Fatal Fortune Read online

  “Abby?” I heard Grayson say, and I realized she’d asked me a question while I’d been thinking about the conversation with Candice the day before.

  “Come again?” I asked.

  “I said, were you aware that your business partner was meeting someone at the airport last evening?”

  “No,” I answered truthfully. I mean, I knew she was going to the airport, but I didn’t know she was meeting somebody there. Somebody she was going to shoot at point-blank range.

  “And you’ve never heard of this Dr. Robinowitz?”

  “No. I swear. I’ve never heard of him. And I have no idea what his connection could be to Candice.”

  “And she hasn’t been in contact with you since yesterday morning?”

  Uh-oh. We were getting into tricky waters here. “I already told you,” I said. “I haven’t spoken to her since yesterday morning.”

  “No texts or phone calls either?” Grayson pushed.

  I had a feeling she’d ask that, so I made a big show of going to my purse and digging through it. “If you don’t believe me, you can check my phone. Wait. Where’s my phone?” I dug through my purse with a little more urgency, then dumped all the contents out on the counter and fished around like I was frantic to find my cell. Then I looked up at Dutch and said, “Honey, have you seen my phone?”

  There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes and he said, “Can’t say I’ve seen it since yesterday, Abs.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe it’s in the car,” I said, and began to head for the door.

  Grayson stopped me by calling out my name. “That’s okay,” she said. “You can check it later. Right now I have one or two more questions for you.”

  Those “one or two” questions turned into something closer to fifty and it was another two hours before Grayson finally wrapped up her interview. She’d asked me all sorts of questions: how Candice and I had met, what I knew about her family, where she might have gone in the hours since the shooting.

  And that was the question that bothered me the most. I had no idea where Candice might be. And I could tell that Brice didn’t know either. In parting, Grayson said that our offices were currently being searched, but the warrant didn’t extend to my half, which was a relief. Still, the detective asked my permission to look through my suite, and I immediately declined. I’d seen enough search warrant aftermaths to know that tidiness and leaving things as they found them wasn’t a priority. Plus, I had no idea what kind of incriminating evidence might show up in my suite. Candice had access to both of my offices. She could easily have attempted to hide something on my side of our shared space.

  Grayson also said that we should be aware that a BOLO alert for Candice had been issued, along with a press release about the crime that named Candice as a person of interest. The police and citizens of Austin were warned to be on the lookout for a woman fitting Candice’s description, who was armed and extremely dangerous, driving a yellow Porsche. The public was urged to dial 911 immediately if she was spotted.

  When Grayson finally left, I felt sick to my stomach. Brice looked white as a sheet, and even Dutch seemed shocked and troubled. “What do we do?” I asked into the long silence that followed Grayson’s exit.

  Brice moved over to the kitchen table and sank into one of the chairs. “What was she thinking?” he asked.

  “There has to be an explanation,” I insisted.

  “She left you a message, right?” he asked. I nodded. “Get your phone and let’s listen to it.”

  I bit my lip. “No,” I said. When Brice’s brow lowered to the danger zone, I added, “Brice, you have to trust me—it’s for your own good.”

  My boss tapped his finger on the counter impatiently and then he tried a different tack. “Fine, then at least tell us the gist of what she said, other than asking you to lock up her computer.” Brice’s tone was sharp. He wanted answers and he wasn’t going to be put off.

  I glanced at Dutch, and saw that he was studying me closely. He’d let it be my call as to what I told Brice. I decided to confess the less important parts. “She started off by saying that it wasn’t how it looked.”

  Brice’s brow furrowed and in his eyes I saw a hint of hope. “She said that?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. She asked me to trust her. That it wasn’t how it looked, but she knew it looked bad.”

  Dutch motioned with his chin toward the iPad on the counter. “How else could it look?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. But Candice would never assassinate someone in cold blood.”

  “What did she say exactly?” Brice asked next.

  “Well, like I already told you, she wanted me to go to the office because she was worried about her computer. Maybe she thought she left it out, or maybe she thought that someone might try to break in and take it.”

  “Candice usually takes that computer everywhere she goes,” Brice replied. “I haven’t seen it out of her reach in months.”

  “Well, maybe she had to leave it behind for some reason and couldn’t get back to lock it up.” I had no idea whether Candice had her computer with her, but it was a good decoy and cover story that I badly needed the boys to buy into so that they wouldn’t press me for details of the rest of Candice’s message. She didn’t want me to show that file to anybody, and Candice was still my BFF. Until I had proof that she wasn’t who I thought she was, I’d believe in her and help her any way I could.

  “What else?” Brice asked.

  I shrugged. “Nothing, really. It was short and sweet.”

  “What time did her call come in?” He wasn’t gonna let me off the hook so easy.

  “Just after three a.m.”

  “So, she shoots this Dr. Robinowitz at midnight and then lays low for the next three hours until she decides to reach out to Abby?” Dutch said. “That doesn’t make sense. She had plenty of time to go back to the office and lock up her computer. What’d she do during those three hours?”

  Brice shook his head. “She didn’t come home. That’s all I can tell you.” Then he looked back at me. “How did she sound?”

