Chapter 9
H eather tried to put up a good front, but it still disturbed her to no end to think that in those last many weeks since her sister’s death, Heather had fallen more and more under Faheed’s control, or at least his family’s control, albeit by drugging her. She paced their newest hotel room, her tarot cards clutched in her hand, as she contemplated her past. She now knew without a doubt that’s exactly what happened. She just didn’t know if it was Faheed’s idea or his brother’s.
She had to stop thinking about it, about the possibility that Faheed had drugged her to keep her docile —to use Royce’s term. As each day moved along since her rescue, her brain was clearer. That alone gave more credence to the possibility she’d been controlled by drugs all that time. Would Faheed have just upped the dosage if she’d fought more? Or just given her an overdose whenever her usefulness had expired?
Still, something was off about his brother, Saheed, and she wanted him to be the bad guy because of it, but she didn’t know that he was. Something strange was going on here. She looked over at Royce. “Does the brother have diplomatic immunity too?”
He smiled at her. “No, in theory, he does not, but he’s part of Faheed’s household. Thus, if Faheed can get him out of the country, it’s certainly something that you would struggle to fight. Remember the American diplomat and his wife who killed a teenage boy and just left that country to avoid repercussions?”
“ Right ,” she grumbled, “and that sucks for that poor boy’s family.”
“It absolutely does. That diplomat’s wife killed somebody and got away with it, never facing the consequences. How unfair is that?” he asked.
She got up and started pacing. “I’m trying to control my emotions over this. I’m trying to be reasonable about it all, but I do think you were right. Faheed must have drugged me over the last few weeks. I don’t think it was an issue before Hannah died, at least I don’t think so. I was still in control of my feelings back then, as long as Hannah was happy. So I focused on dealing with emails and running the company.”
“It’s totally possible and likely reality,” Royce conceded cautiously. “I hate to say it, but grooming is something that happens in a very subtle way, and you don’t necessarily know that it’s happening.”
“Meaning?”
“Just that, when it came to making decisions, looking for advice, or anything along those lines, Faheed would gradually become the one you would turn to.”
She sucked in her breath. “Now that makes sense because he tried it several times. A couple times I just got angry and wouldn’t discuss it with him, which I know pissed him off. He was talking about my sister’s controlling interest and how she should have it back again. I was not cooperative,” she murmured.
“And that could have been enough to set him off,” Royce noted. “You know Faheed and Saheed have a certain expectation of obedience, and when you don’t fall in line…”
“You get what, drugged?” she asked in disbelief. “Who does that?”
“Men who want ultimate control,” Royce replied. “Men who have the power to take what they want and to take out the people who are bothering or stopping them.” He stared at her in concern, yet she needed to hear it. “So, just acknowledge that they exist and that you got caught up in it, and so did your sister. The jury is still out as to whether Faheed or even Saheed killed Hannah or not. Hopefully we will find out, but, for now at least, we don’t know for sure.”
Heather grimaced. “My worst thought was that she took her own life, but it just didn’t make any sense because I knew that she was happy with him.”
“Do you think she was really happy, or was it just on the surface?”
Heather gave him a haunted look. “I’ve asked myself that question many times, and I don’t have an answer,” she whispered. “I wish I did. I wish I’d pushed it in the weeks before, just to see if she was doing okay. But it seemed as if everything was normal, and, now that I look back, it’s almost as if it was too normal. Is there such a thing?”
“Sure.”
She pondered what she could see in the rearview mirror, so to speak. Her cards vibrated warmly in her hand. “Looking back, I sensed she was waiting. When I asked her how she was doing, she gave me this big smile, then said that she was doing just great. Immediately she would change the subject, and we’d have tea or coffee or something. She liked to watch old movies, old romance movies.” Heather groaned, with a shake of her head. “I hated them, but Hannah put one on to shut me out, and she was putting them on a lot.”
“So, I guess the question at this point is this, knowing that and looking back, do you think they might have had marital problems?”
