When All The Girls Have Gone (21 page)

For the first time Charlotte seemed to realize that she was playing with fire. Alarmed, she put a hand on Brian’s arm.

“That’s enough, Brian,” she said firmly. “What was so important that you felt you had to come and see me at this hour of the morning?”

“I am not about to discuss our personal business in front of some stranger.”

“Then you might as well leave,” Charlotte said. “Because Max and I have a busy day ahead. Places to go, people to see.”

Brian flushed a dull red. “Damn it, Charlotte—”

She fixed him with a steely glare. “Here’s the thing, Brian. I don’t have time to waste giving you tea and sympathy because your married lover dumped you.”

Brian abruptly changed tactics.

“Look, sweetie, I know I hurt you. I didn’t realize what we had until I lost you.”

“Until you dumped me and left me with all those wedding bills to pay off.”

“I can make it up to you. I’ll write you a check if that will make you feel better.”

“Be my guest. I’ll send you an itemized list of expenditures. But I can
tell you right now that it won’t change things. Say what you came to say and then leave.”

“Charlotte, this isn’t like you.” Brian shot Max a fierce look. “Whatever you think you have going with this guy, it’s just a rebound thing. It’s natural under the circumstances. But he won’t stick around for long. When it’s over, you’ll realize that what you and I had was something much deeper and more important.”

“You’ve got it backwards,” Charlotte said. “You’re the one who’s on the rebound. You’re here because you got dumped and you want me to make it all better until you can find a new relationship.”

“That’s not how it is.”

“People tell me I’m too trusting,” Charlotte said. “And maybe that’s true. However, it does not follow that I am stupid. Once someone has proven that he can’t be trusted, I learn my lesson. I try not to repeat my mistakes. The bottom line is that I could never trust you again, Brian. You broke our relationship. There’s no way to repair it.”

“You’re making a huge mistake,” Brian warned.

“It’s time for you to leave,” Charlotte said.

She turned on her heel and went back around the corner, heading for the door.

Brian looked at Max, anger heating his blue eyes.

“I don’t know who you are, you son of a bitch,” he said, “but I know you’re taking advantage of her.”

“Charlotte wants you to leave,” Max said. “It would probably be best if you did.”

“Fuck off,” Brian hissed softly.

He stalked out of the kitchen. A few seconds later the door closed quietly behind him. There was a long silence before Charlotte reappeared. Her arms were crossed very tightly and she looked worried.

“That,” she said, “was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I should never have let Phil send him up here.”

“Relax. Pretty sure it will all blow over.”

“Pretty sure?”

“I don’t know Conroy as well as you do. What do you think?”

“I . . . I’m not sure. Before this morning I would have said he wasn’t the type to make a scene.”

“He got mad because the woman he thought he could come back to on the rebound had already moved on. He needs time to cool off.”

“I hope you’re right.” Charlotte took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Still, letting him come up here this morning was a really dumbass thing to do.”

“Yeah, revenge has a strange way of backfiring.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You seem to know something about the subject.”

“I do—for a couple of reasons. One is that in the past six months I’ve learned that a lot of the people who hire a PI tell you that they just want answers, but what they really want is ammunition for revenge. I try to avoid that kind of work. It never ends well.”

Charlotte watched him intently. “What’s the other reason you think you know something about revenge?”

“In one way or another I’ve been looking for revenge since the night Quinton Zane set the fires that killed my mother. Look where it’s gotten me—I’m divorced, damn near broke and, according to at least one shrink, burned out. I’ve got a failed career as a profiler behind me. A lot of people are predicting that I’m going to fail again as a PI. They say I’m obsessed with the notion that Quinton Zane is still alive—and all because I want revenge.”

“No, because you want to be sure Zane is dead. It’s understandable. You want justice.”

“Tell that to the therapist who diagnosed me.”

She surprised him with a fleeting smile. “I will, if I ever get the opportunity.”

A strange, comforting warmth stole over him. She believed him. She didn’t think he was paranoid or obsessed. She trusted him and she trusted his intuition. Among those who knew something about his past, she was the only one outside his foster family who did have faith in him and his weird way of looking at the world.

“Thanks,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, so much for the pleasures of revenge,” Charlotte said. She moved into the kitchen and picked up the coffeepot. “Back to business. How much are we going to tell the other members of the investment club when we interview them?”