  “Sound?”

  “Yeah. Was she anxious? Upset? Scared?”

  I closed my eyes recalling the message. “None of those, really. I mean, even when Candice is freaked-out, you’d never know it. But there was . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. There was this note of . . . I guess . . . alarm, and maybe something else. Her voice sounded strained, like she was upset, or alarmed or stressed-out, and she was trying really hard to keep it together, but there was something uncharacteristic there too. It’s hard to tell with Candice.”

  “Did she say where she was calling from? Or where she was going?”

  I shook my head. “I know she was outside—”

  “How do you know she was outside?” Harrison asked.

  I closed my eyes to concentrate on the memory of Candice’s message again. “I could hear the wind,” I said. “As she was talking, I could hear the wind. And also, toward the end it sounded like she was running.”

  I opened my eyes to see Brice staring at me with that same stricken look on his face. “She was running?” he asked, and I nodded. “From whom?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. There were no other voices or footfalls in the background. Just Candice.”

  Brice’s gaze dropped to the floor, but I could clearly see the worry in the set to his shoulders. “Abby, please, let us listen to the voice mail,” Brice said next.

  I shifted on my feet. “No, Brice, you can’t.” When his gaze lifted back up to me, I added, “I’m sorry, but I’ve already deleted it.”

  Brice’s expression turned angry. “Why the hell would you do that, Cooper? Don’t you realize you’ve just destroyed a key piece of evidence? There could be something on that voice mail that you missed! It could be the way to finding her
! What were you thinking?!”

  I took a step back. Brice had never lost his cool with me like that before. Okay, maybe once when we’d first started working together, but that was before I actually liked him. Back then I thought he was a serious douche bag and he thought me a serious fraud.

  Dutch held up his hand and said, “Hey, lay off, Harrison. She’s trying to help.”

  Brice’s anger subsided, but only a fraction. He glared hard at Dutch, then back at me; then he seemed to settle for looking meanly at the floor again.

  For a minute I debated coming clean with both of them. I mean, I’d done as Candice asked before I knew she’d murdered someone in cold blood. I just couldn’t shake the image of Dr. Robinowitz walking up to my best friend looking so trusting and happy to see her. And that sparked a thought and I said, “Brice, in the video the doctor seems to recognize Candice. Did you ever hear her mention anything about this Robinowitz guy?”

  Brice shook his head and sighed. “No. If she knew him, then she didn’t mention him to me.”

  “Did she ever bring up the name to you, dollface?” Dutch asked me.

  I racked my brain for any memory of Candice mentioning a doctor from Palm Springs. I came up with nothing. “Maybe it would help if we could figure out what kind of doctor he was,” I suggested.

  Dutch reached for his iPad. After a minute or two of tapping he said, “Robinowitz retired his practice in Palm Springs six months ago. The old site says he was a board-certified plastic surgeon.”

  “Why was he coming into Austin through Vegas?” I asked.

  “Connecting flight?” Brice suggested.

  Dutch shook his head, continuing to tap at the screen. “I don’t think so. Looks like he might’ve moved to Vegas four months ago. I found a condo listed under his name there. And I think I know why Grayson is confused about his residence; from what I can see, he’s still listing his address in Palm Springs because it hasn’t sold yet and he probably wanted the tax write-off until he off-loaded it.”

  I rubbed my temples. None of this was making any sense. “Why would Candice want to kill a plastic surgeon?”

  “Why would Candice want to kill anyone?” Brice replied.

  “The answer could be on that computer,” Dutch said, referring to my decoy and cover story.

  “If she left it at the office, APD would’ve confiscated it by now,” Brice said.

  “Does she back it up to a cloud?” my hubby asked.

  Brice’s brow lifted. “Yeah. I think she does.”

  I said nothing. For the record I knew that Candice only backed up certain things to the cloud like her address book and calendar. My BFF was intensely personal and perhaps a weensy bit paranoid, so she kept a lot of what she was up to off the grid. Still, it was a direction for the boys to go in and it would allow me time to figure out what the heck to do next. And, luckily, I already had a plan forming.

  I left the boys to the task of trying to track down Candice’s cloud account, and headed back into the bedroom for a shower and some much-needed think time. I knew that the first step was going to be to abandon my cell phone. I’d have to get rid of it altogether because Brice wasn’t about to let me get away with the “I erased the voice mail” excuse. I had a pretty good feeling that the minute my head was turned, he’d lift it out of my purse or off my person and claim to know nothing about its whereabouts while ushering it down to bureau forensics to see what they could recover.

  While the water was heating up, I retrieved the phone from its hiding place and eyed it moodily. I loved my phone and it was practically brand-new. I wasn’t due for an upgrade, so replacing it was going to be expensive, but what choice did I have? If Brice discovered that Candice had entrusted me to retrieve and hide a file for her, he’d never let up until I handed it over.

  Also, I wasn’t exactly sure when I’d last backed up the phone, but my computer was at the office and I couldn’t risk taking the phone there and have it become part of the search warrant. I knew Grayson was a little ticked that I wasn’t cooperating by allowing her to check my side of the suite, but no way did I want APD snooping through my stuff. I had a feeling she’d be working to find a way to extend the search, and I didn’t want my phone caught in the middle. The Austin PD had computer forensics people too.