She nodded slowly. “It would make sense if that’s what was triggering her behavior. Yet another thing that would make sense was if he kept increasing the drugs a little more. She was prone to migraines and was constantly taking medication. So it could have easily been tampered with,” she murmured, “if he wanted to.”
Royce hesitated before asking, “I hate to ask, but was she expected to produce an heir?”
She looked at him and then shook her head. “No. Just the opposite, in fact. She wanted children, but Faheed was adamant that there would be no more children,… unless it happened by accident. In that case, he would take it as Allah’s will. Plus, she was instructed to maintain birth control.”
“Which would have been hard on her as well.”
“It was.”
“Any chance that she didn’t take it—even once maybe?”
She stared at him. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I guess. I just don’t know. Why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m just wondering if Hannah did something that would have triggered Faheed, provoking a decision to take her out. Was she becoming tiresome? I hate that word, but you know what I mean.”
“Again I don’t know,” Heather stared at him unhappily. “Are you sure there isn’t any food now?” she asked. “This conversation is incredibly upsetting.”
He checked his phone and then smiled. “As luck would have it, Rick is here now.”
She stared at him, just as they heard a knock on the door. She bounced to her feet and raced to the door, but Royce’s sharp voice snapped through the silence. “Wait.”
She froze, then turned and looked at him, fear instantly coming over her.
“Don’t ever open the door,” he declared. “Just because it should be him, doesn’t mean it is.”
And, with that, he walked up to the front door to their hotel suite and made a tapping noise on the door. Then came a response from the other side, another series of taps. He opened the door to see Rick, with bags of food on the floor and a full trolley in front too. Rick was dressed in the hotel uniform jacket. Royce quickly let him in, and Rick took off the hotel jacket and smiled at her.
“Hey, I hope you were enjoying your time while I was out working,” he teased, as he motioned toward the trolley. She frowned at him, pointing back at the delivery trolley. Rick explained, “We ordered it to our old room, so that people would think we were there. Once the delivery was left inside our former hotel room, and the hotel people left the floor, I collected it.”
“Were you in the room at the time?”
He nodded. “Of course. I had to make them think we were there.”
“Right. I never would have thought of that,” she muttered.
“And you don’t have to. That’s what we’re for.”
She sighed. “Still, it feels weird.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, with a big grin.
“What are the bags on the floor for?”
“You ordered a certain amount of food, but I figured that we wouldn’t want to draw attention to ourselves by ordering very much more, so I brought some snacks for those of us who will stay up during the night.”
“Right. So, you’re back to the four-hour security shifts again?”
“Yes, we are,” he confirmed. “That’s the way it’ll be until we get you back to England.”
When he pushed the trolley forward, the smells hit her stomach, and it started growling.
He looked at her and laughed. “I guess that’s good timing, huh ?”
“You have no idea,” she muttered.
Very quickly they were all seated around the table, with large platters of food in front of them. She cut into the steak, and it melted like butter in her mouth. She moaned as the first bite popped into her mouth. Then she just sat back and relaxed.
“I’m sure you must have eaten well with Faheed,” Royce said.
She nodded. “Mostly I did. My portions were rationed, as were my choices. If I wanted something he didn’t agree with, he made it known to me to just eat what was in front of me.”
“Like what were you denied?”
“Oh, potatoes, cakes, pastries, bread even. Faheed felt women are supposed to be slim and trim and could never go off on our own and order whatever we wanted because we couldn’t be trusted with such a decision.” Royce and Rick didn’t say anything to that and just stared. She shrugged. “Gilded cage, remember?”
“Sounds like prison to me.”
“Which I’m really starting to realize more and more as I come off whatever drugs he had me on. So that is most likely the exact same state Hannah lived in throughout the years of her marriage to Faheed.” Heather felt the realness of it, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, and it hit her hard. Heather had been too close to becoming her sister.
