Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One

by Michelle St. James

  Ronan left it unsaid. Taylor was adamant that his granddaughter wouldn’t disappear voluntarily. Ronan still wasn’t sure.

  “You would have to use your… ancillary services first, to determine the people responsible for Elise’s disappearance.” Taylor reached into his jacket and removed an envelope with a shaking hand. Ronan wondered if it was his imagination that the creases on the man’s face had deepened in the time they’d been discussing his granddaughter’s disappearance. “I’m prepared to pay for those services as well.”

  He slid the envelope toward Ronan.

  Ronan picked it up and did a brief calculation based on the cash bundled inside: somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred grand. Not nearly enough to cover their fees, but still an impressive amount of cash for a former drill sergeant on a fixed income. The old man must have cleaned out his savings.

  Ronan’s respect for Taylor expanded. Any man who would bankrupt himself to seek justice for his granddaughter was a man to be admired.

  “Call it a down payment,” Taylor said as if reading Ronan’s thoughts. “I can get you more.”

  Ronan glanced at Nick, then Declan, hoping to get a read on their thoughts, but his brothers were stone-faced.

  Ronan expected no less.

  He set the envelope down on the table and tapped it with his finger. He’d meant what he’d said to John Taylor: Murphy Intelligence and Security wasn’t a private investigative agency. They usually came into the equation after the missing persons case was solved, after a body had been found, after an assault report had been made to the police.

  They were the period at the end of the sentence, the epilogue to every story.

  But there was something about John Taylor that made him consider forgoing their usual rules. Maybe it was the man’s pride, his fierce determination to protect his granddaughters. More likely it was his desire to exact revenge on those who’d taken Elise Berenger in the first place. Ronan understood all too well the primal instinct to protect, to seek revenge as justice when that instinct was subverted.

  He had a sudden flash of memory: shadows in a dingy apartment, footsteps on the stairs, a creaking door, a rope pulled taut in his hands as he choked the life out of Matt Dooley.

  He blinked the image away and closed the envelope, setting it on the table and pushing it toward John Taylor. “We’ll get back to you in twenty-four hours.”

  Ronan already knew he would take the job, but it would be unprofessional to agree without consulting Nick and Declan. He was the company’s unspoken leader, although it wasn’t a role he sought or relished, but Nick and Declan were equal partners.

  Nick managed most of the money. Declan was a logistics expert. Both knew better than to make major decisions in those areas without consulting Ronan and each other. Their equal participation in the big stuff was the only reason the minefield of business and family worked.

  Taylor picked up the envelope, slipped it back into his jacket, and stood, wobbling on his feet before he steadied, straightening his spine. He looked at Nick and Declan, then focused his attention on Ronan.

  “Thank you for your time.”

  He moved toward the conference room door and rested his hand on the frame before turning to look Ronan in the eye. “I’d do it myself if I could.”

  Ronan saw the anguish in the old man’s face, felt it in his bones. Forty years ago, Ronan would have feared for the people responsible for Elise Berenger’s kidnapping.

  Hell, forty years ago, Ronan would have hired John Taylor for MIS.

  Ronan nodded. “I know.”

  Taylor stepped into the hall and disappeared beyond the glass windows that separated the conference room from the rest of the office space.

  “Jesus,” Declan said, standing to pour himself a cup of coffee from the cabinet loaded with drinks, fresh fruit, and pastries.

  Nick sighed. “Poor bastard.” He looked at Ronan. “What do you think?”

  Ronan looked down at the image of Elise Berenger, smiling into the camera from a beach, an expanse of water shimmering behind her. “I think I’m going to be out late tonight.”

  4

  The sun was slanting weakly across her bed when Julia woke up, and she reached for her phone, cursing when she saw that it was after three p.m. She’d set her alarm for noon, but her body must have rebelled, forcing her to catch up on the sleep she’d been missing while staking out Seth’s brownstone and in the week before that when Elise had first gone missing.

  She sighed and threw her legs over the bed, taking a minute to wake up before padding to the apartment’s tiny kitchen. She paused at Elise’s open bedroom door on the way, taking in the unmade bed, the withering succulents in the window sill that Elise stubbornly tried to grow even though she had to replace them nearly every spring when they died over the winter.

  Julia hadn’t touched the room since Elise’s disappearance, hadn’t even had the urge to make the bed or pick up the clothes on the floor like the mother of a sloppy teenager. It made her feel better to see Elise’s room in its natural state, like Elise might breeze through the door any minute, talking a mile a minute about her day and never once asking about Julia.

  She would have given anything for it to be true, would have taken a vow never to be annoyed by her sister’s self-centeredness again, if only Elise would come home.

  She breathed through the loss in her chest and continued to the kitchen where she started a pot of coffee. She took a shower while it brewed, dressed quickly in black jeans and another long-sleeve black T-shirt. She felt almost human as she toasted a bagel, spooned yogurt into a bowl, and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  She took everything to the kitchen table and opened her laptop, then spent the next thirty minutes answering client emails and checking security protocols on the four websites she was currently contracted to manage.

