Light in Shadow (5 page)

“Maybe you're just too small for the chair.” He sounded supremely disinterested. His attention was fixed on the slip of paper coming out of the machine.

That's it, she thought.
Not another word, so help me.
If the man was too stubborn to take some good advice, that was his problem. But the desk worried her even more than the chair. And then there was the poorly positioned mirror.

She cleared her throat.

“It would also be a good idea to move that desk over there near the window, and I'd suggest that you take down the mirror or at least shift it to the other wall,” she said in a little rush. “It would create a more calming energy flow.”

He gave her a sidelong look. “Energy flow?”

She had been right. This was a complete waste of time. “Forget it. You're probably not familiar with design theories such as feng shui that are used to organize a harmonious environment.”

“I've heard of them.” He ripped the paper out of the machine and handed it to her. “But I'm not into decorating trends.”

“Why am I not surprised?” She snatched the credit card slip from him, glanced at the total amount, and winced. Less than Radnor but certainly not exactly a bargain, she thought.

As if he knew what was going through her mind, Ethan's mouth curved humorlessly. “I'm cheap, but I'm not free.”

She sighed, picked up a pen, and scrawled her name.

He took the signed slip from her and examined it with an expression of keen satisfaction. “You know, this is a special moment for me.”

“In what way?”

“This represents my first professional business transaction here in Whispering Springs. I should probably frame this. Just think, your name could hang on my wall for years.”

“Along with my credit card number. No thanks. If I were you, I wouldn't get too excited about this, Mr. Truax. I have no intention of becoming a repeat client.”

“You never know. If this Mason guy doesn't work out as a suitable candidate for, what was it you called it? Oh, yeah, a
serious, committed relationship.
If he doesn't make the grade due to failure to obtain a divorce, you may want me to run a background check on some other man for you.”

For some idiotic reason, she suddenly wondered if Ethan Truax was into serious, committed relationships. She glanced at his hand and noticed that he was not wearing a wedding ring. What would she discover if she had someone run a background check on him? A lot of ex-girlfriends, no doubt, maybe an ex-wife.

Damn. Now she was speculating on his marital status. This was not good.

She dropped the pen she had used to sign the credit card slip into her tote and gave him a very bright smile. “Don't hold your breath.”

She hoisted the tote over one shoulder, swung around, and went toward the door. At least she would have the last word, she thought.

“Just a minute,” Ethan said.

She glanced back over her shoulder. “Now what?”

“That's my pen you're walking off with in your bag. Mind giving it back? I'm trying to keep a lid on overhead and office expenses.”

Leon Grady's heartburn
always flared up in the hushed atmosphere and plush surroundings of his employer's office suite. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood where, if you were lucky, walls got painted, not paneled, and the furniture was trimmed in plastic made to look like wood, not veneered with exotic species of actual trees.

Dr. Ian Harper had once told him that his office had been designed to calm patients and reassure their families. But all the fancy carpeting and the expensive pictures on the walls had the opposite effect on Leon. He really hated this room. Talk about stress triggers. Hell, he'd been standing here, waiting for Harper to get off the phone for only a few minutes and already he could feel the fire starting in his chest.

Maybe it was one of those weird psychological hang-ups, he thought, the kind of crazy shit the folks who worked here at Candle Lake Manor were always going on about. A phobia or something. Maybe he didn't like being in this office because he associated it with his worsening
stomach problems. In his position as head of security for the Manor, he'd endured several extremely unpleasant conversations in this office over the course of the past year.

Things had been going halfway decently until the two female patients had disappeared. The job here at the Manor had been the best one he'd ever had. Bonuses, even. For the first time in his life he'd seen some good money coming in. And going out just as fast. Not his fault; he had expenses. The payments on the Porsche and the fancy sound system were steep.

He'd never been much good with money, mostly because he'd never had enough of it. Cash went through his fingers like water, but here at the Manor that had been okay because there was always another paycheck next month.

But then the two patients had skipped, and his cozy setup had gone sour. His stomach had followed.

The time right after the escape had been especially bad. Harper had ranted and raved and blamed the lousy security. Leon had feared for his job. It wouldn't be easy turning up another one, and he sure as hell wouldn't find anything else with the kind of perks he got here at the Manor. He had some problems with references.

He'd felt cornered and panicky when Harper demanded that the two patients be found and returned to the Manor. He'd had no idea how to conduct a serious investigation. The Bitch Goddess, Fenella, who served as Harper's administrative assistant, had acidly suggested that he hire a real investigator, one of those modern, high-tech types who used a computer.