Not anymore.
*
While Heather and Rick crashed, Royce took first watch and quickly sat down at his laptop to do a deep dive into the other dead wives of Faheed, something he knew that Terk’s people were working on as well. Yet it occurred to Royce that they didn’t know how Faheed had met Hannah—or how he had met the other wives. Royce also wondered if there had been any local investigations into their deaths. Instincts prodded him that more was there. But what? The information was a little sparse. He contacted Jonas, looking for more.
When Jonas phoned him shortly thereafter, he asked, “You guys settled in for the night?”
“Yes, two are asleep. I’m on watch,” he muttered. “She’s pretty nervous, wants to get home.”
“Yeah. It’s too bad we had to stop you guys midway, but that’s just the way it is,” he replied, his tone light.
“We think Heather’s been drugged since her sister’s death, not exactly sure why. We know the how, starting with meds to help her grief after her sister’s death, then continuing the drugging without her knowledge, probably via her food and drinks.”
“What would be the purpose of that?” Jonas asked.
“Our bet is Faheed was making a bid for Heather’s company.” Instinctively it felt right to him.
Silence came from the other end. “Why?”
“Greed, of course.”
When he shared the name of Heather’s large whiskey company, Jonas agreed. “Makes sense. They have a hell of a product.”
“With Hannah’s death, Faheed assumed Hannah’s share would go to him as her husband, but it doesn’t, as stipulated by the father’s will that it has to stay within the family, followed up and confirmed in Hannah’s will. Turns out Hannah had already signed her voting proxy over to Heather earlier as well, so it’s all under Heather’s control.”
“Interesting,” Jonas muttered. “Yeah, losing access to that kind of wealth probably stuck in Faheed’s craw pretty well, wouldn’t it?”
“Not to mention the fact that women can’t do business in his mind-set, so no way he would have allowed his wife to maintain control. He discussed Heather’s hierarchy of employees several times with her, and she’s afraid that he’s contacted at least one, if not more than one, to try and take control. Plus, Heather believes Faheed is trying to break her father’s will.”
“That would suck,” Jonas noted.
“Yeah, you need to contact Terk to get updated information.”
“Yeah, I will,” he replied, his tone dry. “There is such a thing as, you know, information sharing.”
“It’s all evolving, and now we’re getting some clarity and putting it together,” he explained. “So, I’m just trying to keep the status quo from what I know on my end.”
“Appreciated,” he said briskly. “I’ll send you the files that we have on the other marriages.”
Once they ended the call, it took about another eight minutes before the files came in. Royce sat here in the darkness, sipping coffee as he read through the files on the two other wives, from Faheed’s second and third marriages. Both were of American origin. One had been living in Sainte-Marie of Martinque when he’d met her at a museum. They had spent a year there. Then she began to travel with him and married him. Her cause of death was supposedly choking on something. Another accidental death, which of course made Royce’s back go up with suspicion.
Her family wasn’t much of a factor. She did have cousins or other relations who had been given some initial payout, presumably to prevent any hue and cry, not that anybody in that position was likely to even know to do anything against a rich diplomat.
The other wife was an American out of Texas. She had been working in Switzerland as an au pair at the time, when she caught Faheed’s attention at the opera. It had been a whirlwind romance, and she and her unborn child had died in childbirth.
At that Royce sat back, wondering why Faheed’s first wife was the only one to bear children. Did Faheed not want any future children? His first wife gave him three sons and one daughter, all adults now. Maybe Faheed felt he was too old to be a father again or just that he had his heir and a spare, via the first wife, and called it quits on any more.
Even saying it that way made Faheed a jerk because he should have cared for all his children, no matter how many or how late in life. Maybe he did. Yet in each instance where Faheed’s second, third, and fourth wives died accidentally , Saheed, the brother, had been, as he always was, close at hand. That made Royce even more suspicious. He quickly sent Jonas an email, asking for information on the brother.
