Sex & Sensibility (11 page)

And just how weird was that?

“CLEU,
THIS IS
N
ICHOLS
.”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Tessa?” Linn’s tone went from hard-nosed cop to concerned sister. “Why are you calling me at work? Is something wrong?”

“No, not at all. In fact, you’ll be happy to know I’ve got a paying gig. Remember that kidnapped girl I told you about?”

“The one you say you saw in some kind of vision?”

“Yeah. Turns out she wasn’t kidnapped at all. We think she’s run off with her boyfriend, and my gig is to find her. A missing persons deal.”

“Why bother? I can sympathize. I’d like to run off with my boyfriend right now.”

“She’s only eighteen, and he’s an older man. Daddy is very upset.”

“Oh. Yeah, I could see that.” Linn paused. “So what’s up?”

“If I give you a couple of phone numbers, can you run them and find out who they belong to?”

“Phone numbers?”

“Yeah. Griffin says to ask you to do a subscriber check.”

“Griffin? I only know one Griffin, and that’s the one who arrested you two years ago and made me raise my
voice and say bad words in public. I didn’t know you were within a hundred miles of him.”

“He works for the guy who hired me. Kind of a security guy.”

“You sound awfully cheery for a woman working with her arresting officer,” Linn observed. “Especially when I know you’ve been carrying around a lot of anger over it.”

“The operative words being
over it.
I’m cool. He admitted he was wrong—well, sort of—and we’ve moved on.”

“Griffin Knox admitted he was wrong. To a person he arrested,” Linn repeated the words flatly. “I never knew that man to admit he was wrong about anything, and I worked on the same squad with him for two years.”

“I guess he’s loosened up a bit.”
He gets a hard-on when he looks at me. That’s definitely what I’d call loosening up.

No, no. You just didn’t say things like that to Linn.

“So if I give you these numbers, can you help?”

“Sure. I guess. Strictly off the record, of course.” Tessa dictated them and Linn said, “I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

She was as good as her word. Tessa’s cell phone beeped a couple of notes of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” a few minutes later, and when she answered it, Linn said, “I don’t know how much good this is going to do you.”

“Why? Who do they belong to?”

“The first is assigned to someone called Michelle Oraia at Oraia Salon, on First Street in Santa Rita.”

“Hey, I know that place,” Tessa said. “Or know
of
it. Very exclusive. They definitely don’t cater to the working woman.”

“The second is registered to a company called Stellar Memory in Carmel Valley.” She dictated both addresses
and Tessa wrote them down. The second one meant nothing to her, but hopefully it would ring a bell for Griffin.

“Thanks, Linn,” she said. “I really appreciate this.”

“No problem. It’s not like you ask me for favors every day of the week. So, um…” She stopped.

“What?” It was very unlike Linn not to finish a sentence. “Did you find a florist?”

“Huh? Oh, yes, I did. Kellan’s mom is going to do all the flowers. I don’t know why I didn’t ask her in the first place. No, I just wondered what it was like working with Griffin. If, you know, you’re okay with it.”

“I’m getting paid sixty bucks an hour to be okay with it. But no, I meant it. We’re cool. We had a talk.”

“Another revelation. There’s a reason we called that guy Fort Knox, you know.”

“I don’t doubt it. He had a hard time with my, um, shall we say, investigative methods at first. But he’s coming around now, since they seem to be providing information.”

“Coming around how?”

Should she tell her? Oh, what the heck. “I kinda came on to him while I was having a vision. He’s been apologizing ever since for responding. It’s really annoying.”

Tessa could practically feel Linn trying to revise her initial reaction, which was complete disbelief. “How can you come on to someone while you’re seeing things?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m describing what I see and acting it at the same time.”

“And you do this in front of people?”

“Just him. His assignment is to report everything I say.” She paused. “Well, almost everything.”

