by
Steve Jordan
As it so happened, there were no hotel employees hanging around the elevator core, when one of the elevators disgorged its sole passenger into the lobby. If someone had been there to see her, things would have turned out very differently.
Even in the best of hotels, there are rarely too many souls lurking about the lobbies and common areas between two and five in the morning. At that time, the people who can afford to stay at the best hotels are generally fast asleep, or already engaged in very private activities in their rooms. A few hotel employees are always on duty, of course, but most of them tend to lurk in quiet areas, out of sight when they can manage it, or stationed to be the first to greet people coming in from the street.
The Dorset Hotel didn’t quite qualify as among the best of hotels anyway, due to its unfortunate but earned reputation as a place for clandestine and often illicit rendezvous. There were a few workers about, some in their expected stations and some not, but in such a place, visitors often wanted to keep a profile so low as to be relatively invisible, so workers watched the place from mostly quiet corners and kept a low profile.
The girl who reached the Dorset lobby from the elevators somehow went unnoticed. And considering her state, going unnoticed should have been well nigh impossible.
At first glance, she seemed to be a mismatch of elements. Her deep-red satin dress, for instance, was sleek, sexy and expensive. But it had apparently been thrown on carelessly, unkempt and crooked. She had an expensive satin wrap, but it was also wrapped carelessly around one arm, and one end dragged along the floor. She wore matching designer pumps, elaborate affairs that wrapped red leather straps sinuously around the ankles and secured them with silver buckles... but the shoes were unstrapped, and she struggled to walk in their loose state.
Then, there was her hair... or what there was of it. On the top of her head, her brown hair looked shiny and well-taken-care-of. But it hung in carelessly cut tatters, as if it had been hacked off in clumps.
There was her figure, generous in curves, and with enough youthful baby fat remaining to smooth every line and present the picture of desirability. But she seemed to walk with difficulty, and in areas of her exposed arms and legs were marks and bruises, as if she had fallen painfully down a flight of stairs.
And finally, her face: Young, clean, fresh... she looked like she could be a high school cheerleader on a prom date. Except for her expression. It was essentially blank. Not the look of shock, or fear, or pain, or confusion, and certainly not the look of a girl on a prom date... just blank. She stared straight ahead, like a sleepwalker, her mouth closed and set, her lids heavy, as she exited the elevator core and walked across the hotel lobby.
In this state, had the girl been seen by a single member of the hotel lobby’s employees, it was almost certain that she would have been intercepted, and judging solely by her appearance, the police would have been summoned, possibly an ambulance, and a mugging or rape investigation would have immediately ensued. But somehow, at 3:53 in the morning, everyone happened to be looking or working elsewhere. So the girl stumbled to a set of exit doors in the far corner of the lobby, not the main doors to the front driveway, and she walked outside.
There were even fewer people out on the street at 3:53 in the morning, than there were in the hotel. So the girl shuffled halfway down the block without being seen by anyone. She did not seem to know where she was, and seemed to have no destination in mind... she merely walked. When she reached a bench on the sidewalk, she halted next to it. For a few moments, she stared at it, as if she was trying to remember what you did with a bench. Then, slowly and deliberately, she sat down on the bench.
She had not been there long before a bus pulled up to the bench, and stopped. The door opened. But she continued to sit there, staring at nothing.
The bus driver looked down at her, apparently believing she was like many of his late night passengers, and had simply fallen asleep waiting for the bus. “Wake up!” he called out, and waited for a response. Sure enough, the girl’s head came up, and she looked at the bus, and the driver. “Going home?” the bus driver called out next, and waited patiently.
The girl finally stood up from the bench, and stepped aboard the bus. She looked about at the interior of the bus, turned to the driver, and finally stared down at the coinbox between them. The bus driver regarded her primarily with amusement, but she was being incredibly slow about getting herself together, and he did have a schedule to keep. He decided to prompt her by saying, “Sixty-five cents, miss.”
The girl stared at him when he spoke, paused another moment, then reached for a tiny purse on her shoulder... the kind that was too small to hold much other than identification, a few bucks or credit cards, and a lipstick. She reached woodenly into the purse, and withdrew a single dollar bill. She held it out for the driver to see.
