Reclaim: A Recovered Innocence Novel (15 page)

And the most perplexing question of all: What am I going to do about Nolan?

I left Lila’s condo with the same sensation I’ve been having about her almost since the moment I met her—she’s hiding something. What, I don’t know. Even after doing some minor checking into her background I can’t figure it out. She’s not married. She doesn’t have a child. As far as I can tell she’s squeaky clean and exactly who and what she says she is. So why don’t I believe her?

What is it about her that creates more questions than answers? Will she ever confide in me and if not, can I live with it? Maybe I should just take what she’s offering for however long it’s offered and stop trying to figure her out. The truth is, most guys would. They’d accept the crazy no-strings-attached sex without question. I need to start being one of those guys, I decide. The only other option is to keep things strictly professional. No more naked Lila. No more recording our sex acts. No more of the best sex I’ve ever had.

Well, that’s not going to happen. The mere thought of giving up being with Lila is so ridiculous I laugh out loud, earning me a questioning glance from Cora as she looks up from the report I handed in about the updates on Carla’s case.

“You okay?”

“Sorry. Ignore me. What do you think of my theory?”

“I think it has merit. The similarities in the description and composite drawing on the medical examiner’s website to John Martin are striking. Contact the Spokane Police Department and let them know what you suspect. If this is Martin, his family might finally get some closure. Good work.”

“It doesn’t help Carla’s case. If anything it creates more questions.”

“Have you shown Lila what you discovered? She’s the legal expert here. She’d know how or even if Martin’s death affects the case. The witnesses you’ve found and the information you’ve gathered might already be enough to bring the case before a judge.”

“What about the DA’s connection?”

“Those are some strong accusations to bring forward without anything concrete to back them up. Sit on them until we’re absolutely sure we have enough to bring to the authorities. We’ll want to run this by Mr. Nash before we do anything. The DA’s not someone you can throw baseless allegations at. We need to make sure we’re not setting ourselves up for a lawsuit. Be careful. Don’t let him get wind that you suspect him of anything.”

“I won’t.” I can’t screw this up, I remind myself. There’s too much at stake for all of us.

“How’s the Lasiter case going?”

I’m glad to move on to surer footing. No one’s career is going to get ruined over a wife cheating on her husband with her personal trainer. So cliché—and yet most of the cheating-spouse cases we work on are. It’s rare that a suspicious spouse is wrong. It happens, but not often. Usually their hunches are right. Which brings me right back to Lila and my hunches about her.

I push those thoughts away…again, and focus on reporting the status of the other cases I’m working on for Nash Security and Investigation. Cora seems satisfied with my work, but she’s distracted. I’ve been so consumed with my own problems that I haven’t been paying much attention to the people around me. My mom reminded me of that with her guilt-laced phone call earlier today. I missed my standing weekly dinner with my parents because I’ve been so wrapped up with Carla’s case and my issues with Lila.

I force myself to once again put Lila out of my mind and ask Cora if everything’s okay with her.

“Yeah. I guess. Mostly.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“Nah. I’m just being paranoid.”

“About what?”

She makes a face and shakes her head. I recognize something in her expression. It’s the same look I get when I’m trying to figure Lila out.

“Want me to do a little digging on Leo for you?” I joke. “I could run the basics, see if there’s anything unusual going on.”

“No.” She adamantly shakes her head. “Absolutely not. I’m sure everything’s fine.”

I make a mental note to ignore her protest and run the check anyway.
I
want to make sure everything’s as fine as she’s insisting it is. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I find out the boss’s son is messing around on Cora, but if I were her I’d want to know.

“Okay. Just let me know if you change your mind. The offer stands.”

“Thanks. I could do it myself, but…”

“It feels invasive and distrustful. Like a line you don’t want to cross.” Like the line I crossed with Lila.

She nods. “Exactly like that. Relationships should be built on trust. Thanks for the offer, though.”

“No worries. Anytime.”