“It’s a good thing you’re my sister. If it were anyone else I’d say they were bullshitting me,” Linn said. “This is not the Griffin Knox I know. His wife dumped him when he
was shot. Took off with his partner. Natalie Wong, my friend in Forensics, knows the whole story because she worked with his wife. Anyway, after that we started calling him Fort Knox, because no woman could crack him.”

“People change. Not that it matters to me personally. He’s not my type.”

“I know. You’re saving yourself for Coop or Danny.”

“Don’t even go there. Maybe I’ll seduce Griffin just to prove you wrong.”

“I don’t think it’s possible.”

“What, that I could seduce someone?”

“Oh, I have every confidence in your ability to put a hex on some defenseless man and make him do your bidding. I just don’t think that stuff works with Griffin Knox.”

You didn’t see his eyes when he looks at me.
“Very funny. Thanks for the phone numbers.”

“Anytime. Keep me posted.”

Tessa hoped she was talking about the investigation, and not about the man.

U
NFORTUNATELY
, the subscribers to the phone numbers meant nothing to Griffin, either.

“A salon, okay, I can see her calling that repeatedly. But Stellar Memory? They manufacture computer parts. It must be a mistake.”

“Or our mystery man works there.” Tessa sat on the end of the bed, and leaned back with her elbows on the bedspread. The cottage had become command central with the addition of a Mission-style oak table provided by Mandy so they would have somewhere to put the laptop. A couple of yellow legal pads, some pens, and Griffin’s cell phone sat on its glossy surface.

“Which narrows the field to what? A couple of hundred
people?” Griffin’s tone was gloomy. “I could go over there and start asking questions, which would probably make other people ask questions, which would mean the media asking questions. I just don’t see how we can pin down one guy on the quiet.”

“Why so many calls to Oraia, though?” Tessa wondered aloud. “It’s supposed to be really exclusive. You know, caters to the tennis-and-Jag set. But still, you call, you make an appointment, you wait two weeks to get in. You don’t phone a bazillion times.”

“Maybe she couldn’t get the nail person she wanted.”

“Was that a sarcastic remark?”

He glanced at her. “That girl isn’t Jay’s daughter for nothing. I wouldn’t put it past her to nag until she got what she wanted.”

“Hmm.” Tessa wasn’t satisfied.

“You can call over there and ask everyone in the place why Tessa called so often, if you want.” From his tone, it was a dead end. “This Michelle Oraia is probably just a girlfriend and they’re yakking, like she does with—” he held up the sheets of phone numbers “—Ashley, Melissa, and Georgia.”

“You know what? I think I will. Something about this is bugging me.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She dialed the salon’s number and someone picked it up on the second ring. “Good morning, Oraia.”

“Hi, can I speak to Michelle, please?”

“This is she. Can I help you?”

“Oh, I hope so.” Tessa made her voice light and guileless. “Does Christina Singleton have an appointment there this week?”

The woman paused, and Tessa heard a page being
turned. “She does, as a matter of fact. Tomorrow at two, for henna and a trim.”

“Um, just between you and me, do you think she’ll make it?”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“Yes, this is Ashley. I was thinking, you know, since she might not be back in town, you might let me have her appointment.”

“So she actually did it, did she?” The young woman’s voice lost its formality and took on a confidential tone. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think she’d go.”

“I didn’t, either. Not with her dad being so protective and all.”

There was a pause. “You’re way too nice. The guy’s a total tyrant, making her check in every time she goes anywhere, always wanting to know where she is. This whole Trey thing was a major reaction to all that.”

Trey?

Inside her, it felt as if a bell had rung, deep and sure. That was his name. Trey. The guy they were looking for.

“Do you know him very well?”

“No better than you. As much as you can know someone you only see in clubs and stuff. I mean, he talked as much to you as he did to her, which if you don’t mind me saying, totally made Christina mad at you.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do? Ignore my friend’s guy? But I still don’t know where they—”

“Oops, it’s time to open up, and I promised I’d stay away. Why don’t we wait and see if she calls, okay? If not, someone will let you know about that appointment tomorrow morning.”