“Sorry, no change, miss,” the driver said. The girl stared at him, at the dollar, and the coinbox for another moment, and now the driver was beginning to get impatient. “Miss, are you going to—”
He didn’t have to finish, because at that moment, the girl stuffed the dollar bill into the coinbox. The driver started to thank her, relieved that she had finally woken up and made her decision. But at that moment, he noticed the hand that stuffed the bill into the coinbox, and his eyes widened noticeably.
The girl’s wrist was raw with what looked like rope marks. The marks suggested the ropes had been wrapped about her wrist numerous times, not tight enough to draw blood, but enough to leave clear and tender-looking red impressions. At that moment, he caught sight of the hand holding the tiny purse, and he could tell that it had the same red marks.
The driver looked up at the girl, now really noticing the state of her clothing, the unstrapped shoes, the savaging that had been done to her hair. At first, he had assumed it was just her look... to him, plenty of kids had a strikingly disheveled look that he generally thought of as “that punk look.” But upon closer inspection, he didn’t think it was a look at all. And now he thought he could make out odd impressions that encircled the lower part of her face, cutting across the mouth. His eyes popped some more. “Hey, kid, are you all right?” The girl finished stuffing the dollar into the coinbox and stared at him, eyes vacant, mouth set firm. “Did something happen to you? Do you want me to call a cop?”
The girl seemed to consider the question carefully—or maybe she took a long time to understand the question—before she finally croaked, “No,” using a voice that either didn’t sound like it had been used in hours, or sounded like it had been overused for hours. Then, before the bus driver could ask anything more, she turned silently and walked into the bus, selecting a seat midway through the bus, near the side exit doors.
The driver watched her walk back, seat herself, and resume her almost comatose attitude. He started to call a cop anyway, considering for a moment that she might have been in shock. But he had asked... she had said “no”... and he wasn’t sure how deep into this girl’s problems he wanted to get. It occurred to him that kids did a lot of weird things these days, that he might have no idea about. It was probably some kinky party, and maybe things didn’t work out... or maybe they did. He had asked if she needed help. She had said “no.”
Besides, he had a schedule to keep. Finally shrugging to himself, he closed the bus door, and started the bus forward.
As the bus moved on, the driver and his single passenger did not see the almost naked boy running out of the Dorset Hotel well behind them.
The boy was tall and lanky, and he had on nothing but a pair of shorts. More specifically, they were black shorts, of a light, silky material, and about mid-thigh length... not running shorts, but not exactly underwear, either. More like the kind of shorts you would wear to bed, and especially if you shared that bed with someone else.
He bounded out of the hotel, shot across the driveway, and stopped almost in the middle of the main street, and he seemed to be frantically looking for something. A moment later, the boy called out: “Ellen!”
He yelled the name loud and clear enough that the bus driver heard it, even over the moan of the bus, and he glanced into his rearview mirror to see the half-naked boy standing in the street, taking in a deeper breath and yelling like a maniac.
“Ellen!”
The driver glanced into the mirror that showed him his passengers, to see if the girl on the bus had reacted to the shouts. But when he shouted the name a second time, she did not seem to notice or care. The driver was relatively sure that, if it had been her name, she would have shown some sign of a response to it... that was a natural reaction to hearing your name, everyone knew that.
“Ellen!”
But she didn’t react... so it could not have been her. Again, the driver shrugged, and the bus continued on its way. He had a schedule to keep.
One of the things you can always depend on is the fact that, if you live with a large enough collection of people, there will inevitably be some of them that are such creatures of habit that you can set your watch by them.
Often it’s because of dogs.
In the northeast section of Sunview Apartments, this was the case. Every morning, every day of the year, Mrs. Lonnie (not her proper name, but what everyone called her, right down to the mailman) opened her front door at 6:35 a.m. and stepped outside, preceded on a leash by her white toy poodle, Soapy. Mrs. Lonnie and Soapy would proceed to take a leisurely constitutional around the apartment building. While they were out, Miss Jean Fell would open the glass doors to her balcony, and her dog Bug would step out on the balcony and survey the morning. Or, more accurately, the parking lot below Jean’s balcony. At 6:45, Mrs. Lonnie and Soapy would come back around the building, Bug would look down and see Soapy, Soapy would look up and see Bug, and the two of them would proceed to bark at each other. Little-dog yaps, fast and high-pitched.
The kind that Alain Guest could not sleep through. So he was awake at 6:45, every morning, every day of the year.
As was its job, the clock radio by the bed switched on at 7 a.m., playing a local all-news station that tapped into CBS news at the top of every hour, and a local news team for the remaining 55 minutes of each hour. The alarm did not go on... it was largely unneeded, thanks to the dogs.
