Bound by Deception

by Trish McCallan

  “No. I’m sticking with hiring a private investigator.” If Rio was letting a decade old grudge get in the way of doing his job, she could do without his help anyway.

  “Okay.” Adele, stood there for a moment, staring out over the bay, her shoulders drawing tighter with each second of silence. “Can you forgive me? I’m so sorry. I really am. I regret that night more than you could imagine.”

  “I don’t know,” Becca answered honestly, watching the flinch twitch through her half-sister’s emaciated frame. What Adele and Adam had done that night had been unforgivable.

  She expected such obnoxious behavior from her half-brother. Adele though, Adele had been her friend. Even amid the tension that Rio’s arrival had shoved between them, she’d still trusted her half-sister. If Adam had handed her that Diet Pepsi, she never would have taken a sip. But she’d trusted Adele, at least until she’d woken up the next morning.

  “Jesus, Adele. You must have known how dangerous giving me that drink was. God knows what would have happened if Kenny hadn’t stepped in—” she broke off to shake her head. “What was in that thing anyway? I still don’t remember anything that happened during that party.”

  Adele caught her bottom lip with her teeth. “I don’t know. Adam just handed me the can and said to make sure you drank it.”

  “But you knew what it would do to me.” There was no doubt of that in Becca’s mind. The guilt had been plastered all over Adele’s face the next morning.

  “I knew,” Adele said on a shuddering breath. “I honestly don’t understand how I could have gone through with it. I’ve replayed that night over and over in my mind and I’m horrified every time.” She broke off to swallow hard. “Mother was constantly on me to make a play for Rio. And then Adam came along with this sure-fire plan to break you two up. I just didn’t stop to think.”

  Becca eyed her visitor. From her appearance, something appeared to be haunting Adele, maybe a portion of her stress was regret over her actions that night. Some of the petrified anger toward her half-sister softened. Adele hadn’t been any happier in that house than Becca had been. Lena had wielded her love as a club. Withholding her affection to force Adele into line, or showering Adele with endearments whenever Lena got her way. The woman had been a master at manipulating her family.

  Adele had spent as many nights crying into her pillow as Becca had spent crying into hers. What a miserable pair they’d been.

  “But I never wanted anything bad to happen to you, Becca. I hope you know that. I mean, sure, I wanted to break you and Rio up, but I didn’t want you to get hurt in the process. That’s why I asked Kenny to keep an eye on you and make sure nobody tried to take advantage of you while you were out of it.”

  That was news to Becca. “You asked Kenny to take care of me?”

  “Yeah.” Adele’s gaze flitted to Becca face and then away. “I told him you’d had too much to drink. Once Rio had come and gone, Kenny and I took you home to sleep it off.”

  “Adam left that part out of his account,” Becca said dryly. “I thought I’d gotten lucky with Kenny being at the party.”

  She knew the basics of that night from Adam’s self-satisfied rundown the next morning. How Rio had walked in, saw her making out with Kenny and walked back out again. She hadn’t believed Adam. Not at first, anyway. She’d been so certain Rio wouldn’t just leave her there. Apparently, she’d had more faith in Rio than Rio had had in her.

  Yes, she’d argued with him earlier. But he must have realized she wouldn’t turn to some other guy less than four hours later? Surely, he’d known her better than that? He must have known something was wrong?

  When her calls to him had gone unanswered, it had become crystal clear that either he hadn’t known her at all…or he hadn’t cared.

  “I know I have a lot to make up for. And I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to have anything to do with me.” Adele swallowed, following it up with a heavy sigh. She closed her eyes, her breathing hitchy. “But I’ve missed you.”

  Becca didn’t doubt that. The decades old calcified rage within her softened even more as suppressed memories trickled up. Adele had been such a cowed teenager, tormented by her sociopathic brother, and completely beneath her mother’s thumb. She’d been isolated, friendless. Lena had made sure of that. Prior to Becca’s arrival, she’d had no one to confide in. No one to run to for comfort when Adam or her mother were particularly nasty.