As soon as she leaves I run the usual on her boyfriend even though she told me not to. It doesn’t take me long to figure out why she’s sensing something’s off with him. I smile to myself, close out of the programs I was running, and shut down my computer for the day. She’s got a mighty big surprise headed her way. Good for her. Good for them. They deserve to be happy. I hope someday I find someone to make suspicious and then surprise. Again my thoughts turn to Lila. She’s pretty much a constant pop-up window in my head, frequently interrupting whatever I’m doing.

Speaking of…My phone pings with a text. Lila’s running late. She’ll meet me in an hour at my place. On the way home I stop at the store and pick up something for dinner. I have no doubt she’ll be hungry, and maybe sitting down across from her at the table will help me get some kind of perspective and put some distance between us. I can calmly lay out the ground rules I’ve been mulling over in my head all day during dinner.

Rule number one: This is just about sex. No emotions. No expectations. No commitment.

Rule number two: No spending the night. No cuddling. Sex and then gone.

Rule number three: Work and sex and that’s it. No texts or emails about anything except work. No making plans to get together unless it’s about the case.

Rule number four: No meeting each other’s friends and family. No personal talk. No questions. Keep it business only.

Rule number five: Discretion. No one is to ever know about our arrangement.

Rule number six: Either one of us can end the sex at any time for any reason. No questions asked. No recrimination. No looking back. Once it’s over it’s over whether the case is or not.

I feel confident she’ll agree to my terms and that we both can abide by them without anyone getting hurt. I know it’s what she wants and it’s what I can live with.

She knocks on my door just as I finish setting the food on the table. Food, work, sex (if she’s amenable), and then goodbye. In that order. Structure and perspective. That’s what’s going to keep everything on track here.

I open the door and all my careful planning and promises to myself scatter like leaves in the wind. I’m momentarily stuck dumb. How could I forget how gorgeous she is? How did I not anticipate this would happen?

She slips by me without a word or invitation and then she’s on me, grabbing me in that very direct way she has that leaves me with no choice, kissing me like she needs me to live. She tastes like coffee and something sweet. Her fingers twine through my hair, tugging it in a way that is part pleasure part pain. Any thoughts to stop her before things get out of control get overridden by her hand on my dick. My brain fizzles and fries. We’re all urgent, fumbling hands and hot seeking mouths.

There are no rules. There is no order. There sure as hell is no perspective.

Clothes get ripped off and thrown. We leave a trail from the front door down the hall. I grope for the nightstand drawer and find a condom, not wanting to take my mouth off her. She takes it from my hand and I groan as she rolls it down. I love the way she touches me. No hesitation. No uncertainty. She takes what she wants from me and I like it. I pull her legs until she’s at the edge of the bed. She’s hot and wet. I thrust easily into her with her feet on my shoulders. Using her legs for leverage, I pound into her. Her cries echo around the room. The louder she gets the wilder I get until she grips my forearms, digging her fingernails into my flesh as she throws her head back. I can’t hold back and plunge deep, pushing into her as far I can. I come yelling her name.

She opens her legs and I fall on top of her, catching myself so I don’t crush her. Her arms and legs wrap around me. In the quiet that follows I realize I’m in trouble. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We didn’t have dinner. We didn’t do any work. We haven’t even said anything to each other unless you count the words
harder,
faster,
and
fuck you’re hot
as an exchange of pleasantries.

I force myself to disentangle from her. Her limbs fall away from me and she stares up at me with a satisfied smirk. I think I actually might hate her in this moment. She punched through all of my carefully laid plans, all of the roadblocks and
SLOW
signs I posted, like they weren’t even there. Some of the blame falls on me. It’s not like I stopped her from taking my pants off or paused for thought when I had my fingers inside her and my mouth on her tit.

I’m so disgusted with both of us I pull out of her and turn away without a word to dispose of the condom. When I get back she’s lying exactly where I left her, her legs dangling over the edge of the bed like she’s ready for round two.
Perspective,
I remind myself,
rules, order, control.

But she looks so inviting as she gazes down her naked body at me and crooks her finger for me to come to her. I can’t resist. She’s a siren and I answer her call. I lie down on top of her, between her parted thighs. This, I realize, is where I want to be and I’d do anything to get here again and again.
Anything.