  With a sigh I turned the phone on one last time to see if Candice had called, and when I saw that she hadn’t, I took the phone into the shower with me. It took only thirty seconds under the spray to completely fry the hard drive. The only thing the phone would be good for now was a paperweight. True, the forensics guys might still be able to retrieve something, but it’d take them that much longer, and time to help figure this thing out was something I knew I needed to fight for.

  After I’d gotten myself together, I went to the door, opened it a crack, and listened. I could hear Brice and Dutch talking. My hubby was asking Brice some pointed questions.

  “This guy had a condo in Vegas. Do you think she could’ve met him on your honeymoon?”

  There was a pause, then, “I don’t know, Rivers. It’s possible. There were at least a couple of days where I played two rounds of golf while Candice was out shopping. If she met this guy on one of those days, or had some other encounter with him, she didn’t make me aware of it.”

  “How did she seem in Vegas?” Dutch pressed.

  I heard Brice sigh heavily. “For the first couple of days, she seemed great. Happy. Relieved even that we’d taken the final step. But then something changed.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe she was missing Abby, and having second thoughts about eloping without her best friend in tow. Abby’s the only person besides me that counts as family in Candice’s eyes. Hell, sometimes I think she trusts Abby more than she does me.”

  I winced. I could tell that it bugged Brice that Candice had called me and not him, and that what he’d just said was undoubtedly true. But I’d known Candice longer, and we’d saved each other’s lives a number of times. Bonds forged in life-or-death situations ran deep. Deeper even than marriage vows.

  “So something changed in Vegas and you thought it was that she missed Abby, but now you think it could’ve been something else?”

  “Given what’s on that video, it was definitely something else.”

  “Candice was born just outside Vegas—you knew that, right?”

  “Yeah. She told me about her life there. Her sister’s car accident. Her mother dying of cancer and her dad’s heart attack three years later. Poor woman was an orphan before she was twenty.”

  “Did she tell you about her first husband?” Dutch asked next. It rubbed me a little wrong that he was airing all of Candice’s dirty laundry.

  “She mentioned being young and falling for a guy who trained her as a PI, then helped her get her license. Candice never talked much about their split, only that she was naive and trusting and it took her a few years to wise up.”

  “Did she tell you about the fake driver’s license from Nevada?” Dutch asked next. I felt increasingly defensive of my best friend and I wanted to march out there and tell him to shut it.

  “You mean the one with her sister’s info on it? She didn’t pull it out for my inspection, but she did say that she had an alternate identity and the name on the fake ID was her sister’s. Why? You think maybe Candice is using the fake ID now?”

  “If I were her and I wanted to disappear, that’s the tactic I’d use.”

  “Okay,” Brice said. “I’ll set up a trace on her license. Maybe she used it to open up a credit card or book a flight and we’ll get a hit on her location.”

  There was a long pause. Then Dutch said, “Why don’t you let me work on finding Candice?”

  “You?” Brice said, his tone hardening. “She’s my wife, Rivers.”

  “Exactly my point, buddy. Given the circumstances, what do you think
Director Gaston is gonna say to utilizing the bureau’s resources to find your wife, who’s now the primary suspect in a murder investigation by the APD?”

  Brice sighed again. “I have a conference call scheduled with him later this morning. I don’t even know if he’s heard yet, but you’re right. Once he finds out, he’ll order me not to get involved. Which means I’ll have to order you to butt out as well.”

  “I can call Milo and have him work it off the grid,” Dutch suggested. Milo was Dutch’s best friend and business partner in the private security firm my hubby had started many years ago, and which, in recent years, had provided us with a pretty cushy lifestyle. Milo still lived in our old neighborhood back in Michigan while he waited for his youngest son to graduate from high school; then he had plans to move down to Austin and work at the security firm from here to be closer to Dutch. I wondered what he’d say when he learned about what’d happened.

  “Isn’t Milo still in Michigan?” Brice asked.

  “Yeah, but he has sources. And I can make discreet inquiries.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. My hubby was known for his discreet inquiries.

  “What about Abby?” Brice said next. My other eyebrow joined its twin at the top of my forehead. “We haven’t even asked her to use her radar yet.”

  Aw crap. I’d purposely withheld giving any intuitive insight into what was going on because I didn’t want to give the boys anything useful until I had a chance to assess the situation. But as soon as Brice asked Dutch about it, I knew his next move would be to knock on the bedroom door and ask me to come back out to flip that intuitive switch and start spilling.

  So I did the only mature, reasonable, well-thought-out thing I could. I gently shut the bedroom door, locking it, before heading to the window to slide it open, knock out the screen, and shimmy into the backyard. “Thank God for a master bedroom on the first floor,” I said after wiping my hands and cruising around to the far side of the house. I let myself out of the gate and trotted to the car. I figured I had maybe fifteen seconds before Dutch doubled back and poked his head out the front door. Luckily for me, it took less than ten to exit the driveway.