Chapter 6
H eather woke a couple times in the night, reassuring herself that she was still safe. Suddenly self-conscious to be naked, she checked her underwear in the bathroom, happy to find them dry and put them on. She went back to bed and seemed able to fall asleep each time. Then suddenly she bolted to her feet and raced out to the living room. She stopped partway, realizing she only had on her underwear, and bolted back into her bedroom again.
Royce laughed and called back, “As much as I really want to see that show again, I do hope you have clothes in there to put on.”
“I do,” she muttered, mortified at her actions. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be sorry. Hey, I’ll never pass on the opportunity to watch a beautiful woman come out in almost nothing.”
“ Right ,” she quipped, as a way to get over her embarrassment. She certainly wasn’t a prude. What bothered her more was her panic and instantly bolting, “At least I realized it before I got too far.” She quickly dressed, brushed her teeth, and, as she walked out once more, she smiled at them. “I wasn’t expecting to bolt out of bed already running,” she admitted. “So, that’s my lesson from now on.”
“Once you get used to being free again, those reactions will calm down,” Royce noted. He motioned to the kitchen counter. “There’s a fresh pot of coffee on.”
“Yes,” she said, as she headed toward it. “Do we have any plans?”
“We do, indeed. Rick is taking some time to sleep again. He only got four hours, so I gave him a few more, and then we’ll be hitting the road.”
She stopped in the act of pouring coffee, then turned around and looked at him. “Are we going home to England?”
“We’re getting to that point,” he clarified, with a small smile. “I’m not too sure that we’ll make it all in one trip though.” She frowned at him. “We’re heading to Holland first.”
“Why don’t we just go to France and take the Channel across?” she asked.
“It’s not me doing this planning. That’s all up to MI6,” he explained. “Plus, Terk and his team are trying to keep our exit quiet and low-key.”
“Sure, so no flights I gather is what you’re saying.”
“There’ll be flights, but they’ll mostly be private.”
“I never flew in a private jet until my sister married Faheed, and that’s all he travels in,” she murmured. “I found it incredibly luxurious, yet almost criminal, knowing so much of the world was suffering, and here they just traveled like that all the time.”
“And a certain luxury is always afforded to the rich.” He smiled, as she sat down across from him.
As he studied her face, she felt the color flushing up her cheeks. “I know. I know. I got some sleep, but I still don’t look all that great.”
He laughed. “If you’re hedging for compliments, don’t bother. You are beautiful as you are. Even yesterday, when you were struggling to come to terms with the shift in your reality, you were beautiful then too.”
She shook her head. “If that is how you see it, then you’re blind,” she announced. “But thank you for the compliments. It does a gal good to know that she’s not a walking disaster.”
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” he teased, with a cheeky grin.
She gave him an eyeroll and smiled. “You get me back to England, and I will be a very happy camper and will definitely be looking better in no time.”
“That’s the plan,” he confirmed cheerfully. “I’ve got some intel here, and we also have a bunch of questions we need to ask you.”
She groaned. “Of course you do.” He pulled out a pad of paper, and she could see a long list. “All of those?” she cried out.
He nodded. “Yes, unfortunately all of them.”
She sighed. “There’s not nearly enough coffee for that to happen.”
“We can always put on another pot,” he stated.
“Fine, fine,” she muttered. “Let’s just start in and get it over with.”
He began with questions about Faheed’s brother, about some of the photos, about conversations she may have overheard or not overheard, other people who came visiting, women who came visiting.
By the time Heather was done, she felt completely exhausted again. “I need to go back to bed now.”
“If that’s what you need to do,” he said, looking at her sharply, “go ahead and do it. Once we head out to England, it’ll be stressful again.”
“It’s already stressful,” she said, pointing at his pad of paper and all the questions. “I couldn’t even answer most of those.”
“No, but you did answer some,” he noted. “I find it interesting that you never saw any female visitors. Didn’t your sister have any friends?”
“No, she wasn’t allowed friends, female or otherwise. She wasn’t the kind to have very many girlfriends to begin with, so I think it just suited her. However, I did find it odd in the sense that she had no friends. Then she was pretty isolated even before marrying Faheed.”
“Which also suited the both of them apparently.”
