Dirty Business (The Leah Ryan Mysteries - Book Three Read online

  She shook her head. “I’d heard rumors, but I was new, and he was paying so much attention to me. He made me feel special.”

  “He makes them all feel special,” Amanda said.

  “You too,” Jack asked her.

  “Hell, no,” Amanda looked offended, “definitely not my type.”

  “Waaaay not her type,” Tamara said, giggling.

  Amanda cracked a grin in spite of herself.

  “In fact, you’re more her type,” Tamara said to me. “Isn’t that right, Mandy?”

  Amanda looked at me, her grin getting bigger. “Well, yeah, actually.”

  “Well, thank you. I’m flattered,” I said.

  Amanda shrugged, her face flushing. “Sure.”

  “So who is the flavor of the month, then?” Jack asked. “Vicky?”

  “Yeah,” Gina said, “one of his medical assistants.”

  ***

  We stopped for lunch at a pub we frequent, The Lucky Charm. As I sucked down the last of a chocolate shake, The Lucky Charm is known far and wide for their shakes, my cell phone rang.

  “Ms. Ryan?”

  Although the screen said “private number”, I knew by some odd instinct who it was, the way a person sometimes gets up to answer the phone before it rings. “Yes?”

  “Garrett Clemmons here,” He sounded remarkably calm for a man whose wife had gone missing without a trace the day before.

  “I’m glad you called, Dr. Clemmons.”

  “Have you found my wife yet?”

  I thought this an odd question. If she’d been found, he’d have been one of the first to know. “No, we haven’t been so lucky. Can we come over to your house and speak with you, Doctor? We have some questions we need to ask you to help us find her.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m a little bit jet lagged, as you can imagine, but I’ll do whatever I can to help you find her.” He paused. “I love her.”

  “Right.” I made a face to Jack, conveying my thoughts on the Doctor’s odd comments. He lifted his eyebrows.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “We’ll be there shortly. We have the address.”

  He paused. “Thank you.”

  I ended the call and gave Jack a ‘what the hell’ look.

  “What?” he asked. “Not acting like a worried husband?”

  “Not really.” I sucked at the straw, getting nothing more from the bottom of the milkshake glass. I sighed and pushed the glass away. “But then, he’s jet lagged, you understand.”

  Jack chuckled. “Oh, well. That explains it. Poor guy.”

  “I imagine that flying halfway across the world and spending your spare time tagging your medical assistant is exhausting, never mind the jet lag.” I pulled on my jacket as Jack grabbed his truck keys. “Now this is getting interesting.”

  “I thought it might,” Jack said.

  We pulled into his long driveway twenty minutes later. The house was on the outskirts of town, on the Hudson River. It was a gorgeous view, even though many of the tree’s branches were bare. Soon enough the river would be covered in ice and snow, and would be stunning to look at.

  We went up to the house, white with blue shutters and a large porch. Jack rang the bell. We saw the warped silhouette of Dr. Clemmons in the artfully cut glass of the oval window in the door. He opened the door in dark blue jeans and a navy turtleneck. He was good looking, blonde hair streaked with a little premature gray, and Nordic features. His eyes were a clear, light blue.

  “Thanks so much for coming. You found the house all right?” he stood to the side, allowing us entry.

  “Oh, we were here yesterday.” Jack and I stood in the large entryway watching Clemmons’ face.

  He blinked. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Alexia’s mother gave us the spare key. She wanted us to be able to pick up on any clues to Alexia’s disappearance as soon as possible. Time is everything right now, Doctor.”

  “Right.” He looked at me, his eyes moving up and down the length of me, leaving me feeling like I’d been thoroughly assessed as a female specimen. His eyes lingered on my black boots. “Were you able to find anything?” Then he added, “Helpful?”

  “No, unfortunately not,” I said. “But you know this house much better than we do. Was anything out of place? Did anything seem strange or off to you?”