  She’d been an incredibly lonely and anxious girl.

  Considering her brittle physical exterior and the anxiety brimming in her eyes now, not much had changed over the past twelve years.

  Sighing, Becca pinched the bridge of her nose as sympathy whittled away at the resentment. “I don’t suppose it would hurt to remain in touch.”

  It was an easy compromise considering Becca lived in Olympia and Adele in San Diego. With twelve hundred miles, a manipulative brother and suffocating mother between them, she wouldn’t be spending any physical time with her half-sister anyway. At the most, she’d be out a few hours of phone time every month.

  Adele’s eyes brightened. “That would be so wonderful! Thank you! I promise, you won’t regret giving me another chance.”

  With no clue how to verbally respond to that heartfelt exclamation, Becca simply nodded.

  “How long will you be in town?” Animation lit Adele’s face and some of the anxiety disappeared from her eyes. “Maybe you can come to dinner tomorrow night.”

  Before Becca had a chance to decline the invitation—she wasn’t quite ready to break bread with the women who’d drugged her—Adele was talking again.

  “Of course, if you’re still here this weekend you could come to the wedding. It’s too late to include you in the wedding party, but I’d love to have you at the ceremony and reception.”

  Wedding?

  “Who’s getting married?” Becca asked, and watched the animation on Adele’s face drain into dread.

  “Why I am, silly,” Adele said, her voice climbing shrilly.

  Oookay…

  From the barely contained hysteria in her half-sister’s voice, there was some serious nuptial nerves at work here. Obviously, most of Adele’s stress was wedding related.

  “You’re getting married? Congratulations!” Becca tried for enthusiasm but could hear the worry in her tone.

  “Thanks,” Adele said, her expression more terrified than thankful. “He’s a friend of mother’s.”

  He? No name, just he… a friend of Lena’s…and the wedding, not my wedding? The wrongness tugged at her.

  Oh hell…

  She could feel it happening. The Hart family’s soul sucking dynamic was trying to drag her off the deep end again.

  Chapter Four

  Son of a bitch.

  Rio glared at the empty space on the top shelf of the B-block scaffolding. The empty space that was supposed to contain the two evidence boxes for the Rachel Blaine case. He glanced at the piece of paper Phil Perry, the day shift locker officer, had written the case number on—BL-49786.

  The number was right. The docking slot was right. The boxes just weren’t the fuck there.

  “Damnit.” Holding the paper up for quick referral, he slowly walked the length of the shelving unit, scanning each box as he passed. None of them carried the combination of letters and numbers he was looking for.

  A kernel of suspicion unfurled. Missing case files? Perhaps there was something to Rebecca’s claim after all. Or maybe the boxes had just been stuck in the wrong spot. After walking both sides of the shelving unit to no avail, he headed back to the evidence locker’s desk. Maybe Phil had given him the wrong case number.

  “Check the computer again,” he said, leaning a shoulder against the chain link that wrapped the front corner of the evidence locker, creating a cage of sorts for the locker officers. “The name was Rachel Blaine. Suicide.”

  “That’s what I gave you.” Phil’s graying eyebrows bunched over his nose. “What’s up?”

  �
�No boxes.” Rio shrugged. “Just empty space.”

  “Ah, hell.” After a few grumpy pokes at the computer’s key board, he turned the monitor toward Rio. “Rachel Blaine. Case BL-49786. Rack twelve, shelf five, far left.”

  Rio held up his slip of paper, comparing the numbers to those on the computer screen. They were the same. “Fuck. The boxes aren’t there. Who was the last person to check them out?”

  Phil turned the screen back around and leaned in closer, squinting. They really needed to wire in more lighting down here. With no windows, ratty lights and a constant war on mice, the place was too damn dark and dungeonesque.

  “It hasn’t been checked out since it was docked,” Phil finally announced, straightening with a hand to the middle of his back.

  “Who caught it?” Rio tried to get a look at the intake form, but the screen angle made it impossible to see.

  “Colin Foster,” Phil said, after another lean in and squint.

  “Great,” Rio scoffed.