“Yes, but I didn’t think it was all that healthy, and anytime I tried to convince her to change, to go outside, to do something, she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Okay, I’ve got another question for you. Do you think that she was being drugged in any way to keep her that docile?”
Heather stared at him, shocked. Dear God, she hoped not. Swallowing hard, she whispered, “I didn’t even consider that.”
“It’s just a question that comes to mind because that’s not a common behavior.”
She stared off in the distance, nodding. “It isn’t all that common, but I’m not sure it’s all that uncommon either.… My sister was always a loner and just—” She frowned. “This will sound terrible, but she always wanted to be taken care of. She didn’t want to work, to have responsibilities or to earn accomplishments. All that stuff was just too much effort for her.”
“What did she do with her time?”
“She painted a lot,” she shared. “In fact, she was quite gifted at it. She also played music and was good at that too, but she never wanted to do anything more with those gifts. Though she enjoyed them, she was never interested in putting in the effort to reach her full potential.”
“Him too presumably.”
“Actually yes. He loved it when she played, and she would spend hours playing for him, particularly in the evenings.”
“Maybe that was partly what the draw was.”
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “It did seem as if, whenever they were together, they were happy. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have thought it because he’s very controlling in so many other aspects. Maybe after years of marriage to my sister, he decided it was time to get rid of her. I don’t know.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Faheed. I hate to say it, but maybe his brother was involved in that too.”
She stared at him and swallowed. “I have negative feelings toward both of them because they wouldn’t let me leave,… though I realize that I didn’t know who Faheed really was. Hannah seemed to be very content with him, but I wanted to take her away, for both of us to escape, but then she died.” Tears of sorrow and guilt stung her eyes. “So I was good with never knowing Faheed.” She raised both hands. “Looking at it now, I feel as if I didn’t do enough due diligence.”
“It doesn’t seem you could convince Hannah to leave him anyway.”
“No, and I tried,” she muttered. “I did. I tried to get her not to marry him in the first place. Then I tried to get her to leave him. He tolerated it for a while, but she seemed to be perfectly happy. So eventually I just ran out of arguments. What could I say? She was not even listening, and I didn’t have any real ammunition to use against him in terms of bad behavior. He never hit her. He never seemed to hurt her in any way. He always treated her like a princess, which was exactly what she wanted.”
Royce just nodded and didn’t say anything.
She asked him, “Are you seriously thinking that maybe Saheed had something to do with her death?”
“I don’t know. Some of your photographs are of him too.”
“That’s true. I was taking a bunch more of him because, well, he really threw me off. Something was just so slimy about him.”
“But not about Faheed?”
“Because of my sister, I saw him in a different light, not necessarily a better light but a different one for sure. Saheed… makes my skin crawl.”
“Good enough. Did your sister feel the same way about him?”
She nodded. “Hannah didn’t like it when Faheed was away and when Saheed was left in control. It’s not that he ever crossed any boundaries with her. I think Saheed had too much respect for his brother’s property at that point in time. Still, Hannah told me that Saheed was always undressing her with his eyes.” Royce winced at that, and Heather nodded. “I get that for another guy such a description could be seen as just being a ladies’ man. But, to most women, it’s got that sexual predator feel for us.”
“Oh, I understand perfectly,” Royce replied. “I’m wondering still if that isn’t partly what this is all about. Maybe Saheed coveted what his brother had.”
“He does covet what his brother has,” she murmured. “I’ve seen that in him a lot, but I haven’t ever seen him get an opportunity to do something about it.”
“And yet maybe we just haven’t seen it. Maybe it’s still in the planning stages, but Saheed can’t quite bring himself to do it.”
“Maybe,” she murmured, staring at him, lost in her ugly memories.
Royce pointed toward the kitchen. “We have toast or cereal for breakfast.”
She blinked at him several times and then nodded. “Toast will be fine.”
He nodded and again pointed out the mess on the counter. “Help yourself.”
She laughed, as she got up. “After being in captivity for months, I tend to forget about doing these things myself. Hannah and I couldn’t do anything, literally. The servants were there for everything, which my sister adored of course. I felt very uncomfortable at first, but then I got used to it. Even so, it was weird to think that these people are there just to cater to you. While I was a prisoner, I couldn’t take a walk or do anything on my own. The housekeeping staff came every day. Bedding was changed every day. They did all the work.… It’s a very privileged lifestyle.”