It’s not her I hate. It’s me.

She puts a hand on my cheek. “I know you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” I say a little too harshly to be believable.

“Then who are you mad at?”

I take her hands off me and hold them above her head. Her eyes widen a fraction and then she rotates her pelvis, rubbing her pussy against me. I use my other hand to still her.

“Let’s get some things straight,” I say. “This is only sex. We work and we fuck and that’s it. We don’t spend the night together. We don’t cuddle. We don’t touch each other like we care. You don’t ask about me and I don’t ask about you. We don’t date. No one can know we’re fucking. You don’t call me and I don’t call you unless it’s to work or to fuck or both. We fuck until we don’t feel like fucking each other anymore and we work until the case is over. And that’s it. Got it?”

She nods a little too eagerly.

“And you don’t ever, and I mean
ever,
fuck anyone while you’re fucking me. That is non-negotiable.”

“The same goes for you.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

I force myself to get off her. “We eat, work, and fuck in that order and then you leave. No more coming at me like you did at the door ever again. Are we clear?”

“I didn’t hear you complaining.”

“I’m complaining now.”

“I’ll follow all of your rules except one—we fuck whenever we want. If that’s before work or before we eat then so be it. But I’m not going to fuck on demand like some sex slave.”

“That’s not the way I meant it.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then get rid of the orderly eat, work, then fuck rule.”

“Fine,” I grind out.

She holds out her hand. “We have a deal.”

I shake her hand, thinking I’ve made the worst bargain in the world. This is never going to work.

This is never going to work.

I know why Nolan wants what’s going on between us to be only about sex and work. Keeping them separate from each other is a good idea. I can compartmentalize that way and I know he can too. What I can’t seem to do is remain detached in a way that will make this deal feasible. By the angry way he offered the bargain I don’t think Nolan can either. So why are we doing this? I know why I’m doing it, but why is he? What does he have to hide?

We eat at the table in silence. I could ask Nolan about why he thinks Martin is dead. I can tell him what Anna told me and about my visit with Inez. We can talk about the next step in the case and plan a new course of action. We can go over the rest of the stuff we found in Martin’s office. We can do a whole bunch of things we aren’t doing to get past the scene in his bedroom. Instead we focus on our food and let the silence hang over our heads like a guillotine blade. I’m beginning to think that we masochistically like it this way when Nolan finally breaks through the quiet.

“I think Martin’s body is in the Spokane County unidentified remains storage locker. I think he was murdered and I think I know who did it.”

As dropping bombs go, that’s a big one. An atomic-sized explosive. It shakes everything in me. I swivel my head in his direction. He’s not looking at me. Something on his plate has his attention. My mouth flaps open, closed, open, closed. That’s a doozy of a conversation starter.

I finally force words past the clog in my throat. “What? How? Who? Why?”

He glances up at me. “You forgot
where.
”

“You just told me where. Washington.”

“I did like I said I would. I followed his addiction. Idiot kept the same username with his favorite sites, but used a different method of payment. It tied him to Spokane. He kept his same steady diet of live porn for about a month and then all of a sudden it stopped. Cold turkey. No one does that unless they suddenly found God or were somehow incapacitated.

“I searched the records of the Spokane County medical examiner’s unidentified bodies webpage and found a postmortem drawing of a man who resembles Martin and who was found a few weeks after Martin stopped visiting the porn sites,” he finishes, leaving me gaping at him.

“But…who…?”

“My money’s on Debbie Martin. Remember when we visited with her? Something about the way she talked about him—in the past tense—stuck with me. She said, ‘It was one of the things I really
loved
about him, his devotion to his clients.’
Loved.
Past tense.”

“She could’ve just resigned herself to his being gone, and referring to him in the past tense could be her way of dealing with it.”

“Could be,” he concedes. “But I found a hit on her husband’s credit report that led me to a local PI. We know she was already onto whatever he was doing when he disappeared. It’s not too far-fetched that the PI Debbie hired would’ve done what I did in tracking Martin down for her. I checked and Debbie took some time off from work right before Martin’s sudden departure from porn. I bet if I dig deeper I can show that she traveled to Spokane.”

