They dug into their breakfasts and reminisced about the cases they had worked together and how their relationship had grown. Before long, their food was nearly gone and it was almost time for him to shove off.
“So, tell me, when did you realize you were in love with me?” Emily swirled the last little piece of french toast around in the pool of syrup on her plate.
“The night Ricardo Vega’s murderer almost shot you. I knew I couldn’t live without you.”
Emily thought back to that night and how Colin had been so terrified of losing her. She recalled him describing how he had lost his fiancée a couple of years before, shot in the line of duty, and how he had tried to fight against his feelings for Emily because of her dangerous job as a private eye.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said. “When did you realize you were in love with me?”
She looked down at her watch. “Oh, my gosh, look at the time. You’d better take me home now so you can get on the road. You have a long drive ahead of you.”
“No fair.” Colin cast her a quizzical frown.
Emily considered telling him it was from their first kiss, when her knees went weak and his touch sent tingles shooting throughout her body, but that was lust more than love.
But then there had been the multitude of suspicions and questions flying around in her head as she investigated her husband’s murder. With mistrust running rampant, a dark cloud settled over her desire to completely allow herself to trust him.
As she uncovered more facts about her late husband, Emily questioned her own judgment. If Evan was not who he had led her to believe he was, how could she know for certain that Colin was who he claimed to be?
She had wanted to trust Colin fully, give him her whole heart, but she was not convinced until the previous night, at his going-away party, that he was who he claimed to be. Her conversation with Ernie, the Paradise Valley police officer who had known Colin his whole life, had put her suspicions to rest and set her free to love Colin without reservation.
As he sat across the table from her, Colin’s questioning stare was unrelenting. She had to tell him something.
“I knew early on that I was falling for you, but I suppose it wasn’t until you first left to go back to San Francisco that I felt this enormous, gaping hole in my heart—and in my life. I knew then that I didn’t want to live without you.”
A satisfied smile spread across his face and he reached over and laid his hand on hers. “I’m sorry this visit has been so short and that I need to get back, but you have to know I feel the same way. It’s agony being away from you.”
“That’s a good word for it—agony.” Emily smiled weakly, willing back the tears again.
He waved at the waitress to bring their bill.
~*~
Colin drove her back to her home in the charming older part of town and walked her up to her front porch to say their reluctant good-byes. He gathered her up in his arms and held her close, studying her striking turquoise eyes and her rosy lips, not knowing when he would see them again.
“Don’t cry, Emily. I’ll be back before you know it.” He wiped a tear from her cheek and pushed a golden curl back from her face.
“Promise?” Her watery eyes looked into his. “San Francisco is such a long way away.”
“But I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, Emily, like the song says. My heart is in Paradise Valley, with you.” He kissed her deeply and fervently, as if it might be their last.
They were both very aware that life can be fragile and no one is promised tomorrow.
~*~
Before leaving, Colin agreed to phone her while he was on the road and also to let her know when he arrived at his folks’ house. “And please, Emily, keep your doors and windows locked.”
“I will,” she assured him.
“And remember that black sedan that’s been tailing you—keep your eyes open. We still have no idea who it could be.”
“I will, I promise.”
“Call Ernie, or my friend Decker at the Boise PD, if you need anything.”
“Yes, yes, I will.”
“Call me if—”
“Please, don’t worry about me, Colin. I’ll be fine. I’m a big girl—I can take care of myself. Remember? I’m a pistol-packing—”
“Smokin’ hot lady PI. I know. I know. But I can’t help but worry about you, Babe.” Being protective was in his blood. Colin had once been a marine and then he had been a policeman in San Francisco, rising to lead police detective for five years before moving to Paradise Valley. Taking over as their new police detective had been a fresh start for him, and an opportunity to heal from the loss of his fiancée.
“I know. I’ll call you if anything happens,” she promised. “You need to get going.”
“All right, but make sure you call me.”
She waved as he drove away in his red Jeep, doing her best to keep a brave smile spread across her lips. Once he had gone, she wiped a couple of tears from her cheek.
During their last morning together, she hadn’t wanted to remind Colin about the suspicious black sedan or that someone had broken into her house a couple of times searching for something. She knew it would only cause him to worry. Still, with no mention of it from her, he didn’t seem to be able to leave without warning her again.
Emily wished she knew what her stalker was after. All she could do was speculate that it had something to do with Evan and the surprising things she had recently uncovered about him, particularly the suspicious handgun, a Beretta pistol, she had found hidden in his secret safe deposit box.
Sadly, she watched as Colin drove out of sight. She missed him already. As she stood on her sunny porch thinking about him, Emily wondered when he would be able to return for good. Saying good-bye for the second time was excruciating. She wiped another tear that trickled down her cheek and then took a long, deep breath.
With resignation, she lumbered across the porch and stuck her key in the lock. As she unlocked her front door, she glanced up and down her street to be certain she and Colin hadn’t been followed back to her house.
