Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One

by Michelle St. James

  Julia had gotten used to being on cleanup duty, picking up the pieces from Elise’s latest breakup or pink slip, giving her an all too familiar pep talk until someone else came along to distract her from the work of dealing with her shit.

  Their routine was so tried and true that Julia stopped thinking about it after awhile, stopped hoping Elise would get it together. Somewhere along the way, she’d accepted the situation for what it was, tried to live her own life while shielding Elise from the most catastrophic fallout of her fragility.

  Julia hadn’t thought twice about turning down a lucrative job offer with a start-up in California — leaving her sister to her own devices was impossible — but as soon as Elise started seeing Seth, Julia had had a feeling this time was different.

  Elise had been over the moon, her melancholy replaced by the euphoria of love. It was a euphoria Julia recognized, but this time, Elise had come home with eight-hundred dollar shoes and three-thousand dollar handbags, her ears and neck winking with diamonds.

  She’d been coy when Julia asked for details, but something hadn’t smelled right, and eventually Julia had taken matters into her own hands and done some snooping on Elise’s phone and computer.

  She’d felt bad at first. Elise was twenty-four years old, a grown woman deserving of privacy. Julia had soothed herself by ticking off all the times she’d come to Elise’s rescue, then stopped feeling bad the minute she’d discovered the name of Elise’s new love interest: Seth Campbell.

  It had taken some digging. Campbell was careful not to use his name in their text messages, and Elise was equally careful. But Julia had gotten good at digging, and one clue had led to another until she’d finally discovered the name virtually everyone in the developed world knew, a name proving that her baby sister was seeing the man responsible for the development of a technology company that had revolutionized the world.

  He was twenty years older than Elise, although he’d been a wunderkind when he’d launched his first company. And while it was obvious from their text messages that he and Elise were hot and heavy, Julia couldn’t help wondering about the secrecy.

  The whole thing had felt off.

  Then Elise’s behavior had gotten increasingly erratic, her old sadness seeping into her eyes. She’d disappeared for days at a time, seemed jumpy whenever she was in the apartment they shared, became careful about locking doors and keeping her phone with her so Julia couldn’t check it.

  Julia hadn’t been as surprised as she should have been when Elise stopped coming home at all. It had been a sick kind of relief — the other shoe dropping, proof that Julia had been right to worry, permission to do something tangible.

  Except she didn’t know what to do. She’d left messages with Campbell’s secretary but none of them had been returned. She’d showed up at his office and had been told Campbell was out of the country on business. Finally she’d started casing his house, determined to confront him about her sister.

  Julia had only grown more desperate in the two weeks Elise had been missing. The police were half-hearted in their search, their attitude making it clear they thought someone with her sister’s history (previous disappearances from which she’d returned safely, erratic behavior, recreational drug use) was more likely to have left of her own accord, or even to have committed suicide.

  And then there was the online research, research that had taken Julia from casual mentions in obscure kink forums about Campbell’s sexual predilections to more sinister rumors — rumors of sex trafficking and high-end brothels that discreetly catered to the world’s richest and most powerful men.

  It was nothing solid, nothing she could use to motivate the police, something she found out when she mentioned it to Pat Jankowski, the detective assigned to her sister’s case. She’d seen the look in his eyes, knew he thought she was crazy, that she and her sister were both crazy, that it was in their blood.

  Except Julia had always been the levelheaded one, the one who put herself through school to earn a degree in network security even though she didn’t exactly love math (math was a surprisingly large part of anything having to do with computers). The one who dealt with their mother when she was impossible, which was most of the time. The one who dealt with their stepdads — plural — none of whom were anything to write home about.

  Julia was the one who found their first apartment together, secured with her credit score because Elise’s was shit. At thirty-two years old, she didn’t have much, but she saved exactly ten percent of her income every month, even when her income as a freelance network security specialist meant she had to eat ramen for dinner every night. She paid her bills on time and helped her gramps and looked after her sister even when it didn’t seem fair.

  All of which was why it made her want to scream when Detective Jankowski looked at her like she was insane.

  Her sister was in trouble. She knew it the way she knew when she was coming down with a cold, the way she knew when her mother was about to fall head over heels for another loser, the way she knew when lightening was about to rip open the sky.

  “Morning.”

  She looked up at the sound of the voice, coming from an older man in suit and tie holding a briefcase as he walked past. “Morning.”

  She looked for recognition or interest in his eyes, for some clue that he knew who she was, what she was doing lurking two doors down from Seth Campbell’s house.

  But he was just a man headed to work for the day, the camel colored trench coat draped across his bony shoulders disappearing in the crowded street. The sidewalks and roads had filled up in the time that she’d been thinking about Elise, and she wondered if she’d missed something, if maybe Seth had made a beeline from his brownstone when she wasn’t looking.

  She dismissed the possibility. She’d become so attuned to movement at the front of the brownstone she was sure she would have been pulled from her reverie if there had been any activity near the house.