To his private astonishment, he'd gotten lucky. A few weeks after the patients had disappeared, word had come back of a small story in a Mexican newspaper detailing the deaths of two women who had perished in a hotel fire. No identification had been found at the scene, and the authorities had been unable to locate any next of kin. The only clue to the women's identities were a ballpoint pen and some slippers. All three items had been monogrammed with the words Candle Lake Manor.

Leon had been relieved just to have an answer. Sure, it meant a loss of income for Harper, but the guy was a businessman. Harper had to understand that sometimes you took a financial hit, but that life went on and you brought in new sources of revenue.

Actually in this case, Harper was still mining the old sources. Leon was impressed. The doc had balls. Shrewd operator that he was, Harper continued to bill the Cleland woman's relatives and the other woman's trust fund for the very expensive fees charged here at the Manor.

It was conceivable that Harper's clients might remain in blissful ignorance for a very long time. The Manor was a very private, very exclusive, very expensive psychiatric hospital situated on the shores of a remote lake in the mountains of Northern California. The sleepy little town of Candle Lake was nearby, but other than a scattering of summer boaters and campers, and some hunters in the fall, the place was all but forgotten on the maps.

Leon knew that the hard-to-reach location was one of the things that made the Manor attractive to Harper's clients. The hospital raked in big bucks from folks who wanted their crazy family members warehoused out of sight and out of mind. Like so many other patients whose relatives had paid dearly to have a relative committed indefinitely, the two women had not had any visitors.

But Harper could run his scam on the clients who were paying the fees for the two women only for a limited time, Leon thought. Sooner or later someone connected to one or both of the missing patients would have a reason to come to Candle Lake. When that day came, Harper would be in a bind because he would not be able to produce them.

After learning that the two patients had apparently died in Mexico, Leon had begun to hope his problems might be over. Then, last week, he'd been contacted online by the creep who called himself, simply, GopherBoy.

“. . . understand you are looking for a missing patient. I can help. My fees are as follows and are nonnegotiable . . .”

That was when Leon's heartburn had kicked in again, big time. It was getting worse by the hour.

Harper put down the phone, slowly removed his glasses, and looked at Leon.

“I'm very busy today, Grady. I have two intakes to deal with this afternoon. I trust this is important?”

Even Harper's voice affected his heartburn, Leon thought. It was classy sounding, a rich man's voice. It reminded him of all of the differences between them. Harper was a hustler, but unlike himself, the doc had gotten all the breaks.

Harper was good-looking, with a lot of thick, silver-gray hair and a trim, tennis player's build. Somewhere along the line, he'd gotten a good education. He also had the kind of charm that he needed to snow his wealthy clients.

“The hacker came through,” Leon said. “It cost us, but it looks like we may have some hard information on the Cleland woman.”

“Not the other one?”

“No.”

Harper frowned, but he did not look severely disappointed, just mildly regretful. It was as if Leon had told him that one of the stocks in his portfolio had tanked but that another had turned in a higher-than-expected earnings report.

“Well, she wasn't nearly as lucrative as the Cleland woman,” Harper said. “What have you got?”

“According to GopherBoy, she's alive and well and living under another name. He says some online ID broker set up a program to feed false and misleading information about her to anyone who goes looking. That was why that investigator we hired back at the beginning didn't turn up any real leads.”

“Where is she?” Harper asked sharply. “I want her picked up immediately.”

The fire in Leon's chest flared higher. He needed some of the tablets he kept in his pocket, but he didn't think it
would look good to chew them in front of his boss. He wanted to look like he was calm and in control here.

“Not gonna be that easy, sir,” he said. “She's being real careful. All GopherBoy could tell me is that she's somewhere in L.A. He did not have an exact location.”

“Somewhere in L.A.?” Harper's well-manicured hand clenched around a gold pen. “What good does that do us? L.A. covers a lot of territory.”

“Yeah, but now that I've got a name and some details about her new ID, it won't take me long to track her down. With your permission, sir, I'll leave this afternoon.”

“Don't try to bring her in on your own. When you've located her, stay out of sight and keep her under surveillance. Call me immediately. I'll send Ron and Ernie to assist you. They can handle the medications that will be needed.”

“Yes, sir.” Leon cleared his throat and tried to keep his tone respectful. “But I'd like to point out that once I've found the patient, we're gonna need to think about how we want to bring her in.”

“The meds will make her easy to handle.”

For all his fancy degrees, Leon, thought, sometimes Harper could be as dumb as a brick.

