White Lies (25 page)

“No, I don’t.”

“Thank you,” Clare said. She took Elizabeth’s arm and steered her toward the door. “We’ll talk to the building manager.”

“His office is on the first floor,” the receptionist volunteered, clearly eager to see her visitors gone.

“Thank you,” Clare said.

Outside in the hall, Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Sorry about that. I almost lost it in there. When the receptionist said she’d never heard of Dr. Mowbray, those dreadful months with Brad flashed before my eyes.”

“I had a hunch that was what was going on.”

“All I could think about for a few seconds was how Brad convinced everyone that I was having fugue states in which I blanked out and couldn’t recall anything I’d said or done.”

“Well, now you know that you didn’t forget a thing,” Clare said. “You remembered the exact location of Mowbray’s office. Let’s go find the building manager.”

“He just disappeared,” Raul Estrada said.

The building manager was in his mid-thirties, professionally dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark trousers. His desk was covered with neatly stacked piles of papers, notebooks and logs. There was also a computer on the desk. Next to it was a photograph. The picture showed Raul, smiling proudly, together with a pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman and two laughing children.

Clare suppressed the little pang she always got whenever she saw a happy family portrait. Probably not a perfect family, she thought. No family was perfect. But something about the Estrada family picture gave her the feeling that whatever bad stuff might come, the Estradas would handle it as a family.

“No forwarding address?” Clare asked.

Raul shook his head. “Left owing a lot of rent. We tried to track him down but no luck.”

“Do you happen to know the date he vanished?” Elizabeth asked urgently.

Raul eyed her thoughtfully for a moment. “This is important, isn’t it?”

“It’s critical,” Elizabeth said. “I used to be one of Dr. Mowbray’s patients.”

“More like his only patient,” Raul said.

Clare tensed. Beside her Elizabeth did the same.

“Are you sure about that?” Clare said carefully.

Raul nodded. “After he vanished I talked to some of the other tenants on that floor. They all said that Mowbray kept to himself. He spent very little time in his office. Folks up there on four could only recall seeing one couple who showed up on a regular basis. They assumed the woman was the patient and the guy with her was her husband.”

“He had no other patients at all?” Elizabeth asked faintly.

“I can’t swear to it,” Raul said. “But I think it’s safe to say Mowbray didn’t have a large practice. I can tell you this much. Until you two showed up today, no one has come around looking for him.”

“Any mail or package deliveries?” Clare asked.

“No,” Raul said. “It’s like the guy never existed.”

Elizabeth sagged back into her chair, stunned. “He was a complete phony.”

Clare looked at Raul. “It would help us a lot if you could tell us the date he vanished.”

Raul watched Elizabeth for a long moment.

He swung around in his chair and pulled a logbook off a shelf. Swiveling back, he opened the log on the desk and flipped through several pages before stopping to examine one page more closely.

“Here we go. January seventeenth,” Raul said. “That was a Saturday. The weekend security guard made a note that Mowbray showed up very early that morning, collected some files and left again. Haven’t seen him since.”

“What about his office furniture?” Clare asked.

“The furniture was all rented.” Raul closed the log. “He left it behind. The rental company wasn’t too happy with him, either. He left owing them a couple thousand bucks. I checked with their accounting department a few months ago to see if they’d had any luck finding him. But they came to a dead end, too.”

Clare couldn’t think of anything else to ask. She rose from the chair. Elizabeth did the same.

“Thank you very much,” Clare said to Raul. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Let me know if you find Mowbray.” Raul got to his feet and came around the side of the desk. “He still owes us for breaking the lease.”

“We will contact you if we learn anything,” Elizabeth assured him.

Clare looked at the family picture on his desk. “Cute kids.”

Raul grinned. “Thanks. My son’s birthday is coming up next week. We’re all going to San Diego to play on the beach for a weekend. It will give us a break from the heat. I’ve got a new camera I’m looking forward to trying out.”

Clare thought about the pictures that would be taken over the course of the weekend on the beach. There would no doubt be lots and lots of images of two happy kids frolicking in the surf with Mom and Dad.