  She sighed and pushed off the side of the alcove, adjusting her messenger bag as she stepped onto the sidewalk. She wished she could wait around during the day, but the boutique would be open soon, and it was doubtful Seth would lead her to her sister in broad daylight.

  The familiar pit of worry opened up in her stomach as she thought about what she’d read about Seth online. She wished there was someone — even one person — she could tell. But she had no close friends to speak of, hadn’t dated anyone since her lukewarm relationship with Brady Stewart had ended over a year ago, according to him because she “didn’t seem into it.”

  She hadn’t been, although she hadn’t said it at the time. She’d been relieved when he finally ended it. It was cowardly, but she didn’t have the energy to deal with it herself.

  She thought of her grandfather. He was the closest thing she had to a best friend, someone who listened without judgement both when she railed against her mother — his daughter — and when she made excuses for the inexcusable.

  He would be pissed if he knew she was keeping the rumors she’d heard about Seth from him, but she hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to tell him. It’s not that he was fragile — a former Army drill sergeant, he’d never lost the rigid bearing and stoic demeanor that had been necessary for him to do his job for thirty years.

  It was the opposite thing she was worried about: that he would take matters into his own hands. That he would confront Seth with guns blazing. That he would take no prisoners until he found his granddaughter alive.

  He’d been the one constant in their lives. Their dad had left before Elise had been born — Julia hardly remembered him — and their mother had never hesitated to dump them at Grampa’s whenever she had a date, which was often.

  But the three of them had banded together through the shit show of Julia and Elise’s childhood, and their childhood sleepovers had morphed into Sunday dinners and snowstorm chess matches, days on the golf course where he patiently worked on their swing, never minding when they were overly eager to quit in favor
of lunch in the clubhouse. The shelves of his small house groaned under the weight of his books, and he’d been the one to introduce Julia and Elise to the Bronte sisters and Virginia Woolf, to James Baldwin and Aldous Huxley, to Plato and Descartes.

  He would have killed anyone who hurt either of his granddaughters, and Julia needed her gramps too much to risk him ending up dead or in prison.

  She watched the sidewalks fill with people on their way to work and parents walking their children to school. They looked like people who came from nice homes with responsible parents, people whose siblings weren’t constantly circling the drain of self-destruction, but who really knew? The older she got, the more she became convinced that everyone had secrets, that everyone had secret shame.

  She mulled over the problem of Seth as she waited for the all-clear to cross a busy intersection. She couldn’t keep her vigil outside his house forever. Eventually she’d be spotted. Either that or she’d have to admit that he wasn’t going to lead her to Elise.

  She considered the other possibility: that something else had happened to Elise. That she was dead.

  Her stomach flipped, her chest squeezed by a mighty hand. She pushed the thought away. Elise was alive. She knew it, could feel her sister in her bones, the same way her own arm had ached on the day Elise had broken hers trying to follow Julia up the tallest oak among the trees rimming their grampa’s wooded property.

  Still, she would have to find another lead soon. Her work was suffering, crammed into the few hours between her fitful sleep every morning after her stakeout and the start of her next shift outside Seth’s brownstone.

  She would give it one more night. One more night for Campbell to lead her to Elise.

  Then she would be back to square one.

  3

  Ronan stood at the head of the conference table, getting a read on John Taylor as Mark Reilly, their security guard and de facto receptionist, led him into the room. Ronan forced himself to hide his surprise. He’d seen pictures of Taylor in the background they’d compiled on him prior to agreeing to the meeting, but the more recent photos didn’t do him justice.

  He was old — seventy-eight to be exact — but his bearing was as commanding as it was in the photos taken of him when he’d been in the Army, his spine ramrod straight, chin daring anyone to fuck with him.

  “Mr. Taylor,” Ronan said, walking to meet him. He held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He caught a slight tremor in the man’s wrist in the moment before he shook Ronan’s hand with a firm grip. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “Of course.” Theirs was a referral-only business, one that required them to be highly selective in the prospective clients they agreed to meet and even more selective in the ones they agreed to work for. Ronan introduced Nick and gestured to the empty chairs around the table. “Please have a seat. Can we get you anything? Coffee? Water? Tea? Something to eat?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Ronan nodded and returned to his seat at the head of the table. He was preparing to speak when Declan stepped into the room with his hair damp, his shirt unbuttoned, and his tie loose around his neck.

  Ronan scowled and felt a spark of admiration for John Taylor when he saw the same disapproval on the old man’s face. His information about John Taylor was limited to what he’d read in the background information, but he already knew Taylor didn’t suffer fools.

  “Nice of you to join us,” Ronan said. He wasn’t about to cover for Declan, even in front of a client. He might as well have stayed home. Arriving late and disheveled made them all look unprofessional.

  “Sorry,” Declan said, his tone breezy. “Traffic.”

  Ronan thought of the redhead who’d been splayed naked in Declan’s bed when he went to wake up his younger brother two hours earlier, contemplated calling him on the lie, then let it go.

  John Taylor might approve of Declan’s public humiliation, but it still wouldn’t be professional.

  Nick’s expression was impassive. Nick’s high standards applied only to himself and Ronan. Declan’s behavior didn’t push his buttons like it did Ronan’s.

