When they’d gone through Peter’s belongings a couple of weeks ago, they’d found exactly what she had . . . nothing. But as Charlene sat rigid on the chair opposite Chapel, the intensity in his eyes scared the hell out of her.
She’d been scared before. Like the time she and her father had slept in the bus shelter because they’d missed the coach. They’d spent the whole night guarding their life’s belongings. She’d been about twelve at that time.
After that night, Peter made her learn self-defense. Each new town brought a new technique. Karate. Taekwondo. Kickboxing. Even sprinting. Fight or flight had been their mantra.
Charlene could drop a man to his knees and break his finger if the situation warranted. Yet the one and only time she’d needed her self-defense techniques, she’d frozen. She’d allowed that woman to plunge the knife.
The knife had penetrated her father’s flesh with such ease, she hadn’t believed it’d happened. It was only when the blade was yanked out and blood had splattered across the white tablecloth that she’d comprehended what the attacker had done.
He’d died because Charlene had failed.
She’ll never forgive herself for that, and her only chance at some kind of resolution was to get answers. But the look on Chapel’s face had her fearing that the answers would be as shocking as the murder itself.
After waiting long enough for Chapel to initiate the conversation, she opened her palms. “I assume you have news for me?”
His shoulders rose with a deep breath. It was almost like he was steadying himself for a funeral speech, and his heavy pause only instilled greater dread. He let a breath out in a big huff. “Yes. But you’re not going to like this, so . . . so just hear me out.”
The hairs on her neck prickled. For the hundredth time since her father’s death, she couldn’t believe this was happening. They’d always been careful. They never went to neighborhoods that were notorious for trouble. Always checked a room upon entering. Never mixed with the wrong crowds. Whatever Chapel was about to tell her had to be wrong. Her father was a good guy, of that she was certain. Charlene rubbed her clammy hands together and wedged them between her knees. “Okay.”
Chapel pushed the end of his pen onto his notepad. The click that hid the nib was like a whip crack in the windowless room. “We’ve gone through every record we can get our hands on—Social Security, tax returns, employee records, birth records, housing, traffic violations—and, well, there’s no record of Peter Harrison Bailey.”
He looked at her as though she’d understand the implication of his statement. She didn’t. “And?”
“And.” He lowered his eyes, and then after an exaggerated blink, he met her gaze. “We don’t think that’s his real name.”
“What? What’s his real name?”
“We don’t know. But, Charlene, there’s something else.”
The finality in his voice had her heart exploding. “What?”
“You know how we took your blood sample?”
“Yes.”
“Charlene . . . Peter isn’t your father.”
“Are you crazy? Of course he’s my father.”
“DNA doesn’t lie, Charlene. I know this is hard to comprehend, but you’re not related to Peter. Or whoever he is.” He looked like he’d swallowed his tongue.
“What?” she snapped.
“There’s more.”
Charlene swallowed the tang of bile in her throat. “What?”
“There are no birth records for you either, Charlene. We don’t think Charlene Bailey is your real name either.”
“What? How can that be?”
“Well . . . we do have a theory.” A line of sweat trickled down his temple.
He paused.
She waited.
“We think you’re a kidnap victim.”
His words pulled the pin on a memory grenade, and shocking images from twenty-two years ago exploded across her mind.
Peter squeezing her to his chest while he ran through the jungle.
Clutching his neck as shouts and explosions boomed behind them.
Hiding in a rusty old car until daybreak.
It was like it’d happened yesterday.
She clamped her jaw, refusing to voice the memories she’d been repressing for decades. Chapel’s eyes drilled into her, and the longer she paused, the more severe his gaze grew.
“That’s impossible.” She finally found her voice. “He loved me. I loved him. He was the best father anyone could ask for.”
“We’re going through our records, and there are several abductions that fit the time frame for your age. Provided you are twenty-eight, that is.”
“What?”
“Well, if he’s lied about who you are, then there’s every likelihood your date of birth is not correct either.”
Charlene stood and strode to the other side of the room. “You’ve lost your mind. My father never laid a finger on me. He loved me.” Her voice quivered.
Chapel rubbed his hands on his pants. “We understand that, but things aren’t adding up. Charlene, please, just sit and hear me out.”
It was a long moment before she convinced her feet to move. But when she did, every step toward him was like walking through wet cement. She eased onto the sunken sofa and wedged her hands beneath her knees, willing them to stop shaking.
“We’re going to need to document everything you remember, try to slot the pieces into place.”
She stared at the blue dolphins painted on her favorite coffee mug. They’d bought that on the Santa Monica Pier, about ten years ago. A very public place. If she was a kidnap victim, why was she allowed to be out in the community? Surely, he’d have kept her in hiding. Charlene had been allowed to come and go as she pleased.
Charlene straightened her shoulders, glared at Chapel, and shook her head. “You’re wrong.”
He nodded as if he’d been expecting this response. “I hope I am, but at this point in time, it’s the only theory we have to go on.”
