Chapter Thirty-One
Reed’s ass had melded to his desk chair as he searched the Internet for pictures from the cruise to get an image of Sasha. Trying to find out the names of the people on the airplane he had shared with Lori en route to Texas was a waste of time. TSA had shut those things down like the locks at Fort Knox.
Pounding on Reed’s front door shook him from his caffeine coma.
He reached for his gun, loaded the chamber, and slowly walked to his door.
“Put it away, Reed.”
Sad that Reed had already learned the sound of Rick’s voice.
He relaxed the grip on his weapon and opened the door. “What now?”
Rick ducked his head into Reed’s apartment. “Dude, you need to clean up around here. Women hate slobs.”
“Everyone’s a critic.” He opened the door wider.
Rick didn’t bother walking in. “C’mon.”
“Where are we going?”
“Sasha used the credit card.”
Reed shook the dark away. “’Bout time.” He ran through his apartment, turned off his computer, grabbed his cell, his keys, and put on a jacket to hide his gun.
“Where are we going?”
“Beverly Wilshire.”
“She checked into a hotel? We can’t be that lucky.”
“She bought a drink in the hotel bar.”
“Anything else?” Reed asked.
“Just the one drink, the charge batched through at midnight,” Rick told him.
“So she could have been there anytime yesterday.”
“She could be there right now. And since you’re the only one who knows what she looks like, guess what you’re going to be doing?”
“Barfly?”
“No, that’s my job.” Rick reached over to the glove compartment, opened it, removed an earpiece. “You’re across the street.”
“What if she leaves through the garage?”
Rick looked at him as if he was crazy. “Really? Name one woman who can resist shopping on Rodeo Drive?”
“Someone who doesn’t have money?”
“Like that stops them.”
“Fine.”
So as Rick walked into the finery of the Wilshire to pretend to be some kind of businessman, complete with a copy of the Wall Street Journal and a laptop, Reed loitered on one of the most prestigious corners in America. The only thing he was missing was a piece of cardboard asking for change.
“Can you hear me?” Rick asked through the tiny earpiece.
“Unfortunately.”
“This is a nice place. Might need to take the Mrs. here.”
“You’re married?”
“Best woman ever. Okay, log into the Internet.”
Reed removed his phone, kept an eye on those coming and going from the hotel as he multitasked.
“Type this in.” He rattled off a series of letters and numbers that made little sense. But once he pressed enter, Reed found himself on a secure site.
“It’s asking for a password.”
Rick started laughing. “The number four and the words fire ants, capitalize the last letters.”
The earworm Avery had placed started to sing again. “Very funny.”
“We thought so.”
The password brought on a video from inside the hotel bar.
An elderly couple walked out of the hotel, and he immediately dismissed them.
“I’m moving you around. Let me know if anyone looks familiar.”
The camera swiveled around the room. Not one patron had a feature worth remembering. “Nothing.”
“Okay . . . keep the webpage open but save your battery. I’ll clue you in when someone new walks in.”
It was Reed’s turn to laugh. “So I stand on the corner and you act like the crazy man talking to himself in a fancy hotel.”
“I’m bigger than you. People ignore crazy when you’re bigger than them.”
Reed couldn’t argue that.
“Does this street ever close down?” Reed asked his unwanted partner through the mic.
“If you sold shoes at a grand a pair, would you close the door?”
“That’s just crazy.”
Reed glanced back down Rodeo Drive, his eyes landing on the storefront of Jimmy Choo.
A woman walked out carrying bags in both hands. Apparently buying one pair at a time wasn’t acceptable in some circles.
He was about to look away when his eyes fell on a woman with olive skin, dark hair, big sunglasses . . . she carried herself with poise, her head just a little higher than everyone around her.
“I think I see her.”
“Where?”
“She’s headed into a shoe store.” Reed looked at the opposing traffic. No way to jaywalk with so many cars buzzing by.
“Keep your distance,” Rick instructed him.
“Do you think I’m new?” Reed crossed the street and blended into the crowd.
It didn’t take long before she walked out. The woman looked left and right before putting her sunglasses back on.
Reed released a sigh. “Not her.”
“We draft up everything. Consider every possible scenario before you file.”
Lori watched as a nervous Ana Maghakian paced her office. “He won’t know I’m here?”
“Not until we tell him. By then we need to have you out of the house.” Preferably with some kind of restraining order, but that wasn’t likely, since the wife wasn’t willing to press charges.
“If I move my stuff out, he’s going to notice. He’s controlling.”
“Most abusers are.”
“I’ll have to move when he’s out of town.”
“Do you have a house staff?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have regular days off?”
“Of course.”
“So which days of the week are the most quiet?”
“Tuesday is my housekeeper’s day off, and the groundskeepers are there every day but Monday.”
“Cook, driver?” Lori rattled off a few more occupations.
Mrs. Maghakian mapped out her household routine while Lori took notes.
It felt as if she were in the thick of a crime in progress. Then again, her life had turned into some sort of a soap opera of late.
“Do you have someplace secure you can go?” Lori asked.
“I have money. I’ve managed to put enough away for this day.”
Lori leaned forward on her elbows. “I’m not talking about a hotel. I’m talking about someplace he can’t get to you.”
“What’s more secure than a hotel with witnesses and cameras everywhere?”
Lori placed her pen on her notes. “What do you anticipate your husband doing when he learns that you’ve left him and filed for divorce?”