“Sure, that’d be fine.”

Tessa said goodbye and hung up, grinning. She may not
have been able to ask where they were going, but at least she had a name. Damn, she was good at this investigative stuff.

She just hoped Ashley was in the mood for henna and a trim.

“W
ELL
?”

The suspense was killing him.

Tessa practically glowed, she was so elated by her success with Michelle Oraia. Tessa glowing was a new one on him, Griffin thought. It would be safer and easier on his self-control if she wouldn’t do that. Her eyes sparkled and her lips were parted, as if they couldn’t wait to tell him the news.

He dragged his gaze off the lips and back to the eyes—the lesser of the two evils.

“This Michelle seems to be another of Christina’s friends. She said that Christina took off for a tryst with a guy named Trey.”

He flipped through the case files on the top level of the filing cabinet in his brain and came up blank. “Did you get a last name?”

She shook her head. “I think Ashley would have been expected to know, so I didn’t ask. So totally cool, huh? Now we have something to go on.”

“What made you decide to impersonate Ashley?”

“I just had a feeling. And it paid off.” She sat on the bench and hugged her knees, the picture of delighted satisfaction.

“A feeling.” With Tessa, that could mean anything. “Did you hear her thinking or something?”

“Of course not.” Tessa crinkled her eyebrows in what he supposed was a frown. “It’s like when the phone rings,
you know? And you just know it’s your mom, like you have a flash, or a word appears in your mind.”

He was not going to touch that one. Flashes and words didn’t generally appear in
his
mind. Give him something solid, like a spatter pattern or a fingerprint.

“So now what?” Tessa asked.

He walked over to the computer. “How about I see if there’s a Trey anywhere at Stellar Memory?”

She came to stand behind his shoulder as he typed the name into the search function at the company’s Web site. While he waited for the page to load, her scent tickled his nostrils. Jasmine and cotton and soap. The skin on his back tingled and his body tightened as his memory returned to this morning, when he’d looked at her and her nipples had—

“Wow, look at all those hits,” she said, leaning closer.

Griffin blinked and came back to reality as the entries scrolled down the page.

Trey Ludovic, Chief Operating Officer, announced today…

Stellar Memory’s Trey Ludovic said in a statement that…

COO places tenth in Bay to Berries run…

Griffin clicked on the last one.
Show me a picture,
he commanded the screen. There was a good chance that a community events article would have a photograph.

“Hey,” Tessa said in surprise. “Wait a minute.” She dashed out of the room.

Griffin stared at the door and then shrugged, returning his attention to the screen as the photograph finished loading.

And there he was. “Trey Ludovic, 41, of Stellar Memory crosses finish line to take tenth place.” The guy was in
damn fine shape for forty-one. Lean, muscular, his thick brown hair windblown, he grinned at the camera and even after a 10K run, looked ready to charm the Nikes right off the photographer.

“Look at this.” Tessa handed him a framed photo and he recognized the group shot of the Christmas party that hung in the hallway. She pointed to someone in the back row, wearing a toga that managed to reveal way too much chest for a social occasion. “It’s the same guy.”

She was good. No doubt about it.

Griffin told the laptop to print the race article over their wireless network to the color printer in Jay’s office.

“Come on. I’ll bet you a beer Christina met him at the Christmas party, right here in the house.”

Tessa followed him across the patio. “You realize that if it’s someone he knows, Jay is totally going to blow a gasket and shoot something. Maybe us.”

That was the risk you took when you worked for Jay Singleton.

“C
HRISTINA RAN AWAY
with Trey Ludovic?”

Tessa distinctly felt the glass in the windows rattle with the force of Jay Singleton’s rage.

“I’ll kill that two-faced S.O.B.!” he shouted. “I’ll sell my stock—no, I’ll buy his damn company and fire him. I’ll make sure he never gets another job in the industry. And when he’s homeless, I’ll hunt him down with an elephant gun and he will be sorry—” he slammed a fist on the desk “—that he ever—”
Slam!
“—even
looked
—”
Slam!
“—at my daughter!”