  “The only thing that has been a little off is Alexia,” he said. “Come in.” He led us to the living room. “Have a seat. Can I offer you some coffee? A soda?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “We just ate lunch,” Jack added. “Alexia has been off?”

  “Yes. At first I thought it was just pregnancy hormones, but now I think it might’ve been something more.”

  “Oh?” I asked him.

  “I think she’s been seeing someone.”

  I almost laughed out loud. A woman eight months pregnant is not likely to be traipsing around having affairs. She has other things on her mind, and her body certainly isn’t craving hot, passionate sex. At least that would be my guess.

  “What makes you think so?” I asked him.

  “A feeling, more than anything else, I guess. But she just wasn’t happy or content. She’d take off for hours at a time. Once, about a month ago, she didn’t come home all night. She wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, and I didn’t press. I figured that if she was seeing somebody else, there wasn’t much I could do about it. And if she wanted to leave me, she would. We’d just have to work things out financially and,” he lifted his hands, gesturing to the house around us. “Living arrangements, of course.”

  Jack and I exchanged glances. Seemed as if Dr. Clemmons pretty much had it all worked out.

  This wasn’t the Alexia described by her mother or brother. According to them, she was happy and content. Could she have been covering up her feelings so that she wouldn’t worry them?

  “So you think she might be with this other man?” Jack asked him.

  “I imagine so, yes.” He lifted his chin and squared his shoulders.

  Wow. What a guy. So mature and enlightened. “You’re taking this all pretty well, doctor, if you don’t mind my saying. Especially considering your wife is pregnant with your child.”

  “Uh,” he shook his head, looking at the carpet. “There’s some doubt in my mind about that, actually.”

  “Really,” Jack said.

  “The timing of conception. We were going through a rough patch. We weren’t making love, hadn’t really for months.” He glanced up at me, then back down at the floor.

  Boy, he was just painting a lovely picture of his missing wife.

  “You think this child is this other man’s baby?” I kept my tone neutral, which was more than a little difficult, because what I really wanted to do was to tell this asshole to get real. How stupid did he think we were? It was clearly a ploy to sully his wife while making him seem just lovely.

  “Wow,” Jack said. I could tell by his deliberately blank expression that he was having as much trouble wrapping his mind around Dr. Clemmons as I was. “That’s incredible.”

  “You’re telling me. Unfortunately, I haven’t exactly been a saint myself, of late.”

  “Oh no?” Jack asked him, his eyebrows lifted. His gaze flicked to me. Here it comes, it said.

  I grinned. The covering of the guilty party’s tracks.

  “No,” the doctor placed a contrite look on his face. “Sadly, I’ve found myself turning to another woman as a result of the trouble in my marriage to Alexia.”

  “Ah,” Jack said, nodding.

  “I’m not proud of this fact, but I have to say that I don’t know what I would’ve done without Vicky’s constant, unwavering friendship.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Friendship is important.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Clemmons said, his face brightening a little. “It’s an element that is crucial in a marriage, and it’s been missing with Alexia and I for a long time.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
r />   He lifted his hands a little, palms up. “Well, it happens, sadly.”

  “You’ll call us if you do hear from Alexia,” I said.

  “Oh, absolutely.” He stood, leading us rather quickly to the door. “You know, I still hold some hope that Alexia and I can mend our marriage. I’d raise the child as if it were my own. We could work it out.”

  My mouth dropped open. I felt like I might throw up all over the shiny hardwood floor.

  “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Jack said.

  “It would, if we could just put everything behind us and start from scratch. I’d give the world.” He looked at me, his gaze intense. “I still love her. More than I could ever express.”

  “I understand.” I stood and met his gaze with my own. Perfectly. You disgusting waste of oxygen.

  His lips opened and he took a short breath before saying, “You don’t think the same person who took the other pregnant women took Alexia, do you?

  That would be convenient for you, wouldn’t it? I thought. “We will find her, Dr. Clemmons. I promise you that.”

  Something flickered across his face that I couldn’t quite name, something that made the small hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  “I trust you will.” He closed the door to our retreating backs.