  When she was done she tabbed over to the web page that had been lurking behind her primary browser. The landing page was black except for a midnight blue door, half open and so faint against the dark background it was almost invisible.

  There was no text.

  She’d found the site surfing from rumor to rumor about Seth Campbell, following the clues in chat rooms, conspiracy theory sites, and kink forums until they were either debunked or petered out for lack of information.

  Stumbling upon the page in front of her had been nothing but pure doggedness and a dose of serendipity. She’d ended up at the site after coming across rumors of an underground network of international brothels for the affluent. This was as far as she’d gotten.

  She’d been trying to get in for the past five days, but the firewalls were airtight, the security way beyond her capability. She could set up security protocols for her clients, maintain and monitor them for potential breaches, close those breaches when they became obvious.

  Hacking was a whole other animal. Her knowledge was basic at best.

  The door taunted her, promising clues about Seth, about his role in Elise’s disappearance.

  The light in the room had faded while she’d been sitting in front of her computer — occupational hazard — and she glanced at the time on her computer.

  Shit.

  She was going to be late, and while Gramps wouldn’t mind, she wanted to be finished with dinner and back at her spot down the street from Seth’s brownstone as soon as the sun went down.

  It was her last night. She wanted to make the most of it.

  She put her dishes in the sink and grabbed her jacket, then headed for her Prius parked on the street.

  Her sister had never bothered to get a car. She was almost always with Julia when she left the city, and when she wasn’t, Julia always relented and let Elise take her car. It was one of Elise’s mottos, if an informal one: why pay for your own stuff when you can borrow from someone else?

  There was no malice in it, and Elise never saw herself as a freeloader. She just considered herself practical — why have two cars when one would do the job? — an assessmen
t that was strangely hard to refute in an actual debate. Julia should know — she’d tried and usually ended up feeling stupid and anal retentive.

  Julia pulled into traffic and headed for the highway. Her gramps lived in a semi-rural suburb forty minutes outside Boston, and Julia passed the time reviewing the details of Elise’s disappearance, replaying for the hundredth time everything from the night Elise had come home, her makeup streaked with tears, her hands shaking, to the next day when Julia had woken up to find her sister gone.

  She hadn’t taken her suitcase or any of her clothes, and she hadn’t left a note. She also hadn’t taken her phone charger, the one thing Julia kept coming back to whenever Detective Jankowski’s suspicions that Elise had left voluntarily started to get to her.

  Would Elise ever leave with just the clothes on her back? Doubtful, but maybe.

  Would she go on an extended trip without leaving a note for Julia? Even more doubtful, but still possible.

  Would she plan to be gone indefinitely and take her phone but leave her charger?

  Never.

  Elise was obsessive about her phone. She never went anywhere without it, and she took her charger with her if she was going to be gone more than two hours, a habit Julia constantly derided.

  What will happen if your phone dies? Will you die? Will the world stop turning? No, and it’s not going to die in two hours, El.

  Why take the chance? What if there’s an emergency? And why does it bug you so much? God, Julia… get off my ass, will you?

  The old argument replayed in her mind. It always ended the same way, with Elise stuffing her charger in her bag despite Julia’s arguments.

  Which meant Elise hadn’t expected to be gone long. She’d come in from her night out, probably with Seth. They’d obviously had some kind of fight given Elise’s tear-stained face. And then, for reasons Julia didn’t understand, Elise had decided to leave the house in the middle of the night and stepped out with her phone in hand, wearing her sneakers, probably with her pajamas, since they were the only clothing Julia found missing.

  She’d never come back.

  Julia sighed and sank deeper into the driver’s seat. What was she going to do if she couldn’t get answers from Seth? If he kept ghosting her? If she spent another fruitless night outside his brownstone?

  There was no way she was giving up on her sister, but she was at the end of her leads with no idea what to do next.

  The sun was hanging low in the sky when she pulled into the long driveway leading to her gramps’ house, a cottage that had been built in the early 1900s.

  Her gramps had bought the house when Julia was a kid, after the death of her grandmother. Later, when Julia was old enough, he’d told her that renovating it had been cathartic, that he’d thought of her grandmother with every new board and brush of paint, so that by the time he was finished, he felt like she was right there with him, like she’d been right there with him all along.

  Julia didn’t remember her grandmother very well, but she could feel her in the house, in the care with which her gramps had brought it back to life and the pictures he kept of her on the mantle, one with a candle flickering next to it, a candle Julia had never, not once, seen unlit when she’d come to visit.

  The clearing surrounding the house was dappled with shade, and she pulled up next to her grampa’s car and stepped out, shivering when she realized the air was a good ten degrees colder than when she’d left the city. She stuffed her hands in her pockets as she made her way to the porch.

  Her grampa had the door open before she reached the top step.

  “Come inside,” he said, his brown eyes shining with warmth. He wore a familiar cable-knit cardigan and pressed slacks, the same as every day, whether he had errands to attend to or was just reading by the fire. “It’s still chilly this time of night.”

  “You aren’t kidding.” Winter was officially over, but spring still felt a long ways away in the country.

  She leaned in to kiss his cheek and stepped into the warmth of the house that had been more a home to her than any of the apartments she and Elise had lived in with their mother.

