3 Swift Run (9 page)

Charlie was glad Gigi couldn’t overhear the woman’s saccharine tone. It was enough
to make Charlie barf, and she hadn’t been married to Les.

“I’d make sacrifices for someone like you,” Hollis said, his face red with exertion.

Heather-Anne smiled flirtatiously. “Oh, Hollis. As a matter of fact…”

Hardly able to believe her ears, Charlie listened as Heather-Anne fed the smitten
Hollis a story about needing a bit of money to tide her over since her car had been
broken into and her wallet stolen from her hotel the previous night. An almost-sob,
eyes that looked at Hollis like he was the only lifeguard in sight while she floundered
in heavy seas surrounded by Great Whites, a flash of cleavage, and the man was trotting
to the locker room to retrieve his checkbook. Charlie raised her brows, realizing
she was watching an expert in action.

“Can I work in?”

Startled, Charlie released her grip on the bar, realizing she’d done at least fifty
reps while listening to Heather-Anne milk the unsuspecting Hollis, to find a young
man motioning to the lat pulldown machine. “I’m done,” she said, sliding out from
under the thigh pads.

Having learned enough, Charlie exited the Y and returned to her car, loosing her hair
from its ponytail and shaking it around her face to change her looks somewhat before
meeting Heather-Anne. She kept a duffel in the car full of hats, shirts, totes, and
other items that made it easy to change her appearance while on surveillance, and
she pulled a red hoodie from her stash. Looking in the rearview mirror, she finger-combed
her bangs down onto her forehead, added a flick of mascara and a slick of red lipstick—purely
for disguise purposes—and left the car to meet her client.

Standing at the corner of Kiowa and Tejon where they’d agreed to meet, Charlie felt
the wind bite through her thin sweats and smelled the familiar downtown scent, a mix
of exhaust, coffee from a nearby diner, and wet cement from the damp sidewalks. Saturday
shoppers strolled past, studying the wares in boutique windows, and a panhandler worked
the corner of Acacia Park across the street. Dark clouds snagged on the mountain peaks
to the west promised precipitation later. Charlie hoped for snow; winter rain was
too damn depressing.

On the thought, she caught sight of Heather-Anne making her way down the sidewalk
from the Y, a windbreaker protecting her torso from the cold, but her long shapely
legs still bare. She looked pleased with herself, tossing her honey-colored hair back
from her face and smiling a feline smile as she approached the corner. When she was
within earshot, Charlie stepped forward, hand outstretched. The younger woman reared
back, and fright flared in her eyes. Charlie got the distinct impression that she
was planning to run.

“I’m Charlie Swift,” she said quickly. “You’re Heather-Anne Pawlusik, right?”

Heather-Anne recovered swiftly, running her fingers through her hair. “Oh. Yes. I
was expecting someone older, taller.” She appraised Charlie through narrowed eyes.

Wondering why the woman had spooked so easily, Charlie said, “Do you want to get a
coffee?” She nodded toward a Starbucks.

“No. I miss the cold. Costa Rica’s so damned hot all the time. Let’s sit in the park.”
Without waiting for Charlie’s reply, Heather-Anne started across the street. Charlie
caught up with her, and they found a bench across from the empty bandshell that hosted
open-air concerts in the summer. Now a colony of pigeons huddled beneath it, purple
and gray feathers fluffed against the cold.

“So,” Heather-Anne said, “you said you needed more information. I suppose you don’t
really trust Gigi to do the job right.” She finished with a little laugh.

Charlie was conscious of a surprising surge of anger on her partner’s behalf. True,
she hadn’t wanted to share the business with Gigi, but she was learning quicker than
Charlie had thought she would, and she had become quite competent with computer searches.
Her stream-of-consciousness thought process frequently led her to data that Charlie
would never have uncovered with her more linear approach. It galled Charlie that this
snot-nosed thirty-year-old was making fun of the woman whose husband she stole. “On
the contrary,” Charlie said, careful not to let her anger show. “Gigi’s very sensitive
to nuances in interviews.”

“Really?” Heather-Anne looked unconvinced. “So, what else do you need to know?”

“I’m not sure anyone knows exactly how much money Les embezzled from his various business
interests. Was it enough for him to retire on or was he working somewhere?”