“Which is why your sister enjoyed it so much,” he noted.
She nodded. “And yet it seems wrong now.” She put on two pieces of toast and poured herself a second cup of coffee, leaning against the counter as she waited for the toaster to ding . “We get to leave today though, right?”
“Yes, we’re leaving today,” he confirmed, with a smile. “So far we’ve managed to keep our location here a secret. So we’ll just take a private plane to Holland, and, from there, we’ll take a connecting flight to England.”
She nodded. “I guess that’s fine. I just want to get back on English soil again.” Then she hesitated and asked, “What about my lack of paperwork?”
“That’s one of the reasons we’re following Jonas’s instructions. MI6 is dealing with your paperwork. He has validated the documentation, so it’s just a matter of getting you back home again and getting copies for you.”
“Sure, but, until then, if I get separated from you guys, I’ll be in big trouble.”
“So remember that.”
“I’m not planning on running from you,” she declared in exasperation. “You guys are my ticket home.”
He burst out laughing. “And we should remember that too, huh ?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re a nice man, and I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by saying that I’m only here to get home, but obviously I am here to get home safely.”
“Don’t worry. We get it,” he said, smiling, “and you’ve been very good at handling the stress that’s come your way so far. Keep it up, and we’ll get out of here, hopefully without any more headaches.”
As she buttered her toast, his phone rang. He answered it and frowned. “Yeah, Terk. What’s up?… No, we’re supposed to be leaving today. I know she’ll probably be asking for an update on the guard.”
Hearing that, she winced because the one thing she hadn’t done was ask for an update. She’d been so stuck in her own worries that she’d forgotten about him. As she turned to Royce, hearing the change in his tone, she got worried.
When he disconnected, he sat there and stared at her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked hesitantly.
“The guard didn’t wake up.”
“He’s dead?” she cried out.
He nodded slowly. “I know for a fact that I didn’t hurt him enough to die from, and he was alive and well when they took them into hospital, while under security, but now they’re treating it as a suspicious death.”
She shook her head in denial. “But he shouldn’t have died.”
His stare was grim, and he nodded. “No, he shouldn’t have. Yet the hospital is treating it as a suspicious death. Don’t worry. MI6 will get to the bottom of it.”
She sagged into the chair beside him. “Are we really thinking that this was Faheed?”
“I’m not sure whether it was Faheed, his brother, or somebody else in the entourage who was tasked with the job, but, from Faheed’s point of view, your guard failed in an unacceptable way.”
She felt the color leaving her face, and she nodded. “Yes, that is exactly how he would view it.” She shielded her eyes for a minute, as she tried to hold back the tears.
“It’s not your fault,” Royce whispered.
She lifted her head and glared at him. “If it isn’t my fault, whose fault is it then?” she cried out.
“Those assholes are to blame. You know very well that one of them killed him,” Royce stated, staring at her intently. “It’s likely they are sending a message to you.”
“What message? If they catch me, that’ll be my fate?”
“It’s pretty compelling, as messages go, and, given that somebody who failed got this treatment, then I guess it’s possible,” he murmured.
She asked, “There was absolutely no way he died of a heart attack or something else?”
He shook his head. “It was a drug overdose. He was already comatose, so he didn’t commit suicide, and it was injected at that, so somebody else did it. We left him unconscious, but he was alive. Then he was supposed to be under guard at the hospital, so there is no way he could have taken any drugs himself. It was definitely murder.”
She swallowed hard. “I just feel terrible. He didn’t deserve that.”
“Neither did you deserve to be kept a prisoner. Neither did your sister deserve to die early. You need to get it through your head that the guard made choices that put him in that position. Don’t forget that he was part of a group who was keeping you as a prisoner,” he repeated. “I understand that you’re grieving because you feel you had a hand in his death, but you are not responsible.”
“I guess that’s another way to look at it.” She shuddered. “I just wish it hadn’t happened that way.”
