Chapter Thirty-Nine
BARRETT
Six days later, Diego was in the care of his other owners, my office locked down tight. I was in my car on my way to Philly, hoping the ball-of-rust-on-wheels had just enough welding to hold it together through the trip, wondering if maybe Sawyer was right; it might possibly be time to replace it.
She was in Philly.
For reasons completely unknown to me still.
This fact gave me a chronic, infuriating itch on my inner forearm, evidenced by the red scratch marks there, something I hadn't seen in a while.
It was an old tic, one I usually managed to keep at bay solely because I couldn't ever sleep until I figured out the nuances of a case.
But this one was proving difficult.
Clarke was fastidious in covering her tracks, something that still didn't make sense. What also made no sense was the fact that when I'd called her work to inquire about her, I'd been informed that she hadn't worked there in six months.
Six months.
Yet she hadn't lost her apartment, her bills all seemed to be paid, she hadn't asked for money from her father, though I hadn't been able to get in touch with her mother.
When she heard who I was, she likely thought her ex was being ridiculous, that she wasn't going to play into his hand, and therefore ignored me.
But she was clearly in the wrong.
Because something was up, something not typical for Clarke, who, by all accounts, seemed like she had been a pretty good employee, someone dependable, and if not predictable, then at least a creature of habit.
To suddenly quit, but still have an income, to wipe your browsers, to ghost your former detective father, well, it sounded to me like Clarke was into something. Something likely not legal. Something that could possibly lead to real trouble for her. That maybe already had.
In Philly.
It wasn't that Philly was a bad area per se, but all big cities had one thing in common. Big crime. Shady characters. People who would take advantage of the probable na?veté of an unemployed woman who needed money to pay her bills.
Really, it was an old story.
I just hoped for Collings' sake that she hadn't gotten herself so wrapped up that extracting her would be a huge project.
Or that she wasn't hooked on something, selling herself to make ends meet.
While, in my opinion, the sex trade was something unjustly looked down on, I could understand why a loving father wouldn't want his only child to end up using her body to pay her bills.
I had a feeling it wasn't prostitution, though. Or even that she was hooked on something. She'd been too careful. Nothing about her moves spoke of genuine desperation. It was too planned, too meticulous, too cleaned up afterward.
Whatever she was into was likely deeper than that. And, therefore, a lot more dangerous.
There was only one reason I had even known to look toward Philly—since her phone browser had been similarly wiped, and none of her texts seemed to imply anything was out of the norm.
She'd been lying, in fact, to everyone, claiming to still be at the old job, turning down girls’ nights claiming that she had to be up early to get to work, that she had a big project going on.
No one knew.
And she went through pains to make sure no one found out.
But there was one thing she'd forgotten to clear, something that probably didn't even occur to her that held a history.
Her Maps app.
She'd looked up the route from her place to some tucked-away, off-the-grid-including-Yelp Turkish restaurant.
I felt my gut tighten at that information, knowing that while they didn't get as much coverage as their Italian counterparts, that the Turkish mob was alive and well, known primarily for drug trafficking—especially heroin—doing so in conjunction with the Bulgarians.
Neither syndicate being one you wanted to fuck around with.
But what other reason could Clarke have for looking up a somewhat underground Turkish restaurant in Philly after quitting her job and lying to her friends and family?
I hoped I could get to her without having to deal with the mob itself, knowing I would be out of my depth if it came to that, and that there was no way I could handle it myself.
No one man took on the mob.
That was simply something that everyone understood.
By the time I parked my car about a block away from the restaurant whose entrance was suspiciously down an alley, it had been about forty hours since I slept.
Even though I was used to sleep deprivation on cases, I felt the sandpaper sensation of my pupils, the droop of my eyelids, and had needed to pull off twice to get more coffee to keep me going.
I just didn't want to lose any time since the place seemed like it was hopping; this was most likely the time I would see her if she was around.
I could sleep after the sun came up, when the restaurant was closed until evening again.
Just a couple more hours.
I cranked the windows open, feeling the sweat start to trickle down between my shoulder blades.
I hated being hot, the way clothes stuck to my skin, the way my scalp felt oily, the way there was no escaping the heat when, if you were cold, you could move around, put another layer on, warm yourself up.
I just had to sit in my own stewing body, trying not to get agitated with each passing minute. And failing miserably.
Then, as a few of the cars on the street pulled away, as the men in suits left the restaurant, followed by the servers, then the busboys, I realized something.
There was one car sitting far down the street from me, the occupant ducked low in their seat, what looked like a camera in their hand.
I had no real reason to think it was her, but at that point, I was simply looking for any excuse to get out of the balmy car, to feel the slight wind start to dry the sweat slicking through my thin clothes.
So I climbed out, looking like a typical phone-obsessed person, seeming as if I was clicking away at my keypad when I was really trying to catch a good look at the person in the old car that looked straight out of that action movie with the cars and the FBI and the cheesy one-liners.
It wasn't until I was nearly past it that I realized it was her.