  Shedding her jacket, she followed her gramps into the kitchen while they made small talk about the weather, the recent game between the Sox and the Yankees, and a stubborn squirrel who continued to foil her gramps’ efforts at keeping it out of the attic.

  The kitchen was fragrant with the smell of warm dough, and her stomach grumbled as her gramps closed his laptop, set it aside, and pulled two bowls down from the cupboard. He dished from a steaming pot on the stove.

  Julia’s mouth watered. “Is that…?”

  “It is,” her gramps said, setting a bowl in front of her. He put on an oven mitt and removed a baking sheet with four golden rolls from the oven.

  “Mmmm… beef stew. My favorite,” Julia said, leaning in to inhale the scent of cooked carrots and celery and the beef that was always fall-off-the-fork tender.

  Her gramps placed the rolls on a plate and they carried their bowls to the living room. Julia slipped off her shoes and settled on the couch with a sigh of comfort to eat. Sometimes it seemed like this was the only place she was ever really able to breathe.

  “Any news?” her gramps asked.

  Julia shook her head as she finished chewing. “And Detective Jankowski hasn’t returned my latest call. I’m beginning to think he’s already moved on.”

  She had a flash of Seth’s brownstone, the brick facade lit by the tasteful lanterns flanking the black door. She had the sudden urge to tell her gramps everything — about the website she couldn’t access, the nights she’d spent watching Seth’s house, hoping to get some sign about Elise.

  But she’d already told hm about some of the rumors online, although she’d distilled her description to “kinky sex stuff,” not wanting to get too graphic with her gramps, both because it was awkward and because she didn’t want to send him into even more of a panic about Elise. She’d seen the worry in his eyes, the shake of his hands that he’d tried to hide by stuffing them into his sweater.

  “What about you?” Julia asked. Her gramps had tasked himself with calling every area hospital every day to see if any young women had been brought in without identification over the previous twenty-four hours. He was already on a first-name basis with some of the hospital intake operators, a testament to both his dynamic personality and his persistence.

  “No one matching Elise’s description,” he said.

  She tore a roll in half and bit into it, mulling over their next move, assuming nothing came of her final night casing Seth’s brownstone. Elise’s cell phone was a dead end. The one thing they’d convinced Detective Jankowski to do was to get the phone company to release tracking information for Elise’s phone. The last ping had come the night of her disappearance, just two blocks away from the apartment. Someone had obviously destroyed the SIM card shortly afterward.

  “What we’re doing isn’t working,” Julia said. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  He reached for her hand and squeezed. She was always surprised by the strength of his grip.

  “Maybe it’s time to let the police do their work,” he said gently.

  She pulled her hand away. “Give up?”

  His eyes flashed. “Of course not.” He hesitated, his voice softer when he continued. “We’ve reached an impasse. You said that yourself. Sometimes you need a breather to see the things you’re missing.”

  She stared morosely into her stew. He could call it a deep breath all he wanted: anything short of doggedly searching for Elise felt like giving up. A week ago she would have sworn her gramps felt the same way. Now he seemed almost calm, as if he’d made peace with Elise’s fate, whatever it was.

  Her gramps reached for her hand again. This time she let him keep it.

  “We’re not giving up. I’ll keep calling hospitals. You’ll stay on Seth Campbell. But taking a breather might do more than banging our heads against the same brick walls,” he said.
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  A part of her had to acknowledge his wisdom, but she didn’t know if she could do it. Maybe he was right. Maybe searching for Elise the way they had been was pointless. Maybe banging her head against the wall of Elise’s disappearance was futile.

  But it was infinitely more satisfying than doing nothing.

  She didn’t know what would happen if she did nothing, didn’t know if she could tolerate the silence, the inactivity. Some days she thought the only thing keeping her sane was her search for Elise, the hope that it was somehow making a difference, that wherever Elise was, she knew she hadn’t been abandoned, knew that people loved her and were looking for her.

  “Have you talked to Mom?” Julia asked.

  “Yesterday,” her gramps said.

  “And?”

  He sighed. “You know your mother.”

  She dropped the rest of her roll in disgust. “Speaking of giving up.”

  “I know this is frustrating, honey,” her gramps said, “but we’re going to find her. I’m sure of it.”

  She looked into his eyes and was surprised to find that for once, he did seem sure. She didn’t know what had changed, but she wished she could have a little of it, because as much as she didn’t want to admit it, as much as she tried not to think about it, sometimes it felt like she would never see Elise again.

  “I should go.” She picked up her bowl and the empty plate and headed for the kitchen.

  It was getting dark, and she wanted to make the most of her last night staking out Seth Campbell, the only connection she still had to her sister.

  5

  The rooftop opposite Seth Campbell’s brownstone offered a perfect view of the front door. Ronan had gained access to it via a generous incentive offered to the superintendent of the building, plus a twenty-minute conversation about the man’s time in Vietnam.

  The sun was down by the time he was in position with a thermos of coffee, a Nikon P900 taken from the surveillance room at MIS, high-powered binoculars, and a feed to his phone of the mini-security cam he’d set up to watch the rear door.