“I get it, but he knew full well what the consequences could be in that job too. Rest assured, he would have known that, the minute he failed, his death would likely be the outcome. The local authorities were trying to keep him safe, but they should have been more vigilant. They had been told that his life could be in danger.”
“Why didn’t they protect him?” she asked, staring at him in growing anger. “That was their job to do. They had him in custody. They should have kept him safe.”
“Yes, they should have,” he agreed, with a nod. “But people don’t believe that someone would be so bold as to walk into a hospital and try to do something to a man under guard. Yet it only takes a momentary lapse in attention to pull that off. Plus, we know that money talks, and Faheed has plenty at his disposal. That’s for the hospital and the local authorities to look at,” he pointed out. “Our job is to get you out of here. The fact that the guard has been taken out now means that nobody can tell stories, and that’s both good and bad. We don’t want anything to do with it. We just need to get you out of here now.”
His phone buzzed again, but this time with a text message. He checked it and nodded. “Terk is sending a ride for us.”
“ Terk ,” she said, her tarot cards jolting at her waistband. “That’s the name I remember from before. Anytime I hear it, it’s so familiar in my mind. But”—she frowned at him—“I don’t know why.”
“Terk asked me to work this case, and he is the person who works with…” He stopped and shrugged, unsure how to say it to sound less cuckoo. “I guess psychics would be one word for it.”
“I prefer intuition ,” she replied. When Royce frowned at her, she tried for a nonchalant shrug and failed.
“Sure you do, but you also read tarot cards, don’t you?”
She flushed and stared at him. “Yes, but how the hell did that even find its way into your intelligence notes? It’s not common knowledge.” In fact her cards were now heating up. Not in alarm but something else. It took her a moment to realize what it was,… an awareness .
He laughed. “Believe me that definitely works. Reading tarot cards, particularly if you’re any good at it, is basically another form of—”
She jumped right in. “Intuition,” she stated firmly. “It’s another form of intuition.”
He grinned at her. “Are you so against having any abilities?” he asked, with a hard emphasis on the word abilities . “To the point that you’ll knock the fact that they even exist?”
“I’m not knocking the fact that they exist,” she clarified, “but it was drummed into me from a very young age that it’s not something we talk about. And, in no way could I let Faheed know about them. At least…” She stumbled over her explanation. “At least not how much I used them. He would say they were a bad influence. But they aren’t. Not for me.”
“I agree with that,” he said, with a smile. “However, you were utilizing your special abilities, whether you like it or not, and you were utilizing them for Hannah’s benefit, were you not? And your own.”
“Hannah was getting almost despondent toward the end.… And I don’t want you to think that she took her own life because that wasn’t it. She’d had a very rare argument with Faheed, and she was quite perturbed by it all. I would use the cards to sort out a pathway for us from Faheed’s prison, but some days I got no messages of any kind. I don’t know why. I felt… almost bereft. Then, when I lost my sister, I was exactly that. And again I’ve never noticed such a lack of intuitive knowing as I have during my captivity. It’s almost as if a favorite toy has lost its joy. Not that the cards have failed me but that I have failed the cards.”
“Did she tell you what the argument was about?”
Heather shook her head. “No, I think it was just normal marital stuff, although she was different afterward. And never really recovered.”
“Maybe it was the fact that he wanted a divorce or he wanted a change or… anything that she couldn’t offer him.”
She stared at him. “She didn’t mention anything specific to me, so whatever it was… I have no idea.”
“Do you get any mail from her or anything?”
“Hannah sent a lot of mail,” she said, with a laugh. “Mostly after that fight though. She loved hand-scripted letters. Of course she wrote emails, as well, but it wasn’t the same. She loved to write letters and to mail them. She loved to get them too. I called her a traditionalist.”
Royce nodded. “Any idea who she might have mailed a letter to recently?”
“No, I don’t know.” Then she frowned. “I didn’t think about it before, but that seems so odd when she didn’t have any friends.”
“That’s what I was getting at. You say she didn’t have friends or family, just you, and yet she sent letters. Did you mail them?”
She shook her head, staring at him. “No, I didn’t. How was it I didn’t even see that as an odd thing for her to do?”
Heather seemed lost in her own mind. “Odd or not, it does bear some closer scrutiny,” Royce stated.