She'd chopped and bleached her hair, taking her long tresses up to barely brushing her shoulder blades and changing her natural wheat-blonde color to an almost white-blonde.
But there was no mistaking her, crouched down low, one foot planted on the seat, making her knee press into the side of the steering wheel, a notepad propped up on her thigh, her other hand raised to scribble, making me realize something incredibly obvious I had somehow missed before.
She was left-handed. It wasn't exactly rare, but it was something unusual enough that I should have noticed it as I pored over her discarded piles of paperwork, everything from birthday cards she'd clearly forgotten to send, grocery store lists denoting a love of Twizzlers and blueberry yogurt, and even an adoption application for a dog she'd never finished, dated seven months before.
If you asked Sawyer to list my faults, at the tip-top would be a false sense of confidence in myself, followed very closely by my impulsiveness, my inability at times to really think things through before I acted on them.
Which was why I reached out, closing my hand over the door handle and pulling, almost a little surprised when it opened with a heavy groan, making her head snap over, eyes wide as I slid in beside her.
It was all of three seconds before there was a knife pressing into my throat.
"Get out of my car."
There was confidence in the words, likely thanks to her self-defense training, to the certainty that came from practice, but there was a wobbling undertone, something that spoke of never having to use the skills in a real-life situation.
"Your father has been looking for you," I told her, turning my head to gauge the reaction, feeling the blade trace a superficial scratch over my skin, something she seemed to notice at the same time I did, snatching her hand back, but keeping her arm raised, ready to thrust should I make one wrong move.
"Excuse me?" she asked, brows drawing together, looking darker now that her hair was lighter, something that made her eyes all the more dominant a feature of her face.
"Your father. Detective Collings," I added for some reason I couldn't place, as though she would somehow forget her heritage. "He's been looking for you."
"Why would he be looking for me? I sent him an email telling him I would be out of town."
"Your father doesn't exactly strike me as the tech-savvy type. He probably doesn't know how to access his email."
"Wow," she said, lips twitching a bit. "That was a little mean. Accurate, but mean," she told me, flicking closed her knife, sticking it back on the seat just under her ass. "So who are you?"
"Barrett. Anderson."
"Give me some context here, Barrett Anderson."
"Anderson Investigations. He came to me to find you."
"Anderson Investigations," she rolled that around on her tongue. "You mean that little hole in the wall across from the police station?" she asked, then flattened her lips together. "Now I'm the one being mean."
"It's not mean. It's accurate," I told her, shrugging it off.
"No offense, but why the ever-loving hell would my father come to you if he was worried about my whereabouts instead of going to that Sawyer guy?"
"My brother," I told her, only wincing at the bitterness in my tone slightly.
"So, you're the better investigator, but he's the street-smart one."
"Why don't you think I'm street smart?" I asked, maybe mildly offended, though I didn't usually take anyone's judgments to heart. I knew who I was, what my strengths were; there was very little reason to doubt myself based on someone else's observations or assumptions.
"Oh, please, with that shaggy haircut just begging to be pulled during a fight. Those glasses waiting to be smashed. And you weigh, what, one hundred and thirty pounds?"
She wasn't that off.
"Clark Kent wore glasses."
"Yeah, but not as Superman," she told me, rolling her eyes.
"Anyway, you can go ahead and tell my father that I'm fine.
And that he needs to figure out how to work his email.
I mean, I have all but given up on him mastering texting at this point.
But even he can use that very efficient two-finger typing method to answer an email. "
"He's going to want to know why you are in Philadelphia."
"Which will be explained in the email."
"Somehow I doubt you told him the real reason you are here. Like you somehow forgot to tell him you quit your desk job he still thinks you’ve been going to daily until you disappeared."
"And, yet, I don't owe you any explanations, Barrett Anderson. I will handle my father when I get back. Now please get out of my car before I stab you in the gentles."
It was perhaps the kindest stabbing threat there could be, but there was some firmness behind it.
And, quite frankly, I was too hot and tired to be thinking perfectly straight.
Besides, whatever she was doing, it seemed like she was invested in it, meaning I would likely find her in the same spot the next night.
After I had cooled down and slept.
So I climbed out of the car, sure that I would see her again, blithely unaware of how soon it might be.
Meaning just a few hours later.
When a weight bounced on the side of my bed, sending my unconscious body jolting up off of the mattress slightly, shocking me into consciousness with the dropping of my stomach and the soaring of my heart.
"So," a newly familiar voice said as my body settled down, and my head whipped over a bit frantically in the dark, finding Clarke kneeling there at the other end of the bed, hair wet enough to have been freshly showered, smelling of peonies and vanilla—something I found oddly soothing when I usually hated any strong scents, finding they made me feel like I was choking.
"How did you find me?" she asked, head tilted to the side.
Clarke Collings, a woman I had been hired to find, had found me.
And broken into my room.
I didn't know whether I was supposed to be curious, impressed, or alarmed, but I found myself a mixture of all three as she sat there, one brow arched up, waiting for me to explain.
I had a strange feeling right then as I pushed myself up in bed that this case was not going to go the way I thought it would.