“The thing is, sir, the Cleland woman has been living under another name for a year. She probably has a job by now. That means there will be co-workers. Friends. Neighbors. Folks who will notice if we just grab her off the street.”

“Yes, of course.” Harper tossed the gold pen aside and got to his feet. He went to the window. “I see what you mean. We'll have to do this discreetly.”

“Right. So what I'm thinking is, I go to L.A., find the woman, and watch her for a while. Get a feel for her daily routine. When we nail that down, we can figure out the best way to pick her up without causing a fuss.”

Harper gazed fixedly out at the lake while he considered Leon's logic.

Leon's chest burned.

“All right,” Harper said eventually. “That makes sense.
The last thing we want to do is to draw attention to this situation. The retrieval must be handled as quietly as possible.”

Leon allowed himself a small sigh of relief and took a step back toward the door. “I've already made my plane reservations. All I need to do is go home and throw some things in a suitcase. It's a long drive to the airport, so I'd better get moving.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don't like this,” Harper muttered. “But I suppose we can only be grateful that this GopherBoy person contacted us instead of Forrest Cleland.”

Leon shrugged. He knew there was no mystery about why the hacker had approached someone at Candle Lake Manor first. GopherBoy was clever enough to figure out how the place worked. He obviously understood that the management here had solid financial reasons for wanting to get the Cleland woman back without raising a fuss and that privacy and a real low profile were crucial to Harper's profitable operation.

Leon cleared his throat. “Going to Cleland would have been a whole lot riskier. Cleland is a wealthy, powerful man, and he has no particular reason to keep things quiet. Hell, he might have called in the cops, which would have screwed GopherBoy's plan royally.”

Harper frowned. “How did GopherBoy reach the conclusion that I would be willing to pay for this information?”

“Who knows? Probably something in that ID broker's files he hacked into that mentioned just how much money Cleland is paying to keep his relative under wraps here at Candle Lake. GopherBoy's gotta know what that income means to this place. Maybe more important is that he's figured out that the big thing you're selling here is a guarantee of silence. This place can't afford any bad press.”

Harper clenched and unclenched the fingers of one hand.

Satisfied that he had made his point, Leon turned and walked swiftly across the thick beige carpet to the door.

In the outer office, Fenella Leeds looked up from a file she had open on her desk. She was a centerfold dream, blonde, blue-eyed, and gorgeous. She was probably the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in real life, but he treated her pretty much the way he would have treated a cobra that happened to be coiled on the chair behind the desk.

He was fairly certain she had screwed Harper for a while, but there was now some gossip going around that she was getting it on with the guy in accounting. He did not envy either man. If you slept with snakes, you tended to get bitten.

“You're going to L.A to find the Cleland woman?” Fenella queried.

It did not surprise him that she had somehow listened in to the conversation he'd just had with Harper. He wouldn't put it past her to have a tape recorder under her desk. He had a hunch she kept real good tabs on everything that went on around Manor. It was one of the reasons why he had to be very, very careful until he was clear of the place.

“Yeah.” He glanced at his watch and kept moving. “Gotta get going or I won't make my flight.”

Fenella did not wish him a safe trip. She went back to work on the file.

By the time he reached the relative safety of the hall, the burning in his chest was the worst it had ever been, almost unbearable. He took the bottle out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and poured several tablets into the palm of his hand. He shoved them into his mouth and chewed frantically.

He knew why the heartburn was so bad today. It was because he had made his decision and that had involved lying outright to Dr. Ian Harper. It was a scary thing to do because it meant that he was burning all of his bridges.

He had told Harper that GopherBoy had given him only the Cleland woman's new name and the fact that she was somewhere in L.A. But that was pure crap. GopherBoy was a hell of a lot better than Leon had led Harper or Fenella to believe.

According to the information the hacker had provided, the Cleland woman was not in L.A. She was in a place called Whispering Springs, Arizona. GopherBoy had come up with an address and phone numbers, office and home. Everything, in short, that Leon needed to find her.

If the information had come through a year ago, right after the women had escaped, Leon knew that he would have gone straight to Harper with the data. But at some point, probably the day he noticed that he was popping the antacid tablets every couple of hours, he'd arrived at a blinding realization. He no longer wanted to work for Dr. Ian Harper, regardless of how much the bastard paid.

The problem was that, due to his expensive lifestyle and his lifelong inability to hang on to a dollar, he lacked the kind of nest egg he required for a comfortable retirement. When the hacker had turned up the location of the Cleland woman, however, Leon had been struck with a rare burst of creativity.