“Now I really want to know what was in that box at the back of his bookcase. If Debbie got ahold of it, why would she kill him?”

“Hell hath no fury…?”

“Maybe.”

“Could be Billits or someone he hired,” he continues. “Maybe the deal between them didn’t go as smoothly as it looks. Maybe Martin tried to shake him down for money after the fact. I’m looking at Billits’s whereabouts around the time Martin stopped visiting those sites.”

“Are you going to contact the authorities here or in Spokane about your suspicions?”

“Already did. Anonymously from a burner phone. I don’t want any of this to come back on us, Nash, or The Freedom Project. I gave them enough that they could try to match Martin’s missing persons report with the remains in their morgue. We’ll see what comes of it. I could be totally wrong and it’s not Martin at all.”

“I want to see this postmortem drawing.”

He pulls out his phone and taps the screen, then hands it to me. He put Martin’s DMV photo side by side with the drawing. It’s close. Very close.

“They’ll likely do a DNA test if they can’t get dental records,” Nolan says. “It’ll be interesting to see how cooperative Debbie is.”

“Do you have any idea what Billits might have done for Martin or what Billits might have had on him?”

“Funny you should ask. I found a sealed arrest record on Martin. No charges were ever filed, something the DA has discretion over.”

“Is there any way to find out what those charges were for?”

“Not without some hacking into a government database, which I’m not willing to do. It might be something the police will want to follow up on while trying to figure out what happened to Martin. One of the first things they’ll do is look at his record.”

“My friend Anna told me something very interesting about Billits.”

I fill him in on Billits’s visitors and the rest of what Anna told me. By the time I’m done, Nolan is sitting back in his seat, a deep line of concentration between his brows.

“We need to get a look at these guys,” he finally says. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Work. I’m very behind.” Embarrassingly so. Between my newfound chronic lateness and the time I’ve taken away from my regular workload to work on this case it’s a wonder I haven’t been fired.

“I can do the stakeout alone I guess.”

“Stakeout?”

“I want to know who those guys are who are visiting Billits, get photos of them.”

“Oh. You don’t need to do that.” I bring up the photos Anna sent me. “My friend took pictures of them when they first started coming in. They made her nervous. She joked that those men are the kind that make people disappear. I guess she wanted a record of them just in case. She sent me the pics she took. Here’s the first one.” I hand him my phone.

He takes a look and then taps on the screen of his phone. He holds our phones side by side. “Please tell me they look nothing alike.”

I point to the picture on Nolan’s phone. “When did you take this and why? How did you already know about this guy?”

“He was one of the guys guarding the Lucky Inn motel the other day when I went by for a look. There’s no doubt they’re running a prostitution ring out of there.” He swipes his screen and brings up the next pic. “And here’s the other guy.”

I flick my finger across my screen and bring up the photo of the second guy Anna sent me. Another match. We turn in unison toward each other, the same look of shock and disbelief on both of our faces. This isn’t just a can of worms we’ve opened. It’s a giant festering, pus-filled, maggot-swarming wound. The connections click into place. Billits and Carla. Carla and Martin. Martin and Billits. The DA ties everything and everyone together. There’s no way Carla didn’t know who Billits was to her even if she didn’t know who he was to Martin.

She lied.

I turn my attention back to the photos on our phones. These men are the links tying Billits to a prostitution ring. A ring that Carla was a part of. Billits wasn’t just a random customer, he was likely her pimp. Why didn’t she tell us that? Why did she pretend that she didn’t know who he was other than some guy who paid to have sex with her, some ordinary john?

“We need to talk to Carla again,” I say. “We’re missing something here. Something she knows.”

“So much for that photo array with Billits in it that I made to show her.”

“She probably thought we wouldn’t make the connection between her mystery man and the DA.”