  I lifted my face to the frigid air. It felt like snow.

  “Son of a bitch,” Jack said. “I think he had something to do with her vanishing.”

  “If he didn’t,” I turned and faced Jack. “He isn’t at all losing sleep over it.”

  Chapter Three

  “I’ve got a little something for you that you might find useful, Leah.” Lucas’s voice sounded like deep, velvety chocolate over the phone. “I’ve got some time between two and four o’clock if you want to come down to the firm. I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”

  A thrill swept through me. My heart beat double time. I knew I shouldn’t be feeling this way about Lucas. But try telling my body that. He did something to me that I couldn’t explain. “Great. I’ll be there at around two then.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  I ended the call and looked at my laptop clock, a grin on my face. I had about fifty minutes. I swiveled in my chair and faced Jack, who was staring at the giant white board we had set up on the wall. The timeline of Alexia’s last known whereabouts were scrawled across its surface. Points with asterisks were written here and there. Anything we knew, including Garrett Clemmons behaviors and story.

  And the other pregnant women who had gone missing, looking at their names sent a shiver down my spine. I hugged myself, feeling cold. My grin was gone.

  “That was Lucas.” Jack continued gazing at the board, his eyes moving slowly across it.

  I stared at his back. “How did you know that?”

  “The tone of your voice, you get a kind of lilt talking to him. Your voice takes on a different quality.”

  Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Jack was a master when it came to noticing details like that, body language, tone of voice. All the little non-verbal forms of communication. So was I. I’d learned watching my parents’ marriage fall apart after the abduction of my little sister. We were just kids, riding our bikes. She was taken and shoved into a car right in front of me.

  When I close my eyes I can still see the scene as clear as the day it happened.

  With Jack, it was as a result of living in so many foster homes. Not all of them had been kind to him. He learned about human behavior as a matter of survival. Learning the signals people gave off and being able to predict their behavior had saved his skin many times; a skill he’d honed in me.

  “Your silence speaks volumes,” he said, then glanced at me. “With you, it’s what you don’t say that gives you away, Kicks.”

  “Okay, okay. Whatever, anyway, he says he has something for us. Something, that might help.”

  “He asked you to go down and meet him.” He looked back at the white board.

  “Yeah, but he meant us.”

  He laughed softly. “No, Kicks. He meant you.”

  “Jack, we’re both working this case, and you should come with me. Whether he meant me or us.”

  He let out a sigh. “Yeah.”

  “So are you coming?”

  “Yeah,” he said again, but didn’t move.

  “Jack.”

  “Look, Leah.” He turned to look at him me. “We can’t afford your sense of judgment and awareness to be clouded because you and Lucas have the hots for each other, okay? Alexia deserves more.”

  His words took the wind out of me for a moment. He was right, of course. But still it stung. He was acting like I didn’t know that. No, that wasn’t it. He knew I did know it, but that my hormones were speaking louder.

  “It’s a crush. I’ll get over it.”

  He nodded once. “Okay then. Let’s go.

  ***

  Lucas was in his office when we got there. He was a partner in the firm, and had several associates under him who were highly trained in violence assessment and security management. Lucas was a licensed investigator, as well as an expert in threat and violence assessment. His firm worked with government, celebrities, police departments and anyone else who needed security or risk assessment. Lucas had seen a lot. He had a degree in Criminal Justice and a Masters degree in Criminology.

  In short, the guy knew his shit.

  So when he said he had something for us, I believed him.

  He stood when we entered his office. “Hey guys. Anything new come up?”

  He gestured to the leather couch in his office and closed the door.

  “Well, we did meet Alexia’s husband,” I said. “Doctor Clemmons, brain surgeon at your service. His hobbies include tagging his medical assistants, although I’m sure he doesn’t discriminate based on profession, and verbally bashing his missing, pregnant wife.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting.” Lucas took a seat in his leather chair, leaning back and rocking a little.

  “That’s one word for it,” Jack said. “The guy’s got a serious God complex, to the nth power.”