No such thing as a perfect family, she reminded herself. But what the Estradas had looked pretty good.

“Have fun,” she said.

The interior of the Mercedes had turned into a sauna again by the time Clare and Elizabeth returned to the vehicle. Elizabeth went through the ritual of lowering the windows, taking down the sunscreen, switching on the engine and firing up the air conditioner. She pulled two bottles of water out of the small ice chest behind the seat and handed one to Clare. She opened her own bottle and studied the office tower with a strange expression.

“Okay, this is getting really weird,” she said.

“I’m not so sure about that.” Clare reached for the seat belt buckle. The metal edge was so hot it singed her hand. “Ouch.” She wrapped her fingers around the bottle of water to cool them. “If you ask me, things are starting to fall into place. What do you want to bet that Dr. Mowbray wasn’t a real shrink at all, just some scam artist Brad knew and hired to pose as a psychiatrist?”

Elizabeth smiled ruefully. “You sound positively thrilled at the notion.”

“Yes. Because it explains so much.” Clare finally got the buckle fastened.

Elizabeth exhaled slowly. “Like why Mowbray was so quick to declare me a wack job.” She paused. “How was he able to get the drugs?”

“Come on, Liz. A fourteen-year-old kid can buy just about any kind of drugs he wants on a street corner if he knows what he’s doing. How hard could it be for a couple of professional scam artists to get ahold of a few bottles of psychoactive meds?”

“True.” Elizabeth fastened her own seat belt, put the Mercedes in gear and reversed out of the parking space. “Wonder where Dr. Mowbray is now?”

“I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find him.”

“Me, too,” Elizabeth said with great depth of feeling. “I have a few things to say to that bastard.”

Jones & Jones had screwed up, Jake thought. He could feel it in his gut. It wasn’t the analysts’ fault, not entirely. They’d had a lot of help. The intelligence had been bad from the beginning, and Archer Glazebrook’s efforts to protect Clare had sent everyone looking in the wrong direction.

But the biggest problem of all was that no one knew what the enemy’s real agenda was in Stone Canyon. Until he had that information he was chasing phantoms in the dark.

He brought the BMW to a halt and sat looking at the old, abandoned ranch house. It was six o’clock in the evening. The sun was sinking fast in the sky, turning the mountains a dozen shades of purple.

He got out and walked toward the skeleton of the old house. The soles of his low boots left little impression on the hard, dry ground.

He had come across the tumbledown house shortly after arriving in Stone Canyon. The ramshackle structure was perched on a hillside overlooking the town and the Valley beyond. Jake liked the view. He also liked the sensations he got here. The wildness of the desert was a stimulating balm to his senses, allowing him to think more clearly.

He heard a soft rustling noise to his left. A covey of quail bolted out from the cover of some nearby brush and raced madly toward the safety of the shadows beneath the porch.

He opened his senses, taking in the unseen energy of the desert. In this environment life was reduced to its most basic elements. Small creatures darted, skittered and slithered, intent on the next meal or on not becoming a meal, or on mating. Nothing else mattered. Survival and reproduction were the only goals.

He walked through the bones of the old house and out onto the remains of the front porch. When the quail heard his footsteps overhead, they scurried out from under the sagging boards and dashed for some other cover.

He halted, studying the landscape. This afternoon he came out here because he needed to think without distractions. It was time to revise the strategy of the hunt.

The problem was Clare. His instincts were to get her out of the picture entirely; to keep her safe. But that was not going to be possible. He knew her well enough already to realize that nothing he could say would deflect her from her own agenda. And the truth was, he needed her help. If it hadn’t been for her he would still be going down the wrong path.

It was time to tell her the truth. Fallon wouldn’t like it, Jake thought. But it was understood that once he was out in the field, he had the discretion to make decisions of this nature. The reality of the situation was that, thanks to Clare, an entire new avenue of investigation had opened up.

It was definitely time to bring Clare into the loop.

Light glinted amid a mound of boulders on the hillside to his left. His hunter instincts, already fully aroused, reacted in less than a heartbeat.