She nodded slowly. “She didn’t do it all the time, but more so in the last six months. It was as if she had a new hobby,” she murmured, staring around the room.
He continued. “Any chance she would have put anything in those letters that would be damning?”
“No, I don’t think so. She was very happy.”
“Up until the fight with Faheed, which was when?”
“A month or two before her death,” she admitted. “It was mostly because of that one fight, I think, and I did ask her about it, but she always just gave me this gentle smile and said, Everything’s fine . Yet clearly it wasn’t. You know how you get that feeling inside that yells, It’s not fine, that I’ll never be fine again . I didn’t have any way to reassure her. Regardless, Hannah just repeated how everything was okay, so what could I have done? It’s not as if I told her, Hey, you’re lying. Tell me the truth , because then she would just get her back up and be upset with me.”
“Did she show emotions?”
“No,” she muttered, staring at him in surprise. “Not very often.… Dammit.” She got up and paced the kitchen. “You’re making me second-guess my whole life with my sister. Was she drugged? Depressed? I don’t know anymore.”
“I’m not trying to upset you,” Royce began. “I’m just trying to get you to think back, so we have an idea of what was going on in Hannah’s world right before she died.”
“I don’t know,” Heather whispered. “It was odd, but she kept reassuring me, and I let her because I wanted to be reassured.” She sat down beside him suddenly, as if a statue had been pulled down by its own weight. “I’m a horrible sister.”
“Back to that misplaced guilt again. Listen. If Hannah wasn’t willing to share with you, what else were you supposed to do? I won’t say she brought this on herself, but obviously she was in a headspace where either she was content to stay burrowed in her cocoon or that cocoon was blowing up and she wasn’t yet capable of expressing what the problem was or of seeking a way to get out of it.”
Just then Rick walked in, poured himself a coffee, and gulped it down, hot and steamy.
She gasped. “How is it you aren’t burning yourself?”
“I need the coffee,” he said grimly, as he looked over at her in concern. “Did you guys hear the news about the guard?”
She nodded and whispered, “It’s terrible. They didn’t have to kill him.”
“The fact that they did was either a message to all that failure is not tolerated or that the guard knew something, and they couldn’t afford to let it get out.”
“It could be either of those, or both for that matter,” she murmured. “Faheed is not the kind to accept failure in any way, shape, or form. He is a hard taskmaster, as is his brother.”
“Of course.” Rick shook his head. “The brother seems to be an ever-present constant in this equation, isn’t he?”
“He’s an element for sure,” She walked over to the counter, cleaned up the mess from her toast, then asked Rick, “How soon are we leaving?”
“Soon.” He threw two slices of bread into the toaster and looked over at Royce. “Did you eat?”
Royce nodded. “Yeah, I got something earlier. We’ve just gone over these questions, not that it was a whole lot of help—except for a couple idiosyncrasies about Hannah that were kind of interesting.” He quickly explained about the handwritten letters as well as the disagreement she’d apparently had with Faheed.
“Do you think she mailed them out?” Rick asked Heather.
“I think so. She handed them off to one of the servants to mail, and I saw them putting stamps on them, so it seems possible that they did send them.”
“Do you have any idea where they went?”
“No,” she replied, “I don’t, which,… which…” She fell silent, unable to even express what could have gone wrong in that department. “Maybe I saw something that’ll come back to me later.”
“Let’s see if we can track down where those letters went and what might have been in them. I don’t know that it’s important, but it would be something that could explain her mind-set at the time of her death.”
She nodded grimly. “Yes, we need to. Apparently I don’t know anything, so whatever you guys can find out will be more help than anything I can offer.”
Rick studied her and Royce, and Rick’s gaze went back again to her. “Problems?” he asked.
“No, just an awareness that maybe I didn’t know my sister as well as I thought.”
“Ah, well, you aren’t the first person to say that, and you certainly won’t be the last,” he murmured. “When it comes to this business, people are people, and they share only what they want to share, and choose not to share anything they don’t want to,” Rick explained. “So just make peace with it.” With that, he looked back at Royce. “I’ll pack up.” Then he quickly disappeared.
She looked over to see Royce already packing up the laptop and the paperwork in front of him. “I feel as if I should be doing something,” she muttered, looking around the room.
