There were a couple of bar stools tucked under the far side of the granite counter, and that’s where Katie and I took our cups of tea.
“So what is this embarrassing and personal situation I might be able to help you with?” she asked as we sat. There was a hint of amusement in her tone, but her face was open and friendly.
“This is going to sound a little strange, but bear with me for a moment.” I cleared my throat and took a tongue-searing sip of tea, still playing up my nerves. “I have reason to believe my husband is cheating on me.” I rubbed at the ring finger of my left hand, as if missing the wedding ring that should have been there.
Katie blinked. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. Her smile had turned into a puzzled frown, and I imagined she was mystified by the concept that she could help in this particular situation.
“A friend of mine was at this bar called Top of the Hill last month,” I continued, “and she told me she saw my husband there with some redhead hanging all over him. If I could get proof of that, it’ll be a big help to me in the divorce.”
Her eyes widened just a bit in recognition when she heard the name of the bar. I wondered if she was mentally making the connection between her attendance at the bachelorette party and my imaginary cheating snake of a husband. Even if she was, I doubted she could guess what I was going to ask.
“I must admit,” she said, tilting her head to the side, “I’m really curious about how I could possibly be of help to you.”
“You were at Top of the Hill on the same night my friend spotted my husband,” I said.
“I see. And how do you know that?”
I fidgeted with my cup, suddenly feeling a little bad for my subterfuge. I’d only known Katie for about two seconds, but she was warm and friendly, and I liked her. I usually don’t mind lying in the line of duty, but this felt more like I was taking advantage of her. It was too late to back out now, and my discomfort over the lie probably made my act even more convincing.
“I hired a private investigator to try to track my husband’s movements. The P.I. found out about the party and got a look at the guest list.”
Katie’s eyes narrowed at the invasion of her privacy, and I figured Top of the Hill was going to get at least one angry phone call tonight. I couldn’t feel too bad for them. After all, Leo had managed to hack their files . . . never mind that he was good enough to access much more private files than that.
“I’m sorry about that,” I hastened to say, wincing. “He went further than I asked him to go. But he said he heard there was a party there that night and that there were a lot of people taking pictures.”
The light bulb went on over Katie’s head, and she was intrigued enough to forget her annoyance. “Ah. You think your husband might be in one of those pictures.”
I shrugged and smiled at her sheepishly. “It’s possible. I looked at the photos Caitlin took, and I didn’t see him, but she told me you took a lot. So I was wondering . . .” I let my voice trail off and looked plaintive.
Katie nodded slowly as she thought things over. I was hoping the opportunity to nail a scumbag husband would be tempting enough that she wouldn’t try to delve too deeply into my story. I could improvise more details if I had to, but the simpler I kept things, the better. I also prayed she wasn’t the lawyer I’d guessed her to be when I first laid eyes on her, because then she’d be all worried about possible litigation if she provided a photo that nailed said scumbag husband. I’d have said Katie was too friendly to be a lawyer, but that would be a gross generalization.
Finally, she released a breath and shrugged. “What could it hurt?” she asked, and it was exactly the attitude I’d been hoping for. She was, after all, showing me pictures that had been taken in a public setting, not anything private.
She slipped off the bar stool. “Wait here,” she told me, and I was happy to oblige.
She came back to the kitchen a couple of minutes later, carrying a digital camera. She’d ditched the suit jacket and run a brush through her hair so that it no longer lay so stiffly against her head. I suspected if I hadn’t been waiting for her, she’d have done away with the work clothes altogether and slipped into something more comfortable.
“I don’t have any prints,” she told me apologetically as she turned on the camera. “I keep meaning to print some, but . . .” She shrugged.
“That’s okay,” I told her, although finding a picture of Doug and Heather on the camera’s tiny screen was going to be a challenge. It would have been easier to look at them on a computer, but maybe she hadn’t bothered to download them. If my first examination didn’t yield any results, I’d ask her if she would be willing to do that so I could see the photos at a larger size, but it wouldn’t hurt to glance through them on the camera.
Katie scrolled to the first of the photos from the party, then handed the camera to me and let me scroll through.
I swear she must have taken five hundred pictures that night, or at least that was what it felt like as I scrolled through photo after photo of people I didn’t know and didn’t care about. She was a decent photographer, her subjects filling up most of the screen and not providing a whole lot of background. However, every once in a while, there was a shot from a little larger distance, with more people in the background, and those were the ones I scrutinized heavily, looking for Heather.
I was nearing the end of the photos, my eyes ready to cross from squinting at the tiny lighted screen for too long, when I finally found what I was looking for. In the background of a picture of the bride-to-be opening presents was a tall, stunning redhead. She was barely recognizable as the Heather Fellowes I’d met at the coffee bar. Her hair had been curled and coiffed to perfection, her face could be on an ad for expensive makeup, and the short cocktail dress she wore clung to her every curve and revealed legs a mile long. She was the epitome of the drop-dead-gorgeous single woman hunting for a mate, and I saw what Mike the bartender had meant when he said she could have any man she wanted with a snap of her fingers.