Sheer fear filled the other woman’s face.
“We need you safe. I know people that can help you.”
“I can’t go to some shelter.”
“Do I look like I work with a shelter?” Lori didn’t mind pulling strings for women like Ana.
An hour later, with more billable hours than any psychologist, Lori managed to plant the seed that Ana would survive her current situation, she just needed the right resources, resources that Lori could recommend.
It was empowering to have something to focus on other than her life, even when she knew it wasn’t the healthiest of practices to put all her energy and emotion into one client. Truth was, Lori had placed all of her focus in the whole of her practice. Yet at the end of the day, when she was alone in her bed and her brother’s snores drifted to a low roar . . . Lori sensed him. Reed was embedded in the walls of the room, the scent of him in her bed, her pillows. A doctor would tell her she was imagining him there, but she’d deny the doctor’s logic. Reed had left an imprint on her life that lasted beyond any relationship she’d had before him.
The knock on Reed’s door at six in the morning didn’t even shock him.
There was only the groggy walk to the door resulting from the dreams that had haunted him most of the night. He opened it with a push and turned his back on the man beyond.
“Coffee?” Rick asked.
“Please.”
“Great idea. Get dressed.”
Twenty minutes later they were parked outside of the signature green and white storefront.
Rick had put the car in park and stared at the coffee shop across the street for ten minutes before Reed asked, “What are we doing here?”
“Yesterday, while we were playing cloak-and-dagger on Rodeo Drive, your friend used her credit card here.”
Reed glared at the entrance to Starbucks with a groan. “This doesn’t make sense. She’s too smart for this.”
“How so?”
“She picked the lock on my apartment without leaving as much as a speck of evidence. The wineglass was clean, the cell phone was about as traceable as a hooker’s case of VD. She’s not this stupid.”
“You think it’s a setup?” Rick asked.
“She’s leading us here. The question is why? Is she trying to distract us?”
Instead of answering, Rick made a call.
“It’s me. Everything good there?”
Reed heard the male voice on the other end of the phone but couldn’t make out the words.
“Alert level up one. Notify Neil.” He hung up.
“Who was that?”
“Cooper.”
“At Lori’s.”
Rick took his time answering. “Yes.”
Reed focused his attention out the window. “How is she?”
He was slow to respond . . . like a metronome on a piano.
“She’s spending a lot of time in her office.”
“Work is good.” And if she was working, she wasn’t in tears over him.
As the morning drummed on, the coffee shop across the street started to take on a life of its own. It didn’t help that Reed hadn’t managed even one cup before being dragged out of bed.
“This is a waste,” Rick said.
“She’s leading us around,” he agreed. “Tell you what, one pass through and we backtrack.”
Rick brought his cell phone to his ear while Reed pushed out of the car to satiate his need for caffeine.
Morning coffee rush hour was in full swing.
The tables in the coffee shop had yet to fill, but the line was six customers deep. Instead of standing in line, he walked to the bathroom. Sure enough, when he left the restroom, only two patrons were waiting to make their orders.
Then he heard it . . . a voice, very deep and distinctive.
He turned.
Red hair, petite . . . a voice that should be on the radio or doing voice-overs.
Sam . . . Lori’s partner.
What the hell?
He turned back toward the hall to the bathroom and dialed Rick.
It rang several times before he picked up. When he did, he answered with a demand. “Regular coffee, black.”
“Sam is in here.”
“What?”
“Samantha.”
“I know who Sam is . . . what is she doing in there?”
“I don’t know, but I have a feeling we should.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Sam sitting at a tucked away table. A woman sat in the opposite chair, her back to him. Not Sasha, he could see that from where he stood. This woman was a little larger, her hair a little lighter. Her profile suggested a similar gene pool to Sasha’s, but that was about it. He had a feeling he’d seen her before but couldn’t place her.
Rick walked in the front door like a bull in a china shop.
“Lordy, Lord, Lord, I could use some caffeine.” Rick said the words loud enough to get everyone’s attention in the place.
Including Sam’s.
Rick smiled at the woman in front of him and nodded with a wink.
There was a brief moment of eye contact, and Rick placed a hand to his head. “Just don’t think straight without a little coffee.”
He was next in line.
“What can I get you?”
“An ultralarge grande, verde . . . whatever it is you call your biggest cup of coffee. Just coffee. Cut off any of that froufrou stuff. I’ll let the women in my life sweet talk me, I take my coffee bitter and black.”
Reed saw the moment in Sam’s body language when she switched gears. The fact that she hadn’t jumped up from the chair to say hello to someone she knew said she didn’t want the woman with her to know.
“Our coffee isn’t bitter,” the barista said.
“Well, if I leave it in my car as long as I usually do, it will be cold and bitter by the time I suck it down.”
Reed stayed hidden while Sam ended the conversation with the woman.
There was a quick back-and-forth before Sam shook the woman’s hand and the unknown woman turned and walked out.
Like a switch, Rick’s character jolted back to baseline, and he abandoned the coffee he’d just made a show of buying in the barista’s hands. “Who was that?” he asked Sam.
Reed walked around the corner, and Sam saw him for the first time, her expression going from concerned to panicked.
“A new client.”
Reed stepped forward. “For Alliance?”
Sam looked between the both of them, then to Rick. “Yes.”
Ah, damn . . .
Rick bolted for the door and called behind his back, “No new clients, Sam. Lock it down.”
Reed followed him out the door.