Seeing no one out of the ordinary, she slipped into her house and kicked off her shoes by the door. She pulled her handgun out of her purse and carefully crept back to the kitchen, peeking around corners, with her weapon poised to shoot. Emily was determined not to be a victim, and she silently reminded herself of that fact.
I know how to handle a gun—I teach self-defense classes—I can take care of myself.
By the time she reached the kitchen, she was reasonably certain she was safe and alone. Setting her purse and gun down on her breakfast bar, she noticed an opened envelope lying on top of a stack of mail. It had come the day before, but she had set it aside because she was headed out to the going-away party.
Perching herself on a barstool, she pulled the folded paper out of the envelope. Addressed to Evan Parker, it was a letter from a storage facility alerting her late husband that his next year’s rent on the unit was due. She hadn’t been aware Evan had a storage unit.
Her thoughts flew to the unidentified brass key she had found in his safe deposit box a couple of months before. She still hadn’t figured out what it opened. But now, with this letter coming from the storage facility, she wondered if it would open a padlock on that unit—Evan’s unit.
Having seen Colin off, her day was wide open, and rather than spend it missing Colin, she hopped in her car and headed to the storage facility to check it out. It was only mid-morning—she’d have plenty of time to search through whatever Evan had hidden there.
Making sure she wasn’t being followed, she kept a sharp eye on her rearview mirrors as she made a series of three right turns in the center of town. Since no car appeared to be tailing her, particularly not a black one, she drove to the storage company on the edge of town.
While she was driving, her phone began to ring, and she dug it out of her oversized leather handbag that lay on the passenger seat, noticing it was one of her
friends. “Hey, Maggie.”
“Just checkin’ in,” Maggie said. “Don’t forget to pick Molly and me up at noon at Camille’s place.”
Emily had promised to take Maggie and Molly, Camille’s teenage daughter, to the airport to catch a flight for their trip to Hawaii. Maggie had invited Emily to go with her, but Emily was not ready to leave her home exposed to additional break-ins and searches, especially when she was uncovering more and more clues to her late husband’s true identity. So instead, Maggie invited seventeen-year-old Molly, the only other single female she was close to, as an early graduation gift.
What a pair they would make on the beaches of Hawaii, Emily thought. Maggie was a beauty—a southern-belle fitness queen, lightly tanned with flowing blonde waves and dazzling blue eyes. Even in her mid-thirties, she would do her bikini justice. Molly, on the other hand, was a pretty girl, tall and slender with fair skin, long red hair, and shockingly deep emerald-green eyes. The red hair had come from her mother and the green eyes courtesy of her father, but the I-take-no-crap-from-anyone attitude was all her own.
“I didn’t forget. I’ll be there at noon.”
“Did y’all get Colin off to California this mornin’?” Maggie asked.
“I did. We went out for breakfast first, then I sent him on his way.”
Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to spill the beans about the storage unit yet. There was plenty of time to do that later if it came to anything.
“And did he say those three little words y’all’ve been waitin’ for?”
Emily could hear the curiosity in Maggie’s voice and knew her well enough to know it was killing her to find out. “As a matter of fact, he did.”
“Yay!” Maggie squealed. “I’m so happy for y’all, Em. I just knew it. I told Camille he’d say those little gems before he left.”
“Actually, he told me last night at the going-away party. He promised he’d move heaven and earth to come back to me.”
“Oh, how romantic,” Maggie gushed. “Words like that make my heart melt. No one deserves to be happy more than y’all, after all y’all have been through.”
Emily swore she could hear a quiver of sadness in Maggie’s voice. As sweet and lovely as Maggie was, she had terrible luck with men—one loser after another. Emily hoped Maggie’s luck would change soon—for the better. “So do you, Maggs.”
“I’d better let y’all off the phone and finish packin’, or I won’t be nearly ready when it’s time to come and pick us up.”
CHAPTER 2
“Let’s see…four fifteen, four sixteen, four seventeen,” Emily muttered as she read the numbers on the door to each of the outdoor storage lockers. “Here it is, four eighteen.”
Nervously anticipating what might be behind it, she stood for a moment, staring at the door. Then with a held breath, she shoved the brass key into the padlock and exhaled loudly when it fit perfectly.
She twisted the key and the lock slipped a bit as it released. A wave of excitement poured through her as she unhooked the lock from the metal loop and swung the door open.
Exposed before her was a small storage area, maybe five feet wide and twelve feet deep. She had brought a six-inch pocket flashlight, suspecting there may be no lights. It proved useful toward the back of the unit, because the bright sunshine only illuminated the space closest to the entrance.
Emily stepped in and flashed the narrow beam around. Along one wall were several steel shelving units, three shelves high, each one holding white cardboard banker boxes. She stared at the boxes. What could Evan possibly have been hiding in them?
Several months ago, when she discovered the first clue that he was not who he said he was, she had been devastated. They had been married for five years and she’d thought they were blissfully happy. But months after his death, she began to uncover evidence that he was someone else entirely. Rather than a private investigator, she had eventually learned that he was a CIA operative with a vast array of secrets.