Chapter Three
Noah Montgomery stood and twirled the chunky gold ring around what was left of his little finger. The simple habit, something he’d been doing for over twenty years, reminded him of just how powerful he was. He scanned the faces in the courtroom. Every single pair of eyes was looking at him. The front of the courtroom was his stage. He owned that stage.
He lowered his eyes to the defendant and waited until he turned to him. It took a few heartbeats, but when the diminutive fool finally met his gaze, it was obvious he knew he’d already lost.
The air in the room bristled with anticipation, and Montgomery absorbed the rush of adrenaline as he buttoned his designer suit jacket and strolled toward the jury. He smiled at the middle-aged woman in the front row with poorly applied makeup. “Ladies and gentlemen. The defendant, Mr. Robert Dobenheimer, is guilty of many things. And proving it is what we are here for. I promise you that, by the end of this trial, I will prove, with every ounce of certainty, that Mr. Dobenheimer is guilty of the charges laid against him.”
It was all an act. An act he’d been perfecting for thirty years. He was good at it too. So good, in fact, that it had become a double-edged sword. In the hundred and fifty-two cases he’d tried, the jury had failed to reach a verdict in his favor in just two cases. He didn’t consider them as failures as both of those defendants had committed suicide during the trial. In his mind, that proved they were guilty. But his impeccable record meant that he rarely went to court anymore. His cases were finalized with a stack of carefully worded documents and the flick of a gold pen.
Once he was hired as the plaintiff lawyer, most defense attorneys used his impeccable record to convince their clients to settle out of court. It wasn’t even a fraction as exciting as seeing the look in a defendant’s eyes when they knew they’d lost.
By midmorning, he’d presented enough evidence to have the defense attorney looking grayer by the minute. By the end of the day, Montgomery expected to have a settlement offer on his tabl
e overnight.
When the judge’s gavel thumped the sounding block for the last time that day, Montgomery turned to his client, and her doe-like eyes looked up at him. Mrs. Dobenheimer was both a lucrative client and a beautiful woman, representing his usual clientele perfectly. He’d seen that look on many of his elite Hollywood clients before. She idolized him. In Mrs. Dobenheimer’s eyes, Montgomery was a god—a god who’d saved her from the ongoing torture that was her marriage. And he’d make her a bucket load of money in the process. He had no doubt she’d be thanking him with more than just his obscenely expensive retainer very soon.
She placed her hand on his arm and ran her tongue over her plumped lips. “What happens now?”
He offered her his most becoming smile. “You go to your hotel and indulge yourself with a spa treatment and champagne, because I expect we’ll be receiving an offer from your husband before morning.”
“Oh.” Her long black lashes fluttered. “So soon.”
“You look disappointed.”
“Oh, no, it’s just, I’ve booked my suite for a week.”
“Well, darling, with the amount of money I expect you’ll be offered, you can buy your own suite at the Four Seasons.”
Her lip twitched like he’d said the magic words. “Would you like to come over and share a drink with me?”
“I do believe I would. Eight o’clock?”
She tugged her lip into her mouth, and her eyes glimmered. “Lovely.”
He indicated for her to walk in front of him, and as she squeezed past him and he placed his hand on the curve of her hip, her breath whispered from her lips. Montgomery knew the reaction well.
They strode from the courtroom and into the throng of hungry paparazzi. He eased his client in front of him, positioning her to stage the perfect photographs for tomorrow’s papers. After the customary wait for the reporters to settle, he pointed at the pretty blonde in the middle of the crowd. “Ms. Chantilly.”
Her eyes lit up, and she spoke into her microphone. “Mr. Montgomery, do you think you’re going to win?”
“I always win, Ms. Chantilly. You know that.” The reporter blushed at his comment.
“Mrs. Dobenheimer, did you know about all the affairs?”
“Mr. Clarkson,” Montgomery answered for his client, “we shall be saving our response to that question for a more appropriate time.”
After answering a series of redundant questions, he led Mrs. Dobenheimer through the crowd, making a point of eyeballing some of the regular reporters. It was important to keep them on his side.
Once the trial was over, Montgomery would assist Mrs. Dobenheimer in securing a lucrative six-figure sum to sell her exclusive story about her life as the wife of a philandering A-list movie star. Montgomery had the senior editors of all the major magazines and talk show hosts on speed dial. However, these days, they usually called him.
He paused at the limousine, and as Mrs. Dobenheimer eased into the car, Montgomery turned to scan the crowd behind the barrier. Four of his women were there. He spotted them easily. They were beyond stunning. Their pleading eyes proved they were hungry for him.
He liked to think they were hungry for more than just his money. But in reality, he didn’t care. They provided a service his wife couldn’t, so he needed them as much as they needed him. He nodded at Felicia, and the blonde showed a mixture of both joy and relief. The remaining three looked physically deflated at the rejection. But when he didn’t turn away, the threesome straightened, and their long lashes fluttered with eagerness.
He made them wait a full half minute before he inclined his head at Rochelle. Her lips broadened into a beaming smile, and he could already picture what those gorgeous lips would be doing very soon.