As was Alain Guest’s habit these days, he rolled over in bed, reached out, and switched the radio off. But the damage was already done: Between dogs and radio, he was now wide-awake. Often, Alain entertained himself with a bit of masturbation before he got out of bed... but in fact, he had done this before he’d gone to sleep, and presently he did not feel the need. So Alain reluctantly got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. He took his time washing up and shaving (something he did more out of habit than out of any desire for neatness), allowing the running water to drown out the waking sounds of his neighbors, the yapping dogs, someone’s stereo thumping out crappy hip-hop, and the persistent knocking someone was doing on someone’s door out in the stairwell. Alain managed, just barely, to restrain himself from sighing heavily at the prospect of another incredibly boring day in an incredibly disappointing existence.
He rarely gave himself critical examination in the mirror anymore, and he did not today. Alain was one of those people who had the features that often denoted handsome, but somehow they did not quite add up to a handsome face. He had a larger than average forehead, suggesting great intelligence. His eyes were dark brown, alert and open—that is, they did not squint or shift about, and he did not frown. His nose was of average size and shape, and his mouth sported the slightly thin lips of many men. He still had his chin, and despite a few extra pounds, jowls had not yet taken over his jawline. Yet his face had no overriding features that tended to draw attention to it, no aspect that made him stand out. He had the proverbial face that got lost in the crowd.
Once done in the bathroom, he returned to the bedroom to get dressed. He reached over the dresser and opened the blinds, taking his first look outside as he slid the top drawer open and selected a pair of briefs. There were fewer things more pathetic, Alain knew, than a garden apartment with huge bedroom, living room and dining room windows that provided expansive views of a parking lot, and another garden apartment opposite the lot. It was especially sad in Washington, D.C., which had more than its share of picturesque views depending on where you lived... but those places were nowhere near Alain’s place. Still, even a staid view like this occasionally offered a perk, and today it was offering up “the bikini show” for his enjoyment.
“The bikini show” was Alain’s name for a girl in the apartments across from him, whose name he did not know, and who apparently liked to walk around her apartment in her underwear, with the curtains and blinds open, before she dressed and went to work. She was tall, with butch-cut auburn hair that highlighted a gazelle’s neck, a fantastic figure and a dancer’s legs, and Alain could literally stand there all morning just watching her stroll about. She stayed far enough from the windows to avoid being seen from the parking lot, but it apparently had never occurred to her that the opposite apartments could see her in the morning light (or maybe she knew very well that she could be seen, and was purposely showing off). At any event, the morning light that cast into her apartment also left his in the dark, so he was sure she could not see anyone watching her from here. So he did. These days, it was about the closest he got to women, in any state of dress. But he was more than okay with it, especially as long as there were DVDs, the internet, and occasional perks like this. He might be a self-imposed celibate, but that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy looking at pretty women. From a respectable distance.
Alain watched the bikini show for a while, until she disappeared back into her bedroom and did not reappear for a minute or two. Deciding that he would not be likely to need socks that day, he slid the drawer closed, turned to the closet to find a shirt and pants... and stopped. He took another look outside. There was a shiny, black luxury car that looked very out-of-place in the parking lot of Sunview Apartments. He’d almost missed it a moment ago, an irony that was not lost on him. And at about the time that he was idly wondering if someone in his building had either gotten married or died, his attention was drawn to the persistent knocking out in the stairwell.
Alain moved to the door of the bedroom, where he could see his front door. Apparently, the knocking was on his door. He started to the door, taking only one step before realizing that he had not, in fact, put on any clothes yet. So he called out, “Hold on a minute.”
“Mister Guest?” came a voice from beyond the door.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Alain called back. “Hold on a minute!”
Alain pulled on the briefs, followed up with a pair of cargo pants, a golf shirt, and a pair of sandals—other than changes in color, essentially his wardrobe of choice—and walked across his apartment to the front door. Without preamble, he opened it.
