No Return: A Contemporary Phantom Tale (37 page)

“Well, don’t be angry, but—” Now that the moment had come, I was having a difficult time finding the words.

“Why is it that whenever someone prefaces a discussion with ‘don’t be angry,’ it invariably means that I’m about to become very angry?”

So much for our cozy relaxed evening on the couch. I turned so I was facing him, and tucked one leg under the other to get it out of the way. The words came quickly, so that I couldn’t stop myself from saying them. “I called Meg.”

“You
what
?”
 

“I called Meg. It’s okay—I just got her voicemail. But I wanted to let her know that I was all right, and that everything would be fine. I just felt so guilty thinking about how she and Ran—well, how worried everyone must be about me.”

Silence for a moment, as I watched a muscle clench in his jaw and waited for the explosion.
 

His voice was very quiet. “And in your effort to assuage your guilt, did you at all think that you might be betraying your location with caller I.D.?”

Oh, shit. Stupid, Christine,
stupid
! Of course I hadn’t—partly because I didn’t have the service at home and didn’t use it; it was just another one of life’s little extras that I couldn’t afford. I stared at him in consternation. “Oh, my God, Erik—I didn’t think about that. I am so sorry—”

He glared back at me for a moment, and then, inexplicably, the corner of his mouth began to twitch. Then, shockingly, he began to laugh.

“What is so goddamn funny?” I burst out, wondering whether he really had gone mad.
 

“The caller I.D. on my numbers is blocked,” he said. “Anyone receiving a call will just get a ‘restricted number’ message.”

I stared at him for a moment before comprehension set in. I gasped, “Oh, that was so
mean
!” And then, as he continued to chuckle, I snapped, “Stop laughing!”

“But the expression on your face—”

There was nothing for it but to grab a pillow and swing it at his head. He blocked it with his arm and then snatched it from me, returning the blow. I wasn’t quite as good at intercepting it, so the pillow did a sideswipe of my ear before I wrested it from his grasp. At that point he knocked it out of my hand, then pushed me down against the sofa cushions, his breath hot against my neck.

“Here?” I gasped.

“Why not? Ennis is asleep and Jerome is gone.” With a casual gesture he reached up and pulled off the mask, tossing it onto the coffee table. Evidently he didn’t want it getting in the way.

His touch was too irresistible. He continued to kiss me, and once again my body warmed to his. I let him make love to me there on the couch, cushions scattered and remote control knocked to the floor, the two of us like a couple of high school kids getting away with something right under their parents’ noses. God knows what his lawyer would have thought if he’d known how casually I’d made my first contact with the outside world. But just then, as we reached for each other once more, the two of us were the only world that mattered.
   

Chapter 27

Ortiz paused the tape, hit “Rewind,” then listened to the message once again. Even somewhat distorted in its transfer from Meg’s voicemail to cassette, Christine’s voice was still pretty, a clear light soprano with a crispness of diction he attributed to her years of vocal training, and exhibiting none of the usual Southern California drawl. She spoke quickly, the words sounding a little rushed and breathless, but he did not detect any overt sounds of strain or fear. If anything, she sounded as if she were simply trying to squeeze in the phone call between other similarly pressing engagements.

“What the hell...?” he said aloud, then tilted back in his chair and glared up at a water spot on the ceiling tiles. It just didn’t make sense—but then, when had anything in this case made sense? He had the disconcerting feeling that he was missing a vital piece of the puzzle, the one key that would suddenly turn this series of disjointed facts into a coherent whole.
 

Meg had called late that afternoon, apparently as soon as she had retrieved the voicemail. “I heard it ring, but I didn’t pick it up because it said it was from a restricted number,” she’d explained. “I only answer calls from numbers I recognize.”

Restricted number. It figured. Of course they couldn’t be so lucky as to have Christine calling from a phone that could be traced.

He’d asked Meg to come by the station as soon as possible so they could record the message off her voicemail, and she’d answered that was no problem. She was heading in to work at
L’Opéra
anyway, and the police station was only a few streets over from there.
 