Tessa eyed Griffin, waiting for a sign in case they were to run—or maybe perform CPR. Geesh. The guy had no medium setting. He was either enraged or Mr. Control Freak, with nothing in between. She wondered if he made love with his teeth clenched. Poor Mandy.

As if the thought had conjured her up—though it was probably the shouting—Mandy Singleton slipped into the room. She was wearing a multicolored wrap top that Tessa bet carried a Rodeo Drive label, and hot pink capri pants. It wasn’t even lunchtime and she looked glossy and perfectly put together.

“Did you find something?” Mandy crossed the room and laid a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Jay, what’s the matter?”

Jay told her, which made him erupt all over again. When the volcano had settled down to just a few spurts of lava spitting out now and again, Griffin spoke up. “Do you think it’s possible they met at the Christmas party this past winter?”

“What the hell difference does it make where they met?” Singleton snapped. “The point is, where are they now?”

“The length of their relationship makes a lot of difference,” Mandy said thoughtfully. “If she met him at Christmas and pursued him for, say, a couple of months before they began an affair, it could be fairly new. In that case it will be easier to break up. If they’ve been a couple for a year or more—”

“—they could be in Vegas getting married,” Griffin finished.

That was not helpful.
Tessa flashed him a glare.

Instead of punching out a window or throwing something, Singleton sat heavily in his upholstered chair and put his head in his hands. Mandy leaned down to hug him.

“That would be the worst-case scenario,” Griffin added, evidently trying to soothe the poor guy’s feelings. “Hopefully we can find her before that happens.”

Jay was silent for a moment, then lifted his head. “As far as I know, she’d never met him before the Christmas party. She was living in Boston then, and flew out for it. I only got her to come out here to live in April.”

Griffin looked at Tessa. “E-mail,” he said.

She nodded. “We got so involved in the phone records, we forgot to check it.”

“You think they might have been having an online affair between Christmas and April?” Mandy looked a little creeped out by the thought. Which was odd. After all, who was married to a much older man?

“We’ll find out,” Griffin said.

“But her physical pursuit of him didn’t start until she got here,” Tessa said. “I’m sure of that. Her clothes and things definitely give me that impression—longing, frustration, seduction.” Jay flinched. “Sorry. But we have to deal with the truth, here.”

“Why don’t I see if I can track him down through his office?” Mandy suggested. “I can say I want to talk to him about a stockholders’ barbecue or something. You know, part business, part personal. That will get past any executive assistant on the planet.”

Tessa gazed at her in admiration. “You’re good.”

Mandy shrugged modestly. “It worked with Jay, didn’t it?”

It must have.

“We’ll see if we can find anything in her e-mail,” Griffin said.

“And after that I’d like to go down to the beach.” Tessa gazed out the window at the long line of breakers crashing in the distance. “Something about the beach is pinging on me.”

“When she pings, you better listen,” Jay advised, his voice a little muffled. His head was again in his hands.

“Understood.” Griffin motioned toward the door, and Tessa preceded him back to their “office” in the cottage.

“Are we going to be able to get into her e-mail?”

Griffin leaned over the laptop and tapped a few keys. “If she’s consistent, her mailbox should open right up when I—aha.”

Tessa smothered a smile. And here she’d thought only detectives in books said “Aha.”

Griffin paged through screens of messages, then started in on storage folders.

“Does it occur to you that we are grossly violating this girl’s privacy?” Tessa inquired as he flipped things open and closed them again. “Isn’t there some kind of law?”

“She’s under twenty-one, and we have her father’s permission.” Griffin’s tone was absent. “You know what? I’m not finding a single thing related to Trey or even a note from her girlfriends about him.”

“Try the search function. It’s faster.” She picked up her original train of thought. “It’s like reading someone’s diary. An ethical thing, you know?”