  “I’m not surprised, if he’s bashing his missing, pregnant wife,” Lucas said. “Is he accusing her of having affairs?”

  “Why, yes he is,” Jack said. “He’s a real sweetheart of a guy. You’d love him.”

  “Either he has something to do with her disappearance, or he’s covering his ass by deflecting the focus on her allegedly bad behavior while she isn’t around to defend herself. Guilty people often do that. He’s concerned about his image, what people think of him. He has a reputation to uphold.”

  “Oh he has quite the reputation all right,” I said. “Several hospital workers on his floor had a thing or two to say about his penchant for young women.”

  “He probably feels like he deserves whatever he wants, huge sense of entitlement.”

  “Yeah, you’ve pretty much pegged him.” Jack said.

  Lucas moved a hand across his smooth jaw. “Yeah, I’d give him all the attention he could ever crave, and then some, if I were you two.”

  “Oh, we will,” Jack said. I watched him gaze into space for a moment, his eyes squinting just a little. “You said you have something for us. Does it have to do with Doctor Clemmons?”

  “Something was tweaking at my brain the other night when they were covering the story of the last pregnant woman to vanish.” His face was grim. “No matter what the outcome of this one, it isn’t going to be good. That’s my fear. It just doesn’t look good.”

  Neither Jack nor I replied. That was our feeling too. Alexia wasn’t ever coming home alive, and neither were the other two women.

  That reality fell heavily on us, and his office suddenly felt too close and stuffy.

  I felt a knot tighten in my stomach and swallowed down rising anger. I bit down on my bottom lip until I felt enough pain to make the anger bearable, if only for a moment.

  Lucas leaned forward in his chair, clasping his hands in fro
nt of him. “I remembered that last summer a young woman tried to abduct a newborn infant from a hospital. Her license plate was covered in mud to obscure the numbers, and she wore a hat, a blonde wig, and sunglasses.

  Security camera film footage shows her car parking in the hospital parking lot for two days. She just sat in her car watching. When a young woman was wheeled out to her car by her mother, this woman got out of her car and offered to help. She offered to hold the baby for the mother while she got into the car. When the mother wouldn’t hand the baby over to her, she tried to snatch the infant from her arms.”

  “Jesus,” Jack murmured.

  Lucas nodded, continuing. “The new mother screamed at the top of her lungs and her mother hit the woman in the face with her purse.

  At that point a man who was visiting his sister at the hospital was driving in and saw what was going on, and approached them. The would-be abductor took off running. She got back into her car and drove away.”

  “Christ,” I said. “They haven’t caught her yet?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, she’s still out there. But I can promise you that her desire for an infant isn’t going to let up. I always thought she’d try again.”

  “Maybe she has,” Jack said. “Only this time she’s smarter about how she secures a new mother.”

  “Or a soon-to-be mother,” the thought was so awful that it made me want to give voice to the high pitched scream welling up inside of me.

  “A young pregnant girl reported a strange incident about a month ago,” Lucas said. “She had been looking for baby clothes on an online advertising site. She said she answered an ad, got into an email exchange with the woman and arranged to meet her at the woman’s address. The address turned out to be a flea-bag motel on the outskirts of town. There was one other car in the lot, this young woman said. She immediately got a bad feeling. Something told her not to go into the woman’s hotel room. In fact, she wouldn’t get out of her car. She simply drove away.”

  “Good call,” Jack said.

  “Very. Didn’t report the incident until the first woman, Susan Wilson, disappeared. She said she got a creepy feeling, thinking about that woman. When the police tried the email, the account was closed down. It was just a web based email account under a bogus name that couldn’t be traced. The ip address was the motel. But there was no longer anyone staying in that hotel room, and only one other occupant. An older man. A travelling salesman. You might want to get on the local online advertising sites and keep an eye out. Check out the people advertising to sell baby clothes and other baby items. Whoever this abductor is, she’s gotten a hit from this method before. She will again, perhaps already has.”