“No. I think she
wanted
us to make the connection. Why else would she give us just enough information to identify him without giving up his real name? Her description of his tattoos was very specific. She had to know we’d find him and discover who he really is. I think she knew all along who was behind Martin tanking her case. But
why
? Why would a man like Billits care about whether or not one of his prostitutes was convicted of murder? If anything I’d think that he’d want her cleared so she could keep working for him.”

A terrible thought occurs to me. So terrible I can’t voice it. I get up from the table on shaky legs and go into Nolan’s office where I left my files. I feel him follow me, but he doesn’t say anything. I go straight for my file on Diego and open it. Right on top is a picture of the preschooler with his beautiful blue eyes. I put the photo of Billits that Nolan printed out right beside Diego’s. Cold dread seeps into me. Their eyes are the same color, the same turquoise blue.

“Oh, shit,” Nolan breathes. “You don’t think…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence for the same reason I can’t answer him out loud. It’s too horrific to bear. Carla was fifteen when she had Diego.
Fifteen.
That means she was fourteen when she got pregnant.

I push the pics aside and read Diego’s birth certificate with new eyes. There’s no father listed, but the names of the hospital where he was born and the doctor who delivered him are.

I point to the names. “Is there…” I can hardly push the words out of my mouth. “Is there a way to find out who paid the hospital and doctor bills?”

Nolan is already in his computer chair, hands on the keyboard before I can finish my sentence. I pace the small room while he does his magic. The constant whir and hum of his machines isn’t soothing me the way it usually does. The longer it takes the more my agitation grows until I’m shaking with it. Carla wanted me to know, but she couldn’t tell me. She couldn’t tell anyone. She was a victim long before the justice system got ahold of her.

“Cash,” Nolan says. “All of her bills were paid in cash, including the hospital.”

I nod, knowing he can’t see me. It confirms everything. But I need to hear it from Carla. I need to look her in the eyes and have her tell me the truth and then I need her to tell me what she wants me to do with it. Why did she write to The Freedom Project? Why is she willing to go up against Billits now when she wasn’t then? What changed? Or did anything change? Has she been planning this from the start? Is that what
all
of this is about—revenge?

Nolan turns toward me in his seat. “We need to talk to Carla,” he says, echoing my thoughts. “We’re in much deeper waters than she warned us about.”

“Revenge. It’s a game of revenge. Billits tampered with Carla’s case to get back at her for his son’s death. She’s using us to expose his criminal activities. It’s payback for putting her away. This isn’t about getting her freedom at all.”
How did I not see this sooner?

“What do you want to do? We could walk away from all of this, tell Carla that we didn’t find anything new that would help her.
Or
…we could go balls to the wall with it. Mr. Nash has FBI connections. We could turn over everything we have to them and see how it shakes out. Step totally out of the picture. You’d still need to decide what to do about Carla—leave her in prison or try to free her.”

“Carla is a victim here. Many times over. The fact still remains that she didn’t kill her son. Yes, she was negligent, but his death was a tragic accident. How and when and in what order do we make the attempt to exonerate her? If we do it too soon, Billits will be tipped off—if he’s not already. If we wait, that’s however many more days she sits in prison for a crime she didn’t commit.

“I get it now. I get
her
now. Like really,
really
get her. I thought I knew what it was like to have no power as an undocumented immigrant. I knew nothing. Carla was taken advantage of in the most reprehensible ways possible. I’m proud of her for trying to get back some dominance here even if she’s using us to do it.”

“So we’re doing this.”

Squaring my shoulders, I confirm it with a nod. “We’re doing this.”

He gives me the flashy grin that struck me from the start. “That’s my girl.”

I don’t think about how much I want to be just that—his girl. We have so many hurdles to cross, not just with the case, but ones he can never know about. I blink rapidly and look away from him, trying to hold in the tears stinging the backs of my eyes. It’s not fair. Any of it. I won’t get a fairy-tale ending, but maybe Carla can. Or at least a happy one. I renew my promise to Carla and to myself to free her once and for all. Maybe she can create the life she should’ve had. The life she was promised when she crossed the border all those years ago with her father and brother. The life all immigrants dream of.

All of them except me.