He started the search function and sat back and looked at her. “An ethical thing. How ethical is it for her to let her folks think she was kidnapped? Or to run off with an older guy?”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Are you preaching at me?”

Me, Ms. Woo-Woo Weirdness? Preach at you, Mr. Totally Straight and No Imagination? Yeah, right.
“No. I’m just pointing it out.”

He turned back to the computer when it beeped to say it had finished the task. “The whole thing is moot, anyway. There’s nothing containing the word
Trey
in her mailbox. Not a very sentimental girl, our Christina.”

“Most girls would keep e-mails from their guy,” Tessa agreed. “The modern equivalent of tying them up in ribbon.”

“Maybe she printed them out and hid them somewhere. She must not have trusted anyone.”

“Turns out she was right.” Tessa smiled at him. “The question is, why keep it such a deep, dark secret from her family? After all, hooking up with an executive type could be a good thing. Not my cup of tea, certainly, but it’s not like he’s a homeless crack dealer.”

“Think about it from her point of view.” Griffin closed out the screens and got up. “She’s the daughter of one of the ten richest men in America. She’s been living in a fishbowl her whole life. Everything she does is known, maybe not on a celebrity scale, but in Boston I know she had a companion for when she went out in public. Kind of a combination bodyguard and nanny. I think she went away when Christina turned eighteen, but you get my point.”

“Maybe it’s not a deep, dark secret in that way, then,” Tessa mused. “Maybe she just wanted one thing that was hers, with nobody else’s nose poking into it.”

“So yeah, we can empathize with her, but we still have to find her. I was only half kidding about Las Vegas earlier.”

“I didn’t think you were kidding at all.”

“So, what was that you said about the beach?”

“I want to go down there. I just have a feeling.”

How far we’ve come,
Tessa thought as he nodded and handed her a sweater. This time yesterday if I’d said that, he would have made some nasty comment and held things up while I stumbled through yet another useless explanation. Now he just gets on with it.

How nice it would be if he could have a little talk with Linn, and convince her that she really did have a gift.

“I want to do one thing first,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I want to check the cards and see what they have to tell me. It might help me focus.”

“The cards?” He looked completely at sea.

“Yes. Tarot.” The velvet bag with the cards was still in her suitcase. She pulled it out of the side pocket.

“What?”

She sat on the carpet and closed her eyes. “You’ll see.
Give me a moment of silence, will you?” She had the feeling he had just been temporarily rendered speechless, poor guy, so silence was not a problem.

Calming her mind, she pictured the beach and Christina, and with eyes still closed, shuffled the deck. She cut it, turned over the top card and opened her eyes.

The Ace of Cups. “Hmm.”

“Hmm? Hmm what? What does it mean?”

“Would you relax? I’m not summoning a demon, Griffin. The cards are just a tool.”

To her relief, he did relax. A little. “Sorry. I had a pretty conservative upbringing.”

“Yeah, I got that. Well, I didn’t. My mom’s a painter. She did this series of nudes based on the Major Arcana—those are cards representing the stages of human experience—and her pieces are in collections all over the world. Of course, people didn’t start buying them until somebody set the studio on fire. The media coverage was great.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Oh, no. She was moving into a bigger space anyway. But it was a PR bonanza. Every single piece sold. Anyway.” She returned her attention to the card. “The Ace of Cups. This card is about emotional force. Love, specifically, and more specifically still, intimacy.”

“That ties in.” He sounded a little hesitant, as if she’d rap him over the knuckles with a pointer if he got the wrong answer.

On the contrary. He got a gold star for playing along.

“It sure does. This card is about going with your gut, falling in love, and acting on it.” She held the card up and he took it, frowning at it the way people frown at a menu in a foreign language. “See how the water is flowing out of the cup and into the lake? And the water lilies bloom
ing on the lake? That can mean love flowing out of someone to make something beautiful.”