  Ronan returned his attention to Taylor. “You mentioned your granddaughter in our correspondence?”

  Taylor nodded. “Elise. She’s been missing for two weeks.”

  “And you seemed certain she wouldn’t have left voluntarily?”

  Ronan expected Taylor to be angry by the question. Most people would be. Instead his expression hardened. “Elise has not had an easy time of it. Neither of my granddaughters have. Their mother — my daughter — well, I’m sorry to say she’s a fool. The worst kind of fool, the kind who will trade her children’s happiness for her own.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ronan didn’t have children, couldn’t imagine having them, but he could imagine what it must have cost John Taylor to admit such a thing about his own daughter.

  He thought of his own father, in denial about Erin’s drug addiction right up until they got the call from the hospital about her last overdose.

  “Was Elise involved in drugs, Mr. Taylor?” Nick asked.

  Ronan looked at his brother, not entirely surprised Nick had voiced the thoughts Ronan had kept to himself. They annoyed the shit out of each other, but when push came to shove, they were brothers.

  Family. It was the only thing that lasted.

  John Taylor set his mouth in a thin line. “Nothing out of the ordinary for today’s kids. Elise struggled with many things, but she wasn’t an addict that I know of.”

  Ronan made a mental note of the weak denial. How many twenty-four-year-old women told their grandfather they used drugs?

  “What about that you don’t know of?” Ronan asked. Taylor’s eyes flashed as he opened his mouth to protest, and Ronan held up a hand to stop him. “These are questions we have to ask, Mr. Taylor. I know they’re unpleasant, and I’m sorry for that.”

  Taylor nodded. “I’m close with my granddaughters, but you’re right that Elise might not have told me if she were in trouble with drugs. She would, however, have told her sister.”

  Ronan glanced down at the iPad in front of him, his eyes scanning the background they’d done on John Taylor. “That would be Julia?”

  Taylor nodded. “Julia and Elise are close. They even share an apartment. Julia looks out for Elise, always has, and Elise comes clean with her sister in the end.”

  “And Julia passes that information onto you?” Declan asked.

  Ronan had almost forgotten Declan was there. In spite of his rough start that morning, his eyes were alert. Ronan had no doubt he hadn’t missed a thing — spoken or otherwise — that had occurred in the meeting.

  “I like to think so,” Taylor said. “Julia and I work together to take care of Elise.”

  “And Julia believes someone has kidnapped Elise?” Ronan flipped through the files on his iPad, stopping at the picture Taylor had sent over of Elise. She was a beautiful young woman, with light brown hair, brown eyes, and the subtle asymmetry that often makes women especially beautiful — nose a tad too thin, deep set eyes, full lips.

  He didn’t mention the other possibility — the possibility that Elise was dead — but it was all too real. It happened every day to girls like Elise Berenger.

  “That’s right,” Taylor said. “She’s the one who found out Elise was seeing Seth Campbell.”

  The name lit a match of anger in Ronan’s belly. Until they’d been contacted by John Taylor, Ronan had assumed Seth Campbell was like all the other billionaire tech babies in the world — nerds who’d gotten lucky by being born in an age when an understanding of technology could make them rich beyond their wildest dreams in under five years.

  Ronan had nothing against nerds. He just didn’t think they deserved to be feted while doctors and teachers and grunts on the battlefield contributed to the betterment of man for wages that barely covered their mortgage.

  More importantly, he knew now that Campbell was no innocent nerd. The short backgro
und they’d done on him in preparation for the meeting with John Taylor had turned up all kinds of nasty rumors: an interest in snuff films (though Ronan hadn’t been able to turn up any proof), connections with shady international businessmen accused of running trafficking operations, far-reaching wealth obscured by an awful lot of shell companies for a guy supposedly running a legitimate operation.

  “But you have no proof that Campbell is responsible for Elise’s disappearance,” Nick said.

  “I don’t need proof,” Taylor said. “Elise was seeing Campbell, he was giving her gifts, expensive gifts. She became depressed and secretive, she disappeared.”

  “We aren’t an investigative firm,” Ronan said.

  Taylor’s eyes skipped to the iPad in front of Ronan. “It looks to me like you’ve done more investigating than the police.”

  “It’s an ancillary offering, a necessary part of the services we offer.”

  “Those are the services I’d like to contract,” Taylor said firmly.

  Ronan thought about how to phrase the next question. They had the house and office swept for listening devices every morning, and every guest was patted down for a wire, but they were still careful. Surveillance had become increasingly sophisticated, and while they had champions in BPD — few people were more frustrated by a failing in the justice system than the men and women in blue who did their part to make it happen — no one would be able to help them if the Feds got involved.

  “I understand,” Ronan said. Taylor seemed to grasp the need for discretion, but it didn’t hurt to let the man know Ronan was reading him loud and clear. “However, I’m not sure how we can provide said services without knowing the identity of Elise’s kidnappers with certainty.”

  Without knowing for sure she didn’t leave of her own accord.