“We’ll start with the truth—that Jocelyn is missing and that I’m investigating Louise Flint’s death. We’ll see how they react and take it from there.”

“I understand you’re worried about Jocelyn,” Emily Kelly said. “But I really don’t think there’s anything I can tell you that will help. I assumed she was at some convent in the Caribbean doing a tech-free retreat.”

Max drank some coffee and tried to get a read on Emily Kelly. The only thing he was certain of at that moment was that she was tense and anxious. She looked as if she had not slept well.

She had initially refused to meet with them. When Charlotte had called her a half hour earlier, Emily had been quick to explain that she was on her way to a yoga class. It was only after Charlotte had said she was concerned for her stepsister that Emily had agreed to meet with them at her house.

The moment she opened the door it was obvious there was no yoga class. Two suitcases stood in the hall. Emily was preparing to leave town.

The house was an older home in a pleasant residential neighborhood. The interiors and furnishings were standard-issue contemporary, bland to the point of invisibility. There was no edge. No bold strokes of color. In a city noted for its gardens, Emily’s front yard stood out because of its sheer ordinariness.

Emily suited her house, Max thought, attractive, neat and well maintained. But there was nothing unconventional, exotic or over-the-top about either the woman or her home. It was as if both were determined to blend into the background; as if they went out of their way to go unnoticed.

“Do you have any idea where Jocelyn might have gone?” Charlotte asked.

“None.” Emily shook her head. “But this is Jocelyn we’re talking about. For all you know, she simply decided to ditch the retreat and head for a high-end beachfront hotel. It wouldn’t be the biggest surprise in the world.”

“She hasn’t been in touch with you, then?” Charlotte said.

Emily shook her head, her lips pressed tightly together.

She was lying, Max thought.

“You’re worried, aren’t you?” he said.

Emily stared at him with a helpless expression. Then she seemed to collapse in on herself.

“We all are,” she whispered. “Because of Louise. I’ve been telling myself that I won’t run. I’ve got a gun. Good security system. I’ve also got a great job. I will probably lose it if I just disappear. But I haven’t been able to sleep. I can’t go on like this. My nerves won’t take it. So, yes, this morning I packed my things. I was about to put my suitcases in the car when you phoned.”

“Thank you for waiting,” Charlotte said.

Emily shook her head. “I only hung around because I hoped you might have some news or at least some information about what is going on.”

“Will you at least tell us why you’re so concerned?” Charlotte asked. “Jocelyn is my stepsister. I think I have a right to know whatever you can tell me.”

Emily hesitated.

“Have you spoken with Victoria or Madison?” she asked finally.

“Not yet,” Charlotte said. “I called Victoria right after I called you. I wanted to set up an appointment, but she didn’t answer her phone. I left a message. I’ll try again later.”

“It would be better if you talked to them,” Emily said. “I’m the newest member of the club.”

“What is this all about?” Max asked, deliberately sharpening his tone.

Emily flinched as if she had been struck. She recoiled and turned to Charlotte.

“What is going on here?” Charlotte asked.

“I don’t know,” Emily said. Tears leaked from her eyes. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I just don’t know what is going on. None of us do.”

“But you’re afraid,” Charlotte said. “Because Louise is dead and Jocelyn is missing.”

“Yes.” Emily used a tissue to blot her eyes. “I’ll tell you what I know and then I need to leave.”

“Talk to us,” Max said.

Emily fixed her attention on Charlotte. “Madison started the club.”

“We know that,” Charlotte said.

Emily clasped her hands very tightly together on her knees. She was so rigid she looked as if she might shatter at the slightest touch.

“It’s a legitimate investment club,” she continued softly. “We do make investments. In fact, one of them might be about to pay off in a very big way. But at the start the investment angle was meant to serve as a cover.”

Charlotte stared at her, speechless.

“For what?” Max asked.

“It was Madison’s idea,” Emily said quickly. “She said that we—the five of us—could do so much more than just donate to the women’s shelter where Louise worked. She said we could punish the men who got away with abusing their wives and kids.”

Charlotte sat frozen. “Punish them? How?”

“Madison said that we could perform what she called takedowns. The targets would be selected from the files at the women’s shelter.”

“Louise had access to those files?” Max asked.