Heather-Anne didn’t seem offended by Charlie’s reference to her lover’s criminal activities;
indeed, she smiled proudly. “Oh, he made more than enough to retire. More than enough.
He works at managing his money, you might say.”

“I need help understanding something,” Charlie said with an air of bewilderment. “He’s
got a beautiful girlfriend, plenty of money, no family responsibilities … no man would
walk away from that without a damned good reason. I have to conclude that something
scared him away. What was it?”

Heather-Anne blinked once, slowly. “You’re smarter than he said you were. I think
his investment in Swift Investigations was a better move than he realized.”

“Save the flattery for your marks, Heather-Anne,” Charlie said, pleased to see she’d
finally startled the other woman, who looked reflexively over her shoulder as if Hollis
were standing behind her. “Or is it even Heather-Anne?”

The younger woman stilled, an animal freezing at the sudden appearance of a predator.
Only a strand of hair moved, teased by the wind, catching at the corner of her mouth.
She finally brushed it away. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Her voice was harder, older than before, and Charlie was intrigued to see that she
didn’t rush off in an offended huff.
She wants to find out how much I know,
Charlie thought.

“It means,” Charlie said calmly, “that I couldn’t find any trace of Heather-Anne Pawlusik
before you turned up in Colorado Springs two years ago. Either your entire history’s
been erased, or you didn’t exist before moving here.”

Tears sprang to Heather-Anne’s eyes. “If you could figure that out, so can he. He’ll
find me.” Her lips parted, and fear crinkled her smooth forehead.

“Who? Les?”

“No, my husband.”

Charlie eyed her client doubtfully. “Your husband?”

Heather-Anne nodded. “I left him four years ago. He was … is violent, obsessed. I
had to leave before he killed me. I drifted from small town to small town in the South,
waiting tables, babysitting, doing other jobs where I got paid under the table so
I wouldn’t leave a money trail. I came here with a boyfriend, and when he moved on,
I decided to stay.”

Heather-Anne’s eyes searched Charlie’s face. “I liked it here, thought it was far
enough away that he wouldn’t find me easily. I thought I was safe here. And I was.
I changed my name, got my personal trainer certification, built a new life. Then I
met Les, and I began to think that I could love again, that I could trust again.”

The B-movie dialogue was making Charlie nauseous. “Oh, cut the crap, Heather-Anne.
You saw a meal ticket.”

“You’re wrong,” Heather-Anne said with quiet dignity. Charlie couldn’t tell if she
was sincere or acting. “I love Les. He’s my soul mate.”

Charlie could believe that, given that Les had embezzled from people who trusted him,
and Heather-Anne—if her performance with Hollis was anything to go by—was adept at
separating men from their money … and their wives. Neither one had more conscience
than your average anaconda.

The panhandler had made his way around the park and now hovered within arm’s reach,
his ripe smell drifting toward the bench. For the first time, Charlie noticed a small
mutt hovering close to the man’s leg. With a sigh—she never knew if she was helping
someone or enabling an alcohol or drug addiction—she handed him a five, responded
to his nod of acknowledgment with a small smile, and turned back to Heather-Anne when
he was out of earshot. “What’s your real name?” Charlie asked, “and what does your
history have to do with Les’s disappearance?”

Heather-Anne hesitated. “Cindy,” she said. “Lucinda Cheney. I—I wasn’t exactly up
front with Les about my situation,” she confessed, bowing her head so Charlie couldn’t
read her face. “He found … he found some letters, some documents from my life before.
He was hurt, angry. I didn’t blame him.” She looked up so Charlie could see the anguish
and sincerity in her face.

Oscarworthy,
Charlie thought. “So, you’re saying—?”

“We fought. He accused me of lying to him, said our whole relationship was a sham.
I told him I loved him, that my feelings were real.”

Charlie rolled her eyes, but Heather-Anne, caught up in her story, didn’t notice.
“He said he needed some time alone to think things through. I thought he meant an
afternoon, an evening, something like that. I went to the beach to give him some space.
I spent the afternoon there, just walking, thinking, crying. When I came home, he
was gone. No note. Nothing. I didn’t know where he’d gone, if he was planning to come
back … nothing.” She held her empty hands out, palms up, as if to demonstrate “nothing.”

“So you came here. Why?”

Heather-Anne—Charlie had trouble thinking of her as Cindy—twisted a strand of hair
between two fingers. “I thought it was possible he’d come back to Gigi. He was fond
of her, you know. Or to see his kids.”

