was that was in the tea. But then... that dream I had... it was really weird; their two voices just came together and I realized: that’s where she is. She’s in British Columbia.”

  Jason frowned. “Someone kidnapped her and took her to British Columbia? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I think she was abducted anymore.”

  “You think she just left and went there on her own?”

  “I think it’s possible. But the only way to find out is to go there and find her. So... that’s why I booked us two tickets to British Columbia. I guess I forgot to ask if you had a passport, but I figured you probably did. And I also understand if you don’t want to go, because I realize that this might seem a little crazy.”