“O-o-kay,” he said. “So that’s the connection to the beach? Water?”

“Well, it helps.” She took the card and returned the deck to its bag. The Queen of Wands on the exterior of the bag smiled serenely at her, and she smiled back. “But I’m betting it means something a lot more personal.”

“Like what?”

“You never know for sure until you ask the person, but chances are good that Christina and Trey first made love on that beach. And that’s why I’ve got to go there.”

A
S ROMANTIC PLACES WENT
, the beach didn’t rate very highly in Griffin’s estimation. The northern California coastline wasn’t sheltered, and the surf came rolling in sometimes seven or eight feet high, crashing on the shore with a sound and vibration like the detonation of a bomb. Little kids looked for seashells in vain; any such treasures got beaten to bits by the water long before they reached the shore.

The sustained noise of the wind and breakers had one odd effect, though. It was like that old Elton John song that talked about “solid walls of sound.” The noise created an insulating effect for conversation, which couldn’t be heard at all past about two feet. People could be seen, unless they were seated behind a rock or log, but they’d never be heard.

Tessa wrapped her blue sweater around her against the wind, and he briefly entertained the thought of putting an arm around her shoulder and sheltering her with his body.

He entertained the thought, and then sent it on its way. If she were going to go into another trance down here, the last thing he needed to think about was putting an arm anywhere near her. In fact, he’d just keep his damn distance.
He’d stay close enough to do his duty and listen, but far enough away so that if she reached for him in the throes of a dream, he could step away to safety.

Though the sun was warm, the breeze off the combers was cool and carried the damp mist of spindrift. Tessa didn’t walk where the waves creamed up on shore, but followed the line of kelp and bladder wrack at the high-tide mark, where the sand was firm but dry.

“Anything?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I’m heading for those rocks down there.”

About a quarter of a mile away, a massive chunk of granite was all that was left where the cliff had washed away and receded. Fortunately no one had built on that point of land. Griffin figured anyone who built on these cliffs had a death wish, anyway. You just couldn’t guarantee that one good storm wouldn’t take out your living room and deposit it in the bay.

“It’s been a while since I was down here,” he said.

She had a long stride, he noticed, and had no trouble keeping up with him.

With legs like that, of course she’d have a long stride.

Do not think about her legs.

Uh-huh. Or about what that gauzy purple dress does, flapping around her thighs in the breeze. You’re not thinking about that, either, I bet.

No. He was doing his job.

“If I lived here, I’d be out on the beach every day,” she said dreamily. “You can see the water from my apartment.” She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “This much of it.”

“Jay used to run every morning, but the job sucks up more and more of his time.”

“He should run. He needs to do something with all that stress.”

“So you’re in San Francisco? Your sister is, too, right? Didn’t I hear she moved up there when she joined CLEU?”

Tessa nodded. “She’s getting married in a few weeks. Poor thing.”

“What’s wrong with that? Don’t like her guy?” He hadn’t known Linn Nichols all that well, but he wouldn’t have pegged her for the marrying kind. She was by-the-book, idealistic, and thorough to a fault. Which translated into long hours and carefully prepared cases, and that didn’t mix with a developing relationship, as he knew only too well. Her guy had to be law enforcement. They tended to understand the concept of double shifts better.

“Oh, I like him, when he’s not on duty and being a scary whack job. They’re in narcotics,” she added by way of explanation.

Griffin nodded. It explained a lot.

“No, I meant Linn has joined the demented ranks of brides-to-be. I had no idea. I never expected she would get sucked into all the magazine expectations and stuff.” She shaded her eyes against the sun and gazed out to where a couple of neoprene-clad surfers were riding a big one. “If I ever take the plunge it’s going to be in front of my family only, with flowers I pick on the way down to the beach.”

“Better bring a microphone, then,” he suggested. “You can’t hear out here.”

“We’re a close family.” She smiled at him, her dimple flashed, and he lost his train of thought. “Mostly. We’ll cuddle up.”