A man in a good-looking suit stood there, cocking his head back just a bit to look Alain in the eye. Alain didn’t know enough about fashion or fabrics to know if his suit was expensive, but if immaculate tailoring could be considered a sign of expense, then it was very expensive. The man in the suit didn’t look nearly as impressive as the suit itself. It wasn’t his grooming, because he was certainly well-groomed. Rather, he didn’t look like the wearer of an expensive suit. His face looked a bit strained, with a strange combination of intensity, nervousness, and arrogance all displayed at once. His hair was thin and receding, his mouth was weak, and his jaw clearly wanted to jut out in pride, but just didn’t seem to have the stones to actually do it. Along with his expensive-looking suit, he carried what looked like an expensive briefcase, black with bright silver latches.
“Mister... Elaine Guest?” the man asked.
“Not Ee-laine,” Alain stated. “It’s Uh-lane. Alain.”
“Please excuse me.”
“Happens all the time,” Alain explained. “And you are?”
“Marvin Wrigley,” the man introduced himself, and offered his hand. Alain shook it, noting that the handshake was much like the man, purposeful and wimpy at the same time. “You are the investigator?”
“Uh, yes, I am,” Alain nodded again, and a beat later, added: “Come on in.”
“I have a job I’d like to discuss with you.” Marvin Wrigley took a tentative step inside, and looked sideways at Alain. “Is something wrong, Mr. Guest?”
“No, no,” Alain replied, leading Wrigley into his apartment. “It’s just that I don’t usually see clients here.”
“No?” Wrigley asked innocently.
“No,” Alain confirmed, as he steered Wrigley around the kitchen and through a fairly clean living room. “Generally, I do business over the phone or e-mail. Occasionally I go to see clients. They rarely visit my office.”
At that point, Alain waved his hand to indicate the space they were now in. Originally intended to be a dining room, Alain had bisected the space with a desk, and added two chairs, a small file cabinet, a floor lamp, and a single picture on the wall behind the desk. The desk itself was topped with several stacks of papers, which had apparently abandoned the idea of being neat, a digital camera and handheld computer, both mounted atop sleek plastic stands, a keyboard and a flat-screen computer monitor. Cables from the monitor, handheld computer and camera stands ran through a small hole on the top of the desk, where a lower shelf held a laptop computer in a working dock. Alain indicated the chair opposite the desk to Wrigley, as he himself sat down behind the desk. He tapped one of the F keys on the keyboard, which activated voice-recording software on the computer, and folded his hands in his lap.
“So,” Wrigley nodded as he sat, and took in the converted dining room with a thinly-disguised look of disdain.
“I imagine,” Alain observed, “that you usually see bigger offices than this. Yours, perhaps?”
Wrigley nodded. “A bit bigger.”
Alain smiled. “I like to keep things simple. Nothing beats a thirty-foot commute.”
“How long have you been an investigator, Mister Guest?”
“The last four years as a freelancer,” Alain replied, sure that Wrigley already knew that... he didn’t seem like the kind of person that wouldn’t check out a potential hire himself. “I picked it up after I lost a job through a corporate takeover.” He shrugged. “It pays the bills. These days, anyway.”
“I suppose I expected... something...”
“A bit more hardboiled? Tough guy in a dingy downtown office?”
“I suppose.”
“Investigators have changed,” Alain shrugged. “Ex-military specialists turned private eyes went out with Magnum. We’re all computer geeks and bored ex-cops now.”
Wrigley cocked his head. “And which one are you?”
Alain tapped the sleek flat screen with a knuckle. “Guess. For the record, though, I did work in an insurance investigations office for six years before this.” The answer seemed to satisfy Wrigley, so Alain leaned back in his chair. “So, what can I do for you?”
In response, Wrigley brought the briefcase onto his lap, opened it, and extracted a folder. “It’s about this. A few months ago, I started to receive these letters, one a month.” He handed one of a small stack of letters over to Alain. The letter was simply a standard sheet of paper with the following message printed on it:
I know all about Ellen Levinson, and I know all about the obscenities done to her. You will not find her, but I can turn you all in. If you don’t want to go to jail for rape, lies, bribery and obstructing justice, you will send ten $500 bills to: POB37222-3024.
“Hm,” Alain muttered as he read. After a second quick read, he asked, “Did you keep the envelopes?”
“Yes,” Wrigley said, handing them over.
“Have you been paying this?”
Wrigley nodded. “Four payments, so far, counting this last one. Twenty thousand dollars.”
“And are the allegations true?”
“Well... not as stated.”
Alain looked at Wrigley. Then he put the letter end envelope down on the desk, leaned back in his chair, and smiled lightly. “You have my full attention, Mr. Wrigley.”