  Didn’t that just figure? Foster had retired right around when Rio had joined the SDPD and died not long after. Rio blew out a frustrated breath. He could eighty-six the idea of running the case details down through the detective in charge.

  “Let me take a look.” Phil unlocked the cage door.

  Shrugging, Rio stepped aside. “Knock yourself out.”

  He followed Phil’s tall, lanky frame back to rack twelve and around the corner. They both stopped at the fifth shelf and looked up at the empty spot in the far-left corner.

  “Ah hell,” Phil said, a sour expression dragging at his long face. “I’ll start a sweep. Someone must have docked the boxes in the wrong place.”

  And nobody had stumbled across them in the past sixteen years? How likely was that? The knot of suspicion tickling his mind swelled even more.

  With an irritated grunt, Phil headed back the way they’d come. “At least it was a suicide, eh? Low importance level.”

  Rio grimaced. “The victim’s daughter found some new evidence. If the information is legit, it could mean COD wasn’t suicide. Which makes those boxes essential evidence.”

  “Ah hell.” Phil’s face darkened as if he were visualizing a sudden shit storm descending on him.

  If Phil didn’t find those boxes, the poor bastard was probably right, too. The brass didn’t like missing evidence. It made them look bad. Raised questions best not raised. That kind of a dust up rolled right down the ranks, and in this case, the locker jockeys would bear the brunt of the brass’s frustration. It was their job to log the evidence, check the evidence in and out and basically know where the fuck everything was twenty-four seven.

  Missing evidence would unleash a firestorm. Two full boxes of missing evidence—Rio shook his head in sympathy. It didn’t matter who the box had disappeared on. They’d all catch hell for this.

  “I’m going to have to update Captain Fuentes.” Rio tamped down his sympathy. He wasn’t putting his ass on the line by sitting on this development.

  Phil sighed, and ran his palm over his thinning hair. “Can you give me a couple hours? Let me sweep the place. Dollars to donuts those damn boxes are in here somewhere.”

  “An hour,” Rio said over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Call if they turn up.”

  While the missing evidence was disturbing, he still had access to Rachel Blaine’s autopsy report. The medical examiner’s office would have it on file. He’d know shortly whether the woman had been pregnant. When he reached his desk, he took a seat and grabbed the phone, dialing the M.E.’s office. Ten minutes later, he very carefully laid the handset back in its cradle and forced his white-knuckle grip to release the thick, black handle.

  Son of a bitch…

  He rubbed the back of his head, the kernel of suspicion ballooning into a fucking basketball. What were the odds that the evidence boxes and the medical reports would both go missing?

  Not very likely, those were the damn odds.

  Sure, evidence went missing off and on, most of the time thanks to human error. Files got labeled wrong, or boxes were docked wrong. He knew for a fact that human error was alive and thriving in San Diego. But two separate batches of evidence, from two separate departments, regarding the same closed case? Fuck, that was suspicious as hell.

  He scrubbed a hand down his face. He’d given Phil an hour to locate the missing boxes, and there was still thirty minutes on that timer. But this latest news canceled their agreement. This case was starting to reek, and he needed to alert his CO to that fact ASAP.

  After a quick call to Phil to make sure the boxes hadn’t been found, which they hadn’t, he explained the unraveling circumstances and warned the locker rat that he was headed to the Captain’s office. He hung up on Phil’s plea for that last half an hour. He’d warned the man. That was the best he could do.

  Fuentes’s office door was open. The sound of the police scanner the captain obsessively listened to drifted into the bull pen on bursts of nasal voices and static. Fuentes was a straight arrow. He put the job before politics and looked out for the men and women beneath his command. It was enough to float him some slack for his weird obsession with the scanner, and the collection of plants taking over his windowsill.

  Rio gave the glass a light rap and waited for his CO to turn from the window ledge and the leafy plant he was messing with.

  “What’s up?” Fuentes finally turned. But instead of facing Rio, he bent to pick up the small garbage pail next to his desk. Without waiting for Rio to enter the room, he returned to the window ledge and used the side of his hand to brush a pile of dried leaves into the trash can.