“Should I call Randall?” she’d asked of Ortiz while the technician transferred the message onto a cassette.

God, no!
had been Ortiz’s first thought. The last thing he needed was Randall underfoot, asking unanswerable questions and generally getting in the way. But he’d said only, “I can handle that. We need to perform more analysis of the message before we let him know about this.”

“Okay…” she’d replied slowly, looking a little puzzled. But apparently she’d decided that it was better not to question him about it. “Well, I hope it helps. I’m just glad to know she’s all right—but if she’s been okay all along, why didn’t she call sooner?”

Why, indeed.
Christine, you got some splainin’ to do
, he’d thought in his best Ricky Ricardo voice, but of course he’d only murmured something noncommittal to Meg and then got rid of her as soon as he could.
 

“Analysis” had consisted of Ortiz listening to the tape over and over again, hunting for any subtle inflections, any oddness of word choice that might indicate she was under duress of any sort. But he’d found nothing. In tone it sounded like the sort of commonplace message any girl Christine’s age might have left on a friend’s voicemail—except that in this case the girl leaving the message had now been missing for two weeks.

The only ambiguous element in the message had been Christine’s use of the word “can’t.”
I can’t really tell you where I am
, she’d said. Did that mean she really was being forced to keep her location a secret, or was it just a careless choice of words? And what was that bit about not wanting to cause any trouble? Had she really just gotten up and bailed out on her life for a few weeks? And if that were the case, then why the involvement of Jerome Manning and the trusty wrecking crew at Rigoberto’s A-1 Auto Repair? Manning had been lying through his teeth, but the evidence linking him to the Daly case had been so scanty and circumstantial that there was no way they could have held him.

Ortiz resisted the urge to pull out the last few stalwart hairs on his head. Instead, he sighed, hit “Rewind,” and listened to the tape one more time. Afterward he glanced at his watch. Good—only ten minutes to go. Then he could get the hell out of here and try not to think about Christine Daly for a few hours at least.

I’m sorry if I’ve caused any trouble
, came her sweet, oblivious voice from the tape recorder, and Ortiz winced.

Girl, you don’t know the half of it
, he thought, then turned off the tape recorder. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so happy to see six o’clock roll around.

 
I wasn’t sure exactly what I had been expecting of Erik’s attorney—I just knew that Martin Greenburg was not it. For one thing, he was fairly young, probably in his mid-thirties at best, with a strong-featured face that was more interesting than attractive. For another, he had overlong hair that brushed the edges of his collar, and instead of the typical dark suit he wore a sport coat over a pair of dark jeans, a dark blue shirt, and a wide tie that looked as if it came straight out of the bargain bin at the local vintage clothing store. He looked for all the world like the software industry’s latest wunderkind—or one of the guys who staffed the help desk at school.

I could feel my eyebrows shooting up even as Erik got up from his chair and went to shake the attorney’s hand. Then Erik turned toward me and said, “This is Miss Daly, Martin. Christine, this is Martin Greenburg.”

Greenburg extended his hand and I took it, offering a smile and hoping that he hadn’t noticed my shock.

The dark eyes that met mine were very shrewd, however, and I could see the amusement dancing in them. “Ah, the infamous Miss Daly,” he said.

“Martin—” Erik said, and Greenburg only smiled, then set his briefcase down on the table.

“Shall we, then?” he asked, and Erik took his seat once again.

We sat around a large mahogany table in a conference room located to one side of Erik’s private office. I had never been in there before, and had wondered, when I first saw it, at the presence of such a room in a house that never seemed to have visitors. But of course Erik’s grandfather had built the house, and Erik’s father had lived here as well. Presumably they had used this conference room when they hadn’t wished to leave the estate to attend to business.

Greenburg didn’t seem at all taken aback by Erik’s mask, and so I guessed that they must have had some face-to-face dealings in the past. Likewise, Erik seemed to take Greenburg’s decidedly unorthodox appearance in stride, and so I thought I had better try to do the same. He had to be good, or he wouldn’t be Erik’s attorney.