Wrigley responded by sighing deeply and shifting uncomfortably in his chair. After a moment’s thought, he seemed to pick a spot to begin his story.
“Ellen Levinson is the daughter of my employer, L. Taylor Levinson. I am his Executive Secretary. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”
“No,” Alain said honestly. “What does he do?”
“He’s rich,” Wrigley replied smugly. “He does whatever he wants.”
Alain shrugged. “And Ellen?”
“Ellen...” Wrigley paused, his demeanor shifting quickly from smug arrogance, to nervous sadness. “She suffered a date-rape, at the age of fifteen. The event... scarred her emotionally. It also threatened to bring considerable scandal onto my employer’s estate. So we had taken steps to... minimize the damage.”
“I assume that would come under the heading of ‘lies, bribery, and obstructing justice’,” Alain stated.
Wrigley’s eyes came up then, the only part of his face that did not seem nervous or apologetic at that moment. “Mister Guest, when you are a wealthy man, on the board of numerous financial and charitable organizations, and a member of high society, you are in a position to cause a lot of damage to others because of your own sullied reputation.” Once Wrigley got that out, he seemed to lose some of his fire again, and slipped back into his apologetic stance. “Mister Levinson was only trying to do what was best for Ellen. And for himself.”
“Okay,” Alain said after a pause. “So you greased a few wheels to keep the incident quiet. Then what happened?”
“Well, we thought everything was going... as well as could be expected,” Wrigley continued. “Even Ellen was responding better to the therapy.”
“Therapy?” Alain repeated. “As in?”
“Psychotherapy,” Wrigley answered. “She had withdrawn terribly after the incident. We engaged a psychotherapist to try to help her. We thought it was working. And then, one night, she had her driver take her into town on a date. She never came back.”
“Never? What, she ran off with her date? Eloped or something?”
“No, no...” Wrigley shook his head. “Paul—that was the driver, Paul Covey—said he found her date searching for her in front of the Dorset Hotel. She had run out on him. She disappeared. We haven’t seen her since.”
Alain absorbed this information. “Okay. How long ago did she disappear?”
“2000,” Wrigley replied simply.
“What!” Alain jerked forward in his seat. “You’re saying six years ago? And you haven’t seen her since?” When Wrigley did not immediately reply, Alain asked, “Did the police turn up anything?”
“The police?”
Alain goggled slightly at him. “You know, blue suits and funny hats. You would have filed a missing persons report with them. What did their investigation turn up?” Wrigley, Executive Secretary for millionaire L. Taylor Levinson, and at times an incredibly smug and arrogant man, seemed to have lost what arrogance he had, and now seemed to be physically shrinking into his seat. “You did file a missing persons report, didn’t you? For the daughter of a millionaire? Who had been raped once, suffered from mental withdrawal, and went by chauffer to hotel rooms to rendezvous with boyfriends?”
When Wrigley still did not immediately respond, Alain let out a rush of breath, and leaned back in his chair. Wrigley tried to rise to Alain’s non-verbal suggestion, and expanded in his seat a bit.
“It was the express wish of Mr. Levinson that we make no effort to find Ellen. He believed that she would come back when she was ready. So no police report was filed. We did hire an investigator later, but it was too late to track her down.”
“No missing persons report,” Alain stated. “Buried rape report. Your boss must be special.” He was sure that he’d done a bad job keeping the sarcasm out of his voice, but Wrigley did not challenge him about it. “And now—six years later—you’re getting blackmail letters, regarding a girl you don’t even know is alive.”
“She must be alive,” Wrigley protested, his aggressiveness making a comeback. “These letters—”
“These could be from anyone,” Alain said, holding his hand out for the folder containing the rest of the letters. He looked them over carefully. “All printed on a computer printer, standard Times Roman type. Comes standard on every computer, and printer, in the world. Cheap office supply store paper. No way to trace it. We can get a post office from the PO box,” he added, and looked at the envelopes. “Hmm. No address on the postal stamp. That’ll take some checking.”
Alain dropped the rest of the letters on his desk. “So what’s your intention here? To catch the blackmailers?”
“Of course not!” Wrigley snapped. “We want to find Ellen, make sure she’s all right, and bring her home.”
“Ah, so now you want her home,” Alain said. “Well, that should make blackmail a bit harder.”
“I’m not at all concerned about the blackmailers,” Wrigley said. “Once you find Ellen, we can stop the blackmailers.”