Personally, Charlie thought it unlikely that a man who hadn’t given his kids a thought
in over a year and couldn’t be bothered to pay his child support was going to return
to his spurned wife and alienated kids after a spat with his new honey. She pulled
out a small notebook. “Right. Well, you’ll forgive me if I take everything you’ve
said with a grain of salt until I can find some proof. Where did you live before leaving
your husband, and what is his name?”

Heather-Anne pulled back with a frown. “I can’t tell you that! You’ll make inquiries
and he’ll hear about it. He’ll know why and he’ll find me. You have no idea what he
can do. Look, I paid you to find Les, not to tear my life apart. If that’s too much
for you to handle, give me my money back and I’ll hire a PI firm that wants my business.”
She held out her hand as if expecting Charlie to count bills into it on the spot.

Charlie studied the younger woman, sure she wasn’t telling the whole truth but uncertain
where the lies lay. “We’re still hunting for Les,” she said, “and Gigi’s your best
shot at finding him fast. She tracked him to Aspen, after all.”

“Yeah, and let him give her the slip,” Heather-Anne said with asperity. She tossed
back her hair with a head jerk.

“Let’s come at this another way,” Charlie suggested, putting her cold hands between
her thighs to warm them. “Les embezzled from a lot of people on his way out of town,
and maybe long before that, for all I know. Was anyone particularly mad at him?”

Heather-Anne gave her a disbelieving look.

“I said ‘particularly,’” Charlie emphasized. “I’m sure he generated hate mail on a
Bernie Madoff level, but is there anyone who stands out? Anyone who threatened him
with something more specific than ‘I could kill you, you scum-sucking, lower-than-snail-shit
slimeball’?”

Heather-Anne was nodding before Charlie finished. “Patrick Dreiser. He and Les were
partners in a vending machine company. He had to declare bankruptcy when Les left.
His wife left him, and his son had to quit Stanford to get a job. He blamed Les. If
he’d had adequate financial controls in place, Les wouldn’t have been able to do what
he did,” she added self-righteously. “That’s what Les says.”

The old “blame the victim for making someone kill/rape/rob him” technique. “What did
Dreiser do?”

Voice dropping to a whisper, Heather-Anne leaned in. “He threatened to hurt Les’s
kids, Kendra and Darryl.”

“Kendall and Dexter.”

“Whatever. The point is, he sent Les this e-mail with photos that were…” Heather-Anne
shuddered and Charlie got the impression that, for the first time, the woman was sincere.
Her horror was genuine. “Who could threaten to do that to kids?”

“What steps did Les take to protect them? Did he tell the police? Warn Gigi?” Gigi
had certainly never mentioned such threats to Charlie, but maybe it had happened before
she joined Swift Investigations.

Heather-Anne looked baffled. “He couldn’t call the police—they would’ve arrested him!
It all came to nothing because Dreiser realized—”

She cut herself off, but Charlie finished for her. “Dreiser realized Les didn’t give
a damn about his kids, so threatening them wasn’t going to get him what he wanted.”
Not giving Heather-Anne a chance to reply, she asked, “What did Dreiser want?”

“His money back, of course. A couple million and change. Plus ten percent for ‘mental
anguish.’”

Charlie whistled softly. If Les had made off with two mil from one business, he must
have made a total haul of over ten million. No wonder he thought Swift Investigations
was small peanuts, not worth embezzling from. Eight figures would finance quite a
nice lifestyle in Costa Rica, she imagined, and made it all the more unlikely that
he would willingly return to a country where police slavered to arrest him, prosecutors
panted at the prospect of tossing him in jail, and defrauded victims waited their
chance to boil him in oil.

Heather-Anne stood and twisted to pick up her gym bag. Charlie could see slat marks
from the bench imprinted against the back of her bare thighs. “I’ve got to go—another
training appointment. With Les gone, things are a little tight for me.” She grimaced.
“So, I’ll hear from you soon?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said. She watched Heather-Anne sashay out of the park, highlighted
hair riffling in the breeze, bare legs drawing appreciative looks from every man within
eyeshot. Like trout watching a glittery lure, she thought, making her way back to
her car. She wondered if the men Heather-Anne reeled in ever even knew they’d been
hooked.