After many tears, and sleepless nights, she had finally gotten control of her emotions and accepted that his lies were to protect her. With Colin’s help, and the aid of her close friends, she was able to move on from her grief, but the mystery of who killed her husband still hung over her. Emily would never be able to completely close the door on that chapter of her life, and fully commit herself to a new relationship, until the mystery of Evan’s murder was solved.
With the flashlight poised in one hand, she pulled the snugly fitting lid off one of the boxes with the other, causing a faint cloud of dust to waft up. She batted at the air to clear the dust and peeked into the box.
Fingering through the old files and papers, she hoped she wouldn’t have to rummage through every single document in each and every box before she would discover anything of value—fortunately, there were only seven of them.
Emily wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find in this storage place, but a bunch of boring-looking file boxes was definitely not it. Unlike Evan’s secret safe deposit box that was filled with fake passports and bundles of cash, along with a suspicious gun, these boxes only seemed to contain files, papers, and old photos.
No matter what lay in the boxes, though, they had to contain something Evan didn’t want anyone else to see. So, for the next two hours, she searched through the boxes, folder by folder, page by page.
Most of the documents looked like photocopies, as if Evan had copied them to keep a set of his own files on his CIA assignments. She wondered why he felt he needed protection—or was he searching for proof of something? Documentation to back up his actions, maybe?
Along with the copied documents, there were photos of locations and people, as if he had snapped the candid shots as his target was meeting with someone, or clandestine pictures showing what his mark was up to.
Emily searched for more photos of the mysterious brunette—the one standing with Evan in the single snapshot kept hidden in his safe deposit box—but she found none. Her identity had plagued Emily since the first time she’d discovered the picture of this woman snuggled in Evan’s arms.
Digging for another picture of her husband with the dark-haired beauty was now more out of curiosity than anything else. After reading the hidden note she had found from Evan, she knew the woman had been a girlfriend, accidentally killed in the crossfire during a shootout in which Evan was involved.
But why did he keep only that photo—the photo of the two of them—hidden in the safe deposit box? Why not here with the others?
After spending a couple of hours methodically pouring over the contents of a few of the boxes, she realized it was time to take Maggie and Molly to the airport. As she was sticking some files back into one of the boxes, a small, black-leather notebook slipped out from between a couple of the folders and smacked onto the cement floor.
“How did I miss that?”
Emily crouched down and picked it up. She flipped through it, recognizing the handwriting as Evan’s. It was an address book with cryptic names and numbers written in it.
She read a few of the names, but then her gaze landed on an entry that said, Handler, Izzy, with a phone number. Was Handler someone’s name or was it someone’s position?
Izzy.
Suddenly, she recalled Evan referring to Isabel as Izzy. Was Isabel’s maiden name Handler? Or was Evan noting that Izzy was his CIA handler, writing that information in the book as if that was the person’s full name—Izzy Handler—to throw anyone who got possession of this book off the track. Or was it an alias? Or code?
Maybe she should take the boxes back to her house? Then Emily’s breath caught in her throat. The person in the black sedan, possibly a BMW, could very likely be the one who had broken into her home, and maybe they were looking for something in these boxes, like this book.
Giving her head a shake for being temporarily oblivious to the mysterious stalker, Emily peeked out of the storage unit to see if anyone was watching her now. She glanced around but saw no one.
She di
dn’t have any more time to look through the black book at the moment. Maggie and Molly would be waiting for her. So she tucked the book, and the flashlight, in her purse for later. She’d have to give the Izzy question some more thought.
CHAPTER 3
While Maggie and Molly were winging their way to Hawaii, Emily returned to the storage unit, keeping an eye out for any tail. Page by page, she again foraged through each box, reading about her late husband’s exploits as a secret agent at the CIA. Though some of the comments were abbreviated, she found she could decipher most of the text, but she wondered when she kept seeing orders for him to handle someone with extreme prejudice. What exactly did that mean?
He appeared to have been in some very dangerous situations. She didn’t know he could be so bold and cunning, so physically aggressive. The Evan on those pages was not the man she had fallen in love with.
She had grieved for him, mourned the loss of their love and life together, for more than six months when the series of accidental discoveries led her to realize the man she had married was not who he said he was. So she really shouldn’t be surprised now. She was grateful, though, that she hadn’t uncovered these things earlier on. It would have been more than she could handle, piled on top of the shock and sorrow of his death.
These discoveries, as painful as they were, forced her to dig down deep and become a stronger woman, which presented her with the opportunity to follow in his footsteps as a private investigator. The things she had learned as she had covertly helped Evan on various cases had given her the skills.
Her thoughts drifted back again to the note he had left for her, folded and concealed in the center of one of the bundles of cash he had secreted away in the safe deposit box. He had to have known she would eventually find his hidden stash, because the note was addressed to her. In it, he explained who he really was and why he did what he did.
Studying the case files, reading about the operations, Evan’s face came to her mind—his sandy blonde hair, his piercing blue eyes, that sexy off-centered smile that she loved so much. Even though that note said his real name was David Gerard, she knew she would always think of him as Evan Parker.
3 The Chain of Lies Page 2