With the decision made, he stepped into the limousine and turned his attention back to his client. She didn’t hesitate to rest her hand on his thigh . . . a sure sign she’d be a wild cat in the bedroom. Once he’d delivered Mrs. Dobenheimer to her hotel and made promises to return in three hours, he eased back in his seat and rode the rest of the way to his office in silence. This was the part of the ritual he hated the most.
Once the adrenaline that’d fueled him in the courtroom ebbed away, his mind was left to wander. And it wasn’t a safe place to be. A niggling feeling that his entire world, one in which he was currently riding at the pinnacle of his legal career, would come crashing down, plagued his every thought.
But he’d been careful, and that stupid night some twenty-two years ago was barely a long-forgotten memory. They had no proof, he reminded himself as he twisted the gold ring around the stub of his little finger.
His finger began to throb, not the part that was left, but the missing part that’d been bitten off twenty-two years ago. It was a weird sensation to feel pain from a body part that was no longer there. But he did. It was like the bitch was haunting him.
The limousine pulled up outside the Solow Building on West 57th Street, jolting him back from his troubling thoughts. Mansour jumped from the driver’s seat and raced around to open Montgomery’s door.
“Shall I wait for you, Mr. Montgomery?”
Montgomery handed his trusted driver a hundred-dollar note. “Give me forty minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Montgomery strode from the limousine and into the office towers that’d been home to Montgomery and Pearce for nearly a decade. When he’d first rented the space, he’d had just one floor. Now, though, his firm owned and occupied four floors. His office took up one-third of the fiftieth floor, the top floor.
He entered his office, and the hint of sweet perfume confirmed that his girls had arrived before him. As he loosened his tie, he crossed the plush carpet to his private quarters.
Both Rochelle and Felicia were naked, and as they’d been trained to do, they’d started without him. His erection bounced to life as the striking blonde looked up from Rochelle’s abundant breast and ran her tongue over her lips.
He paused a few feet from them, and the two beauties curled off his oak desk and strode toward him holding hands.
The murky waters that’d threatened to tip him into a pitiful depression just ten minutes ago abated the second Felicia lowered to her knees in front of him.
Chapter Four
Three weeks of interrogation by Detective Chapel had them no closer to finding Charlene’s father’s killer. All it had done was fill the giant corkboard in Incident Room Four with cards detailing snippets of Charlene’s transient life. Chapel was a very patient man, and other than the occasional flicking with his pen, he remained relatively silent. Charlene had already spent hours spewing random memories of her father, or Peter, or whoever he was. Yet despite Chapel’s accusatory gazes, she was adamant that her life had been perfectly normal.
Normal . . . it was such an ambiguous word.
What was a normal family anyway?
Was it the couple with the two young children in which the wife knew her husband was having an affair with his boss?
Was it the newlyweds who’d raced off to have an abortion after discovering they were pregnant?
Was it the family of six who had both sets of grandparents living in trailers in their front yard?
Was it the middle-aged American man who’d ordered his young Thai wife over the Internet, then produced a set of triplets?
Was it the lonely wife who spent every night nursing her baby while praying her husband would return from Iraq in one piece?
Charlene had met every one of these supposed normal families. What she and Peter had was a loving, supportive, nurturing father-daughter relationship.
So what if nearly every six months of her life they’d moved hundreds or even thousands of miles to settle in a new town?
So what if their total assets could fit into three suitcases, two of them being hers?
So what if Charlene never finished school?
None of that mattered.
What mattered was that they loved each other. Peter taught her respect and
love. He taught her how to cook the best pancakes in the world and how to avoid a brain freeze when eating ice cream. He was there when she needed advice about the boy in the school band with the plump raspberry lips. He was the responsible parent who took her into Macy’s to buy her first trainer bra when she was thirteen. No topic was ever off limits, and he was the best father Charlene could have asked for.
She refused to believe Detective Chapel’s ludicrous claims.
Charlene stood and strolled to the board. They’d pinned the cards in a time line, with her most recent memories on the far right, and each day Chapel and his fellow officers had coaxed her back further. With each story she told, they added another card to the time line. Each afternoon, while she returned to her empty apartment and wondered what the hell she was going to do next, Chapel’s team would search for evidence to corroborate her stories.
A witness. A document. A record of some sort. Friends, coworkers, iconic places, bus companies, rental properties. Even names of restaurants they’d frequented and what she’d recalled either of them eating.
Some of the cards had pictures attached to them, like the elderly woman who’d shown her how to feed the rescued cats when she volunteered at the animal shelter in Boulder City, Nevada. Thankfully Mrs. Pierce had remembered her too. As did the young woman in Hot Springs, who’d been the same age as Charlene, who spent every night trying to stop her baby from suffering from colic. In the photo, the poor woman still had bags under her eyes that made her look middle-aged.
Some of the cards, however, had a big red question mark, indicating that more evidence was required. After a couple of weeks listening to Charlene rattle off certain unique details about each town, Detective Chapel expressed his surprise at her level of recall.
“It’s a game we play. We did play.” A pang of sorrow twisted in her heart.
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