Standing beside Heather, with his arm around her waist and his hand curled around her hip possessively, was a handsome forty-something man who could only be Doug.
“Hey, you’ve found something?” Katie asked, sounding excited.
I’d felt a thrill of triumph when I’d spotted Heather, but since I was supposedly finding proof that my husband was cheating on me, I tried to look devastated instead of elated. I swallowed hard and nodded.
“That’s him,” I said, barely whispering.
Katie looked at the picture and winced in sympathy. Heather was a jealous wife’s worst nightmare, the kind of woman who would make just about anyone other than a supermodel feel plain and dumpy by comparison.
“I’m sorry,” Katie said softly, giving me a gentle pat on the shoulder. “But at least you have some good evidence you can use to nail his ass.”
I smiled more broadly than I probably should have in my supposedly devastated state of mind, but I couldn’t help it. I liked this woman and wished I hadn’t had to tell her so many lies.
“Can I trouble you to email this photo to me?” I asked.
FOUR
I ate dinner in Georgetown, then headed over to the condo I’d refused to give up even though I’d moved into Anderson’s mansion. Little by little, my possessions were migrating to the mansion, making it more and more into a home and giving my beloved condo an empty, neglected look. I didn’t know if I would ever move back in, but I was determined to at least keep the place clean and in good repair. I managed to kill a couple of hours puttering around before heading back to the mansion.
It was after ten by the time I got there, and I slipped up to my third-floor suite as quickly and quietly as possible. Someone was in the media room watching an action movie with the volume turned up so high the floor vibrated with every explosion, which made a stealthy entrance easy. It looked like I’d manage
d to avoid Anderson for one more day. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to keep it up.
The first thing I did after arriving in my suite was to check my email. Sure enough, Katie had sent me the photograph. I downloaded it, then opened it up as big as I could on my relatively small laptop screen, centering the image on Heather and Doug. I cropped that part out and enlarged it even more, and that was when I caught Heather in her first bald-faced lie. It was Doug’s left hand that rested on her hip, and I could plainly see that he was wearing a wedding ring.
I leaned back in my chair and scowled at the photo. It was far from the first time I’d ever had a client lie to me, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t already been harboring some doubts about Heather; however, I most definitely did not like the portrait of her that was beginning to emerge: a femme fatale who trolls upscale bars and leaves with rich older men without regard to their marital status. Maybe she just had a thing for older men, and their wealth had nothing to do with it. But the fact that she’d lied about Doug not being married bothered me. It was possible she did it because she was embarrassed, or she thought I’d be judgmental about it and refuse to take her case. But instinct told me there was more to it than that.
I decided to stick my nose where it most likely didn’t belong and did some background research on Heather Fellowes.
As it turned out, Doug’s marital status wasn’t the only thing Heather had lied to me about.
Heather was twenty-four and lived in a three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood in Bethesda. A high school dropout, she’d worked at a dizzying array of crap jobs ever since, from housecleaning to waitressing to retail. A couple of those jobs paid a bit more than minimum wage, but they certainly wouldn’t provide enough income to buy a house. Figuring it was possible she had financial support from her family, I looked into them, too. Her father had been absent from her life since before she was born, and her mother worked as a housekeeper. There were no rich aunts, uncles, or grandparents I could find, so there seemed to be no legitimate way Heather could afford that house.
A beautiful woman who lived above her means, frequented a posh bar, and made a habit of leaving with rich older men. I couldn’t help wondering if money changed hands during these one-night stands of hers, although it seemed to me a pro would not get careless about protection as she claimed to have done. Then again, the human capacity to act like idiots sometimes astounds me.
One thing I knew for sure: Heather had lied to me. I wasn’t taking another step in the search for Doug until I’d pried the truth out of her.
I figured my next conversation with Heather wouldn’t be the kind we’d want to have in public, so I decided to drop in on her unexpectedly at her house on Thursday evening. I’d had to fight off the momentary urge just to call and tell her I was dropping the case. I hadn’t liked her all that much in the first place, and the lies and omissions really pissed me off. However, every instinct was telling me there was more to this case than met the eye. Heather seemed desperate to find Doug. I remembered thinking that she seemed scared when I first met her, and that didn’t make sense if she was just looking for a sugar daddy. Something wasn’t adding up.
When I pulled into the driveway of her house, I was once again struck by the incongruity between her chosen profession—if you could call her parade of crappy jobs a profession—and her standard of living. She wasn’t exactly living high off the hog, her house being of moderate size and sporting a postage-stamp-sized lawn, but with her income, she should have been living in some cheap, small apartment in a less-than-ideal neighborhood, maybe with a roommate or two to help foot the bills.
I parked in the driveway, then went to the front door and rang the bell.