  Rio closed the door behind him, which brought the Captain around to face him with an enquiring look in his dark brown eyes. After detouring to the bookcase behind his desk to turn the scanner off, he turned to Rio and lifted his eyebrows.

  “I was asked to look into a closed case. Rachel Blaine. A suicide from sixteen years ago.”

  “I heard as much.” Fuentes’s brown eyes narrowed. “She was the mayor's side piece. Or so the rumor mill claimed. “Why the relook?”

  “The daughter found the victim’s diary, which included a fetal ultrasound. She’s certain her mother was pregnant, and that the pregnancy would have prevented her from suiciding. She thinks her mother was murdered.”

  “I don’t remember any talk of her being pregnant during the investigation.” Fuentes shook his head, his frown a little heavier. A distant look entered his eyes as though he were trying to remember back. “Was she?”

  “That’s the problem,” Rio said, his tone neutral. “The evidence boxes are missing. So are the M.E. reports.”

  Fuentes froze, and then his face hardened. “They’re both missing?”

  Rio nodded grimly. “Phil is doing a full sweep of the evidence locker. But the case boxes aren’t where they’re supposed to be. And the autopsy reports have disappeared from the M.E.’s computer system, along with the hard copy file.”

  “What about the daughter,” his CO asked slowly, his forehead wrinkling. “If there was a child on the way, does she know who the father would have been?”

  “She’s certain the father was Aaron Hart,” Rio said quietly.

  Fuentes swore softly, his gaze sharpening. “Moyer was chief back then. He and Hart were golfing buddies. Longtime friends.”

  “If Rachel Blaine was pregnant and Hart was the father, would Moyer have suppressed the evidence?” Rio asked.

  If Rebecca’s mother had been carrying Hart’s second child, that could be something he’d want to hide. The first time the news had broken of Hart’s illicit relationship with Rachel Blaine and the child it had produced, he’d come close to losing his career and marriage. Without doubt, a second foray into that landmine would have had explosive consequences.

  As for Moyer…he could personally attest to Chief Moyer’s willingness to pull strings for Aaron Hart. Although he hadn’t discovered it until years later, his application to the San Diego Police Department ha
d been personally expediated by Chief Moyer, who’d approved the application during the middle of a hiring freeze as a favor to Mayor Hart. Hart had requested Rio’s hiring as a favor to Rio’s grandmother. Without the interference of the two men, it would have been years before Rio had been hired by the SDPD.

  But approving a departmental hire was a far cry from suppressing evidence and burying a possible murder.

  “I don’t know,” Fuentes said, with a slow shake of his head. “If he was involved, he couldn’t have done it alone. The M.E., hell, even the case detective would have to be involved.” He paused to look at Rio. “Who caught the case?”

  “Colin Foster.”

  The captain’s grimace said it all. “Talk to the daughter. Find out who Rachel Blaine’s friends were. Who she worked with. Hell, who her hairdresser was. If she was pregnant, someone would know. I’ll talk to Moyer and Dr. Henderson.”

  Henderson had been the M.E. back then. He’d retired years ago. Rio nodded and turned toward the door.

  “Addario.” Fuentes’s grim voice echoed in the room. “Not a word of this to anyone. I’ll talk to Phil. Have him keep the missing boxes under wraps.”

  Rio nodded as he opened the door. Next order of business was to track down Rebecca. Find out everything she knew about her mother’s friends and what she remembered about the Hopewell estate. Had her mother been Hopewell’s sole employee at his La Jolla Farms estate? Or had other employees shared the house and grounds with them?

  If Rachel Blaine had been pregnant, she must have confided her condition in someone.

  Of course, interviewing Rebecca again meant…well, seeing her…spending time with her. Something his accelerating heart and respiration found far too titillating. He’d hoped to avoid a second encounter, hoped to starve this unwelcome attraction.

  Instead, he was walking right back into the fire.

  With a final goodbye, Becca hit the end call icon on her cell phone and dropped it in the side pocket of her purse.