When Jonas phoned him back, he asked, “Are you really thinking Saheed’s involved?”
“According to Heather, he’s quite slimy.”
“That’s a pretty descriptive term,” he noted, with a laugh.
“In every instance the brother was in those countries with Faheed and was around at the time of each subsequent wife’s death. There could be some professional jealousy going on here between the brothers. Something is going on there.”
“It’s quite possible,” Jonas conceded thoughtfully. “We have looked at him in the past, but he doesn’t have a criminal record. We don’t have anything really, though we found some suggestion that he was accepting bribes for contracts.”
Royce agreed. “Unfortunately that’s a common problem in the diplomatic field.”
“Right. So, then what?” Jonas asked.
“Then we keep looking,” Royce muttered.
“The physician who attended the wife’s death who died with her child in childbirth met with some backlash, questioning whether everything was done to save her and her child.”
Royce asked, “Do we know the sex of the child?”
“Female,” Jonas replied.
Royce winced. “Faheed has adult children, three sons and one daughter at this point. They probably would not be happy to welcome any more siblings.”
“Realistically it shouldn’t matter to them either way, considering Faheed’s marriages were his choices in his life,” Jonas suggested, “but I know what you mean. Anyway, if we have confirmation that the same physician was attending both wife number three and Hannah up until their deaths, that is suspicious as well. I’ll do another check into him,” Jonas offered, “and any other medical personnel who are still there in Faheed’s entourage. Did Hannah have any regular nurse or someone like that?”
“I don’t know. Is it customary to have a medical team traveling with Faheed’s entourage?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Jonas confirmed. “Some of these people don’t even blow their own nose. So, yeah, I will look into it,” And, with that, he disconnected.
It boggled the mind to think that people were so dependent on the services of others for the simplest things in life, but it wasn’t for Royce to judge. If the same doctor and possibly an attending nurse were on staff at the death of wives three and four, that upped the ante as to who were the guilty parties in all this.
When Jonas phoned back only five minutes later, he announced, “I just got a report on the doctor on my desk. He was not allowed to practice medicine in the US.”
“What for?” Royce asked.
“Malpractice, with several lawsuits still pending against him. He dodged the law for quite a while. He’s supposed to be an exceptional doctor but didn’t always follow the rules or legal avenues and did surgeries he didn’t have approvals for.”
“So, if Faheed wanted something, like to let these women die for example, that would suit this out-of-bounds doc totally, wouldn’t it?”
“It would. He’s not licensed to operate in England at the moment either.”
“Any chance that he came over with him?”
“He comes over all the time,” Jonas said. “From what I am seeing here, he’s been a part of Faheed’s personal entourage for a while.”
“And there’s no way to stop that?”
“No, of course not. If he’s not practicing medicine on any English citizens, then it doesn’t really matter. The diplomat is perfectly capable of hiring whoever he wants for his own personal household.”
“Right, and that probably explains how they’re accessing the drugs as well. So, we have a dodgy doctor, a scary brother, a husband who keeps gaining the inheritances of all these wives at a very rapid rate. This is such a cluster fuck, and we cannot do anything about any of it.… Hang on a minute, the one wife out of Sainte-Marie, I thought she had no immediate family. How would Faheed have benefited from her death?” he asked.
“Back then she’d just inherited the family’s fortune out of England,” Jonas shared, as he rustled papers around. “Seems she was born in America, so she’s a dual citizen. Anyway her parents were killed in a plane crash. She was estranged from them and was hanging out somewhere in the Caribbean when she found out. I’m not sure how she met Faheed. Or who knows? Maybe he just heard about the family deaths and their fortunes and decided to introduce himself.”
“Yeah, that would be possible too. Particularly if he was hunting for a particular kind of wife—rich and docile. Which I would imagine he was, considering that he had already buried his last one by then. According to what Heather said, her sister didn’t know about the last two wives, just the first one.”
Silence came on the other end. “Seriously?” Jonas asked.