The speed of his reflexes was all that saved him. Even with that, he was not able to move fast enough to avoid some damage.

The shot from the rifle seared his left shoulder instead of sinking deep into his chest. The impact spun him partway around and off his feet.

There was an audible whack as the bullet tore through flesh and continued on, plowing into the wall behind him.

The initial sensation of icy shock in his shoulder gave way to fire. When he looked down he saw that his shirtsleeve was already saturated with blood.

“Where is he? I know he’s here somewhere. Let me see him. I demand that you tell me his condition.”

Clare’s voice reverberated through the thick glass doors that separated the emergency room reception area from the treatment rooms. Jake could hear her very clearly. He smiled.

“Sounds like my ride is here,” he said to the young ER doctor and the uniformed representative of the Stone Canyon Police Department who accompanied him.

“That would be the lady out there in the waiting room?” Dr. Benton asked, watching Clare through the glass doors.

“That’s her,” Jake said.

“Don’t give me that privacy stuff.” Clare leaned toward the hapless woman behind the desk. “I’m the closest thing he’s got to next of kin in this town.”

“Your wife?” Officer Thompson inquired politely.

“No,” Jake said.

“Must be a good friend, then,” Thompson concluded.

“Oh, yeah,” Jake said.

“Sounds like she’s real concerned about you,” Thompson offered.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Jake said, pleased.

Benton hit the code to unlock the doors. Jake and his two companions ambled out into the lightly crowded reception room.

Clare had her back to him. She was still engaged in an intense conversation with the woman behind the desk.

“No, I’m not his wife,” Clare said tightly. “I’m a friend, the one who got the call from you a few minutes ago telling me that he had been injured.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the beleaguered receptionist said. “I can’t authorize someone who is not a family member—” She broke off at the sight of Jake. Relief brightened her face. “Here is Mr. Salter now.”

Clare whirled around.“Jake.”

“Sorry I’m late for dinner, honey,” Jake said. “Got held up at work.”

She rushed toward him. He had the distinct impression that she was about to throw her arms around him. But to his great disappointment she stopped short, horrified at the large white bandage that enveloped the upper portion of his left arm.

It dawned on him that he probably looked more than a little rough around the edges. The ER team had cut off his shirt. He was leaving the hospital bare to the waist. No one had bothered to clean him up, either. There was a lot of dried blood on his pants and boots.

“How bad is it?” Clare whispered.

“I probably won’t be playing golf for a while,” Jake said, feeling quite cheerful. “You look lovely. Is that a new T-shirt?”

Clare frowned worriedly and turned to the doctor. “He sounds out of it.”

“He may be,” Benton said, frowning a little. “I gave him something for the pain. Some people react in odd ways to painkillers. Which reminds me.” He pulled out a notepad. “Here’s a prescription for an antibiotic and some more pain meds. He’s going to feel that arm when the local wears off.”

“Are you sure he’s ready to go home?” Clare asked.

“Yep,” Jake said, rocking a little on his heels. “I’m ready.”

“He’ll be fine,” Benton said to Clare. “If I had any real concerns I’d admit him for twenty-four hours. But as long as he has someone to stay with him, I don’t see any problem. Keep Mr. Salter quiet for a couple of days and watch for a fever or any other sign of infection. There will be some seepage from the wound, but if he starts to bleed heavily get him back here right away.”

“How badly was he hurt?” Clare asked.

“It was just a flesh wound,” Jake assured her. “You know, like in those old Westerns where the hero gets shot from behind. Except I was shot from the front. Sort of. More like on an angle, maybe. The guy was up on the hillside hiding in some boulders.”

He wondered if he had become invisible. No one was paying any attention to him.

“There’s some soft tissue trauma, naturally,” Benton said to Clare, “but no damage to the bone. He did an excellent job of getting the bleeding under control right away.”

“Thank goodness.” Clare’s shoulders relaxed slightly. “Stitches, I assume?”

“Sure,” Benton said, “lots of ’em. He’ll need to make an appointment to have them removed in a few days. Will you be the one changing the bandages in the meantime?”

Jake got a sudden visual of the gory state of his left arm.