“In much the same way you stopped two police investigations, I imagine.”
Wrigley smiled thinly. “You might be surprised how easy it can be, given the proper wherewithal.” Then his smile faded. “Ellen’s obviously not faring well. She’s been gone too long. We want you to bring her home, Mr. Guest.”
Alain considered everything he’d heard. After a few silent moments, he said, “I’d like to speak to this driver... Paul, you said? Does he still work for you?”
“No,” Wrigley said, “but I have an address for him. Last I knew, he still lived in town.”
“All right. And the psychotherapist who treated her? Who was that?”
Wrigley’s eyebrows knitted together. “Mr. Guest, I hardly see why you need to speak to her doctor about—”
“Ellen Levinson has been missing for six years,” Alain cut him off. “She’s barely an adult. She’s never contacted her own father. Now she’s apparently talked to the wrong someone about a horrible personal incident. If that’s not a sign that the girl still has some issues to be worked out, I don’t know what is. I’m going to need as much information as I can about Ellen’s mental state, in order to figure out where she is, what she’s doing, and how I’m likely to find her. Okay?”
Wrigley considered Alain’s words. Finally he nodded. “Her name was Doctor Marilyn Lewis.”
“I’ll call her. It would be a good idea for you to call her first, tell her to expect my call.” Wrigley nodded again. “One more thing: The police investigation.” Wrigley started to speak, and Alain held up his hand. “I know, it was buried. But that means someone started it. You remember who?”
Wrigley thought about it a moment. “A Detective Scott. She worked at the Second District station on Idaho Avenue at the time.”
“I can find her,” Alain said. “So this happened downtown?”
“Yes. The Dorset Hotel, on Connecticut.”
“My expenses will—”
“Expense is not an issue,” Wrigley promptly said, asserting himself again. “Whatever it takes.”
“—will require an advance for travel,” Alain continued. “And a six-year-cold trail is much harder to track. Three thousand in advance should cover it, assuming she hasn’t skipped the country.”
“All right.” In an eyeblink, Wrigley had reached into a breast pocket and produced a checkbook. He opened the book, produced a pen from another pocket, and started writing. Seemingly in less time than it usually took Alain to sign his own name, Wrigley was finished, ripping out the check leaf, and handing it over to Alain.
Alain looked over the check. “You had most of this written out in advance, didn’t you?” Wrigley merely returned his gaze expectantly, and after a moment, Alain shrugged. “All right, I’ll get started.”
“Here’s my card,” Wrigley said, producing the card as deftly as he’d produced the check. No very good, no thank you, nothing. “Where do you want to start?”
“Right here,” Alain said, indicating his desk. “Hopefully I can turn up some leads on the web, first.” Wrigley began to protest, and Alain cut him off. “Yes, I’m sure you’ve done that already. But being a professional investigator means knowing a few more places to look.”
After a moment, Wrigley nodded. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“Good,” Alain said, grinning. “I appreciate your confidence in me.”
“Yes,” Wrigley said, and after a pause, stood up. “Well. I guess I’ll let you get started, then.”
“Excellent,” Alain agreed, rising out of his seat and guiding Wrigley towards the front door. “I’ll be in touch shortly, to let you know my progress.”
Wrigley seemed at least partially satisfied about the proceedings, although his arrogant side seemed to want to get the last word in. “I’ll expect to hear from you within two days!”
“Two days, no problem,” Alain nodded, opening the door for Wrigley. “You’ll hear from me by then, or sooner. Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”
“Good. Good. Thank you.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Wrigley,” Alain said, as Wrigley stepped through the door, then turned and stood there in a sort of formal closing to their meeting. “Talk to you soon. ‘Bye.”
Alain closed the door, not too fast, in Wrigley’s face. Once it clicked softly shut, Alain’s amiable business smile disappeared with the speed of light. He paused at the door for a moment, until he was sure he could hear Wrigley walking away and down the stairs. Then he walked back to his desk, and stood at the window to watch Wrigley climb into the black car in the parking lot. The closing of the car door apparently got the attention of Bug, in Jean’s apartment, and he began yapping at the car until it pulled away and drove out of sight. Once the car was gone, the dog stopped yapping, and all was quiet again.
“Six year old missing persons cases,” Alain muttered. “God help me. I should have hid behind the door.”
Lambs Hide, Tigers Seek e-Book edition is copyright ©Steve Jordan. All rights reserved.
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