The Heather who answered the door was an interesting compromise between the ordinary Jane who’d met me at the coffee bar and the femme fatale from the photograph. She was dressed casually in skinny jeans and a baby-blue hoodie, but her makeup looked like it had been done professionally, as did her hair. From the neck up, she looked like she was ready for a fashion shoot. She blinked her sooty, mascaraed eyelashes in evident surprise at finding me on her doorstep.
“Nikki!” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
I bit back a caustic remark. “I know,” I said with admirable restraint. “But we need to talk. Like, now.”
Another dramatic blink, but although batting her eyelashes might win her points with her gentleman callers, it didn’t work on me. She wasn’t as innocent as she’d have liked me to believe.
“Did you find Doug?” she asked. There was no true hint of hope in her voice. I wasn’t yelling at her or being openly rude—yet—but I was sure she’d noticed the stiffness of my body language. She knew I wasn’t there with good news.
“May I come in?” I asked, instead of answering.
“Of course.” She opened the door wider and smiled at me, but the expression was false, and her voice was tight. She might not know exactly what had brought me to her doorstep, but she wasn’t exactly clueless, either.
The interior of Heather’s house wouldn’t have looked out of place in the home of a corporate mover and shaker. I took in the expensive furniture, the art on the walls, and the Bose home-theater equipment as she guided me to the living room and invited me to take a seat on her plush leather sofa. The lamp on the end table nearest me looked suspiciously like a genuine Tiffany, although I supposed it could be a high-quality knockoff.
Heather sat on the other end of the sofa and folded her hands in her lap. She tried the wide-eyed-innocent look again, but the way her teeth worried at her lower lip was yet more evidence that she suspected the jig was up.
“So . . . what brings you?” she asked with another false smile.
Wordlessly, I pulled the photo I’d printed out of my pocketbook and handed it to her. Her jaw dropped open, and a small, startled gasp escaped her.
“How did you get this?”
“It’s a long story.” I wasn’t in the mood to dazzle her with tales of my brilliance.
“So have you found Doug?” she asked as she tried to hand the photo back to me. She didn’t seem to know what to think now. On the one hand, here I was showing her concrete evidence of progress; on the other hand, I was wearing my surly mood on my sleeve.
I didn’t take the picture back. “Why don’t you look a little more closely.”
She did as I instructed, her brow furrowing as she inspected the photo, but she didn’t catch on to what was bothering me.
“Look at his hand on your hip,” I told her with thinly veiled annoyance.
A soft little “oh” escaped her lips when she finally understood. She licked her lips and averted her gaze. This time, when she handed the photo back, I took it.
“You told me he wasn’t wearing a ring,” I said, just to hammer home the point.
She winced and flashed me a look that was half guilty, half sheepish. But there was something else behind it, something that looked like alarm, maybe even fear.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was ashamed of myself for hooking up with a married man. I didn’t want you to know.” Her hands were still folded in her lap, but I could see the tension in her fingers. Her knuckles were turning white with how hard she was clenching those fingers together.
I’ll admit, I can see why someone might want to conceal the fact that she’d had a one-night stand with a man she knew was married. But this same woman had admitted she’d had a one-night stand with some guy she’d met in a bar when she was drunk, and she’d admitted she was pregnant. Something about this whole scenario wasn’t right, and I was determined to find out what it was.
“I don’t work for clients who lie to me,” I lied, just to see how she would respond. “Good luck finding someone else to take this case.” I started to rise, and Heather leapt to her feet so fast she practically knocked the coffee table over. Her face had drained of color, and her eyes were wide with
what looked an awful lot like fear.
“Oh, please don’t quit,” she begged, grabbing hold of my arm. Even through the fabric of my sleeve, I could feel how cold her hand was. “I’m sorry I lied to you. I was afraid you’d turn me down if you knew, and I didn’t think it would hurt to keep that one little detail to myself.”
One little detail, my ass. Her face was still a bloodless white, and there was a sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. If Doug’s marital status was the only little detail she’d left out, I was Captain Kangaroo.
“What are you so afraid of, Heather?” I asked. I was frankly mystified by her reactions, by her apparent desperation.
Heather let go of my arm and forced a laugh that, rather than making her seem more at ease, as she wanted, made her seem that much more nervous. “You’re my best hope of finding Doug,” she said, talking a little too fast. “No one else would even take the case, and you not only took it but somehow found a photo of him. I couldn’t bear it if you dropped the case because of a stupid white lie.”
If this was her bid to make me think she wasn’t afraid, it had exactly the opposite effect. She practically vibrated with fear and desperation. I didn’t know why she wanted to find Doug, but it wasn’t because she wanted to find the father of her child-to-be. It wasn’t even because she wanted a sugar daddy. I have to admit, as pissed as I was, I was also intrigued.
“If you want me to keep looking for Doug, then you’re going to have to tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” I warned her. “Whatever it is you’re hiding may be the one big clue I need to track him down.”
“I’ve told you the whole truth,” she protested weakly.
I shrugged. “Fine. If that’s the way you want to play it.” I turned for the door but wasn’t surprised when Heather grabbed my arm again.