“I assume Erik has already told you that I am less than thrilled with the situation,” Greenburg said, fixing me with a stare that clearly said he thought this was all my fault. “However, since he pays me the big bucks to keep his fat out of the fire, let’s attempt to do some damage control.”

“Martin—” Erik said again, but his tone was milder than I would have thought possible. “Miss Daly is certainly not responsible for my actions.”

“Possibly, but your actions could get you fifteen to twenty in a federal prison. If we can make this more about her, there’s a chance you can walk away with this with stories to tell your grandchildren.”
 

Erik and I exchanged a significant glance at the “grandchildren” comment, but we both remained silent, waiting to hear what he had to say.

Lifting a heavy brow at me, Greenburg said, “So you first met Mr. Deitrich at your place of business.”

“Yes. He paid the hostess so he could sit at my station.”

To my surprise, the attorney slammed his hand down on the table. Erik and I both jumped. “No!” Greenburg said. “That is
hearsay
, Miss Daly. The hostess told you Mr. Deitrich paid to sit at your station, but you didn’t actually see the transaction, did you?”

“Well, no,” I replied.

“Very good. And what did you think of Mr. Deitrich?”

I shot a helpless glance at Erik. What the heck
had
I thought of him? That night seemed to have taken place in another life, when I stopped to think of all that had happened since then. “I thought he was interesting,” I said cautiously, not wanting to invite another table-pounding.

“Just interesting? Did you find him attractive?”

God, this was excruciating. “I - I suppose I did.”

“So you were attracted to him even though you were seeing someone else at the time?”

Erik interrupted, his tone a little sharper this time. “I don’t really see the point here—”

“You will.” Greenburg picked up his Mont Blanc pen and directed another one of those laser-beam stares at me. “Miss Daly?”

“Yes, I thought he was attractive. I was attracted to him. Satisfied?”

“Very.” He scribbled a few lines on a legal pad while I stared down at my hands and absently twisted the sapphire on my right ring finger. “And did you continue to think about him after that first night?”

I lifted my shoulders. “I - I might have.”

“So may I postulate that you were attracted to him, continued to think of him, and were receptive to seeing him again?”

“Well, I never really thought of it that way—”

“And that when he proposed seeing you again, you readily accepted?”

Now Erik and I exchanged incredulous looks. How the hell had he managed to jump from forcible kidnapping to a hypothetical date?

“What exactly are you driving at here, Martin?” Erik asked, his voice ominously calm.

“I am driving at keeping you out of prison, Mr. Deitrich,” Greenburg replied, seemingly unruffled. “We must represent your current relationship as a natural progression of a completely normal attachment.”

“Normal” and “natural” were not exactly words I would have used to describe the formative periods of Erik’s and my relationship, but I’d begun to see where Greenburg was going with all this. I knew I’d have to talk to the police, and soon, and I had damn well have my story straight before I went to them.

“Yes,” I said steadily, trying to ignore Erik’s outraged stare. “I felt bad about it, since I was sort of dating Randall at the time, but I really wanted to be with Erik.”

“Have you both lost your minds?” Erik snapped. “Or are you preparing testimony for a court in Never-Never land?”

“Erik,” I said, and I looked at him steadily, willing him to go along with this. “I have to lie. There’s no other way.”

He held my gaze for a moment, but again his face was unreadable, as opaque as the half-mask he wore. “Martin, I can’t believe you’re telling her to perjure herself—”

“When she goes to the police, she’d better not be telling them the truth.”

“Who said anything about going to the police?”

Greenburg set down his pen and folded his arms against his chest. “Mr. Deitrich, for all your brilliance, you can be remarkably obtuse at times.”

“I have to, Erik,” I said quietly, the words coming slowly as I wrestled with the dawning realization of what I must do. “Are we going to let the police trail after Jerome for the rest of his life? Are we just going to hide here and hope that no one ever finds out where I am? You know that’s not possible.”

He looked away from me then, and I could see the tense muscles working in his jaw and throat. “I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said at length, the words barely above a whisper.