Emily nodded. “She often interviewed the women. She was in a position to get the details we needed to go after the ones who got away—the men who went unpunished by the system. We were just trying to get some justice for the victims, you see.”

“What kind of justice are you talking about?” Max asked.

“We did everything online. There’s so much damage you can do and remain anonymous. We went into the chat rooms that the men used to find
their victims and we did what we could to expose them. We ruined credit ratings. We even got two men fired from their jobs.”

“You hounded them,” Charlotte said.

“Yes.” Emily raised her chin. “Our goal was to make sure the abusers never had a moment’s peace. We wanted them to be afraid all of the time. We tried to ensure that they never got close to another potential victim.”

“Jocelyn never told me any of this,” Charlotte said.

She sounded as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her, Max thought.

“Of course not,” Emily said. “Jocelyn considers herself your big sister. She thinks she needs to protect you. And, although we were careful, we all knew that what we were doing was potentially dangerous.”

“Why did Jocelyn disappear?” Max asked.

“None of us knew that she had disappeared,” Emily said. “Not at first. We really did believe that she was off at some retreat in the Caribbean. But after Louise died, Victoria and I started to wonder if something had happened to Jocelyn, too. Then someone sent the warning code. We assume it was Jocelyn. It has to be Jocelyn who sent it. Otherwise, it makes no sense.”

“What is this warning code?” Charlotte said.

“Our biggest concern was that one day one of the targets might figure out who was behind the online takedowns,” Emily said. “We worked out a code word to be used in such a situation. Last Friday all three of us—Madison, Victoria and I—got an e-mail from an anonymous address. We are sure it must have come from Jocelyn. There was only one word in the subject line. It was the code word.”

“You think that one of the men you punished has turned the tables,” Max said. “You think he’s targeting you and the other members of the investment club.”

Emily looked at him, her eyes stark. “That’s what Victoria and I believe. Madison has . . . a different theory.”

“What is Madison’s theory?” Max asked.

“Ask her,” Emily muttered.

“Where are you going?” Charlotte said.

Emily bit her lip. “No offense, but I’m not telling you or anyone else.”

“I understand,” Max said. He reached into his pocket and took out a card. “But if you need help, you can contact me at that number. Day or night. Got that?”

Emily nodded. She clutched the card and got to her feet.

“I need to go now,” she said.

Neither of them spoke until they were back in Max’s car, driving away from Emily’s house. Charlotte tried to organize her thoughts, but she kept hitting a mental stone wall no matter which way she turned. She glanced at Max. He seemed lost in his own thoughts.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, more in an effort to break the silence than anything else.

“You can’t believe that Jocelyn and her investment club pals were living out some sort of real-life female revenge fantasy?”

“Well, actually, I can see Jocelyn doing something like that,” Charlotte admitted. “I suppose what I find hard to believe is that I had no clue she was living a secret life.”

“Looking back, are you sure she never dropped any hints?”

“No. Well, in hindsight I guess the fact that she was so firm about refusing to invite me to join the club was a clue. But I didn’t pick up on it. You must think I’m incredibly naïve.”

“What I think is that you had no reason to suspect that Jocelyn was taking a huge risk.”

“But what does any of it have to do with what happened all those years ago in Loring?”

“Maybe we’ll get more answers out of Victoria Mathis,” Max said.

Charlotte took out her phone and keyed in Victoria’s number again. She was dumped straight into voice mail.

“She still isn’t answering,” she said.

“Either she’s running, too, like Emily Kelly, or—”

He stopped. His mouth tightened. Charlotte’s insides knotted.

“Or whoever murdered Louise has already killed her. Is that what you were going to say?” she asked.

“It’s a possibility, but at this point I’m inclined to doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, dead bodies have a way of showing up.”

“Sometimes they do disappear forever, though.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed. “But this particular killer doesn’t seem to be concerned with making his victims disappear. If we’re right about him, his goal is to make it look like his targets OD’d.”

“So he doesn’t care if the body is found,” Charlotte said. “He must be very sure of himself.”

“Yes,” Max said, thoughtful now. “Yes, he is very confident, isn’t he? That’s interesting.”

“Why?”

“Ultimately it will make him more predictable.”

“Well, alive or dead, Victoria isn’t answering her phone.”

“That leaves us with Madison Benson,” Max said. “Unless she has decided to run, too.”