He smiled. “Go ensure you left no sign of being in your bedroom.”
“I can do that.” She hopped up, raced to the bedroom, quickly picked up little bits of laundry she had and folded them. Then she made the bed and headed into the kitchen to wipe down all the counters and surfaces. She asked, “Does somebody come in here and clean?”
Royce nodded. “Somebody will, but it may not be for a day or two.”
“Okay, I’ve wiped down everything as much as I could. And this is the clothing that I wore coming in here.” She held up the small pile in her hands.
Rick walked past and slapped a plastic bag on top. “Put it in here.”
Within a matter of minutes, they walked downstairs to the garage as their car pulled in. As she got into the car, she seemed anxious. “This feels…” She stopped. “I don’t know how to say this without it being alarming. Leaving here feels scary because, with the guard dead, that seems to have upped the ante.”
“It only ups the ante,” Rick replied, twisting from the front seat to look at her before he started the car, “if you know something they want to silence you about. They’re covering their bases.”
She stared at him, bewildered. “If you’re asking me if I have anything to share or to tell you that would bring him down, the answer is no. I’ve given you the photos, but I don’t even know that they’re relevant or if they implicate him or his brother in any way. I don’t know anything about it,” she declared. “Honestly, all I can tell you is the little bit that I’ve already shared with you.”
At that, Rick nodded and turned on the engine. “Good enough. Let’s go.”
*
They were all in the car for the ride to the airport. Royce’s gut told him that the energy around them was too still, too calm. That worried him. He sensed a storm brewing underneath the surface.
Heather broke the silence. “So you guys are wondering if Faheed or Saheed or some hired gun had something to do with Hannah’s death?”
“Right, that does keep you grounded, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but not in a good way,” she muttered. “I’ve been racking my brain over my staff, trying to see if anybody there would have had a part in this, and, of course, the answer is yes. I can name three people off the top of my head.”
From the driver’s seat, Rick looked up at her in the rearview mirror. “What was it that made you pick those people?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“For one, Dan’s got a gambling habit. He’s divorced. His wife walked away from him a few years back. He got kind of desperate there for a while. I lent him some money, and he got out of trouble, but I think he’s back in trouble again,” she explained. “He’s damn good at what he does for the family business, but he’s unstable and dangerous to have around because of the gambling.”
“Very unstable and very dangerous,” Royce murmured, getting instant energy flashes over the guy’s name and situation. These erratic flashes were happening more and more and might be helpful, but, he couldn’t count on their value, not without a second confirmation or some evidence to prove it all. He quickly tuned back into the conversation going on around him. “So he would have to be damn good at that job if you kept him around.”
“He is,” she murmured. “Yet it feels as if I’m watching over him all the time.”
“And the others?”
She sighed. “Okay, another guy has three ex-wives, so he’s paying alimony and/or child support to all three of them. He’s forever broke, smokes a couple packs of cigarettes a day, and drinks a bottle of wine every night,” she murmured. Then she laughed, “And yet I don’t know that he would do anything wrong from a moral perspective. I just know that, if somebody could get him out of his financial woes, he might just jump on it in a heartbeat.”
Rick muttered, “Yeah, he sounds ripe for somebody willing to accept a lot of money for a little bit of info.”
“Absolutely,” Royce agreed, as more but faded flashes hit him but less powerful this time. “Give us the full names of these people.” When she hesitated, he shrugged. “We’ll just do some background checks to ensure no private meetings are happening with any of these people. So you said three people. Who is the third?”
“Right, then another suspect is… Maria.”
“So, who is Maria, and why would she be on the list?”
“Honestly she’s probably not a suspect but her leaving was odd. She started off as an employee. I got to be really good friends with her, but then she quit and walked away from all of us, including me. I’ve lost track of her. I never understood why except that she wanted to be shut of us. I wondered if she had gone to work for our competition or something, but that’s purely a judgment call on my part.”
“Remember that thing about instincts ?”
“Yeah, I know.” She groaned. “It’s hard for me to ignore the instincts thing. You told me that I wasn’t allowed to contact anybody, but, if I were allowed, she would be the one who I would contact because I have this horrible feeling that something’s wrong.”