“Yeah. According to what Hannah was supposedly told, Faheed’s first wife died in a car accident years ago, and so he didn’t want Hannah driving. He wanted to ensure that she stayed safe. So he arranged to have her driven wherever she wanted to go.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Right. It allowed him to keep track of where she went, when she went, and who she met, so Faheed doesn’t have to worry about anything or anybody coming in between them.”
“Meaning that Hannah couldn’t have a lover without somebody knowing.”
“Exactly. I guess that’s why I’m still wondering what the hell was up with those letters.” He frowned considering what they knew so far. “According to Heather, she and her sister had been very, very close—up until that marriage.”
“Did Heather mention how Hannah met Faheed?”
“She was visiting someone and went as their guest to an art show. Hannah was an artist but had no urge to go public with her art. Yet she enjoyed the arts, and the gallery had a big opening night and then an after-dinner party for the featured artist. Hannah was in attendance, and Faheed apparently fell hard for her. Or appeared to fall for her.”
“Okay, good enough,” Jonas muttered, “I will do a follow-up with anybody else who is a regular in Faheed’s entourage. Of course we can do nothing while they’re not on British soil. I wonder if they would come over to talk to Heather. Maybe we can set up a trap to bring him over, under the guise of Heather wanting to see him or to show him the company or something,” Jonas pondered out loud.
“At this moment, she would freak out completely if we suggested such a thing,” Royce declared. “She just wants to get home safe and sound and not have anything go wrong at this stage, like losing her family’s very successful company to Faheed.”
“I get that,” he muttered. “I was just thinking out loud, trying to figure out what we can do to get this guy.”
“What about other countries?”
“We’re in contact with the countries where all the women were killed and to a certain extent the countries where the women themselves came from, since their citizens have died,” Jonas replied. “This is definitely an international situation.”
“But we don’t really have any way to contact him,” Royce pointed out.
Jonas asked, “What about Iran itself?”
“What about Iran?” Royce asked. “We both know all too well that Faheed has denied any wrongdoing and has been backed up by his government. Yet you can expect every country to say the same thing about their diplomats.”
“Unfortunately we see that time and time again, don’t we?”
“Yes, we do.”
And, with that, Jonas rang off for the second time.
As Royce lifted his head from his laptop, Rick appeared, standing in the doorway to his bedroom, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Was that Jonas on the phone?”
“Yes.” Royce then brought Rick up to date.
Rick frowned. “So, with each wife’s death, Faheed basically inherited a family business, which would help legitimatize anything he was doing in his mind, even give him an excuse to step in because he would improve things for them. He meets them, hooks them, and, within a couple years, he’s overtaken these companies.”
“Sounds about right.”
“How long was he married?”
“The first one he was married to for seven years and produced three sons and one daughter. She died afterward in a car crash.”
“Ouch, she was just a broodmare, having four kids in seven years.”
“Exactly. The concern at this point in time is if the good doctor, who lost his license to practice in the US, seems to have been attending the family all these years and maybe helped each wife to die from natural causes. He has an advantage as a medical doctor to get close to the women.”
“Right, so even if we do prove wrongdoing, we don’t have any way to prove that it was Faheed and not his hired help.”
“Exactly. I hate to say it, but it’s damn smart on Faheed’s part. He can always claim complete ignorance, and a jury will definitely let him off the hook, without even second-guessing things.”
“Not only will they let him off,” Rick added, “but he probably won’t even get that far because you can’t prove his involvement over anybody else’s. This will take a lot of time to sort out.… You ready to get some sleep?”
“Yeah, I’ve done what I can do right now,” Royce noted. “If you come up with any new information, let me know.” He looked down at his watch and winced. “I better grab some sleep now, and we should plan to head out early. The weather has at least calmed down some.”
“Good. Go grab some sleep, and I’ll see you in a bit.”
With that, Royce got up and headed to the empty bedroom.