At that, Royce nodded, getting no flashes of insight or visuals on this person. “Give me her full name.” And when she did, he asked, “Why do you think something’s wrong?”
“ Instincts .… I know it’ll seem wrong, but it feels as if she’s not there anymore—as in not alive anymore.”
“Okay, that is a very interesting and specific instinct,” Rick noted, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “It may not be anything, but it’s easy enough to do a background check on these people.”
“I also want to check on two others.” And she quickly gave them those names.
“Why these two?” When she hesitated, Rick twisted around in the driver’s seat and barked at her, “Really not a time for secrets.”
“I understand, but I don’t want to destroy their personal lives if I don’t have to.”
“We need to know what is it about these guys that has you thinking that whatever we’ll find out would destroy them.”
“They’re having an affair with each other. They’re both married to other people, and they both have families.”
“Ah. Interesting people you keep on staff.” Royce eyed her curiously. “And do you hire an investigator to find out this information, have a company spy, see the evidence for yourself, or… use the cards?”
“Not the investigator but all the others to some degree. When I started doing a lot of this, when taking over more and more of the company, I talked to my father about some of these problems. He told me that, as long as they kept working,… as long as it didn’t affect the company’s name or our net profit, he would keep them employed because he figured that it would be less harmful if he kept them close than if he had a bad relationship and they left in a temper, in which case they would quite likely try to destroy us.”
“Your father’s gone, isn’t he?”
“Yes, unfortunately he passed away about six years ago now. Took me a while to get into the groove of taking over fully because management is one of those things that you think you can learn quickly, yet experience over time really gives you that edge. My father was very good with people, and I’m not sure I’m anywhere near as good.”
“Doesn’t matter whether you are or not,” Royce stated. “You’re younger, and you haven’t had the experience he’s had, so you need to cut yourself some slack.”
She burst out laughing. “According to you guys, I should cut myself slack all the time.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Rick asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe nothing. Just, with all that’s been going on, I should have seen or felt or at least understood what was happening and found a way to stop it.”
Royce pointed out, “We’re back to instincts again, right? Because we’ve kept that fairly low-key up until now. You haven’t mentioned feeling off or about Hannah being drugged, right?”
“No,” she replied, staring out the car window. “Believe me that I’m… I’m wondering about all of that now too.”
“So, let me ask you something. Is there any chance you were drugged too?”
She stared at him in horror. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“Because your instincts have sharpened considerably the longer you’re with us,” he explained, with that ironic tone of voice. She just blinked. “Think about it. You’re telling us about these staff members now as clear as day, detailing the potential problems they could present and why they might be vulnerable to interference from an outside source,” he noted. “You couldn’t do that at least to some degree yesterday.”
“I don’t know that it’s due to drugs,” she clarified. “I think it was more shock and trying to figure out just what I was supposed to say and what I wasn’t.” Then she winced. “Although I will admit to feeling off for a long time, but then I had a lot of reasons for that.”
“True,” Royce agreed, “but I still wonder if you were given something on a regular basis that might have kept you… docile .”
She flushed. “You mean, like Hannah?” At that, she felt Rick’s look in the rearview mirror. She explained, “Royce brought that up this morning—or was it last night?” She gave a wave of her hand. “Royce wondered if my sister had been drugged on a regular basis to keep her from causing Faheed any trouble.”
“Do you think so?” Rick asked.
“No, I wouldn’t have thought so,” she conceded, “but really what do I know? My coffee was prepared for me every day. If I asked for tea, it was given to me. If it was drugged with something tasteless, I would never know, would I? And because I was so upset about Hannah’s death, my doctor—and I’m using that phrase lightly—definitely gave me something to calm me down. I didn’t want to take it the first day, but everybody was urging me to. Then I didn’t take it again after that, but I didn’t tell them.”
Royce shook his head. “It would still be in your food or drink though, knowing you might be palming the drugs. All of which makes me a little suspicious that maybe this doctor was accustomed to doing that because it kept Faheed’s women the way he liked them.”
“It’s possible.” Heather grimaced. “I just hadn’t really thought about it until you brought it up.”
“Now that you have your instincts firing up again,” Rick began, “what does it tell you about what happened? No overthinking it, just tell me what your gut says.”