Jeffery Deaver: Ice Cold

I didn’t tell Alyse any of this. It wasn’t my place, but the idea of her father Tom-catting it around with someone from work made more sense to me than anything else. But my first thought was that if he was, it would serve Isabelle right.

“When was this?” I asked casually.

“Last winter,” Alyse said. “I was with one of my girlfriends. We were taking a short cut through Book Hill Park when we saw them. Since I wasn’t supposed to be there, I made sure Dad didn’t see me, but I got a good look at her. She was very beautiful.”

“Your friends saw them, too?”

“I was with Crystal. I ducked back out of sight behind a tree. She’s the one who saw the briefcases.”

“What briefcases?”

“They had matching briefcases, brown ones. Dad always carries one like it back and forth to work. Crystal said that when the woman got up to leave, she took Dad’s suitcase instead of the one she brought. You know, an old switcheroo like they do in the movies.”

“That’s not much to go on, now is it,” I said kindly. “It might have just been a mistake.”

“I guess,” Alyse said. She bit her lip and shrugged. “I was just thinking if he got in trouble or something, maybe I could come live with you and Grandpa all the time instead of just for a few weeks during the summer.”

Alyse said the words with such heartfelt earnestness and innocence that it broke my heart. Long before Alyse’s little brother, Jimmy, was born, Isabelle treated her like so much excess baggage. As soon as Isabelle appeared on the scene, baby Alyse was shuffled off into the care of a series of mostly non-English-speaking nannies. Later on, she was packed off to various daycare facilities for long hours every day even though Isabelle had by then given up all pretense of holding a paying job.

Over the years it was clear that as far as Isabelle was concerned, Alyse was tolerated rather than loved. Once Isabelle and Gunnar’s child came along, it got worse. Jimmy is an obnoxious kid, your basic spoiled brat, and Alyse is expected to spend her weekends, afternoons, and evenings serving as an unpaid babysitter for the little demon while her mother goes off to do whatever it is she does with all that spare time.

Because Lloyd and I were fairly well to do, Isabelle assumed that meant Gunnar was, too. Supposedly, Isabelle comes from an impoverished background, but once she and Gunn tied the knot, she started making up for lost time. She wanted to live in the best neighborhoods, drive the best cars, wear the best clothes. And if Gunn’s paycheck didn’t pay the freight, she figured they could come to us with their hands out to get whatever was needed to make up the difference. Isabelle was willing to be chummy with us as long as the money kept flowing. When Lloyd finally put his foot down a few years ago and turned off the money spigot, Isabelle stopped making any effort to be pals, and so did I. We’ve tried to stay in touch with the grandkids. That’s been easy to do with Alyse but not so easy with Jimmy.

I finished my coffee. “Let’s not give this another moment’s thought,” I said. “I told you we were going to go shopping for school clothes for you today, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

We were parked outside the Logan Valley Mall by the time the first stores opened at 10 a.m. I stayed on the sidelines while Alyse tried on clothing. Just because we were no longer talking about her father’s outside interest didn’t mean I was no longer thinking about it.

It was the fur coat that Alyse had mentioned, the one the woman in the park had been wearing, that piqued my interest and ate away at me. For one thing, I knew far better than Alyse that Gunn and Isabelle were still deeply mired in money troubles, enough so that only a few months earlier, Gunn had once again come crawling to Lloyd, begging for a loan to keep from losing the house. Lloyd claims to be a tough guy, but he knuckled under one more time—more out of concern for keeping a roof over the grandkids’ heads than to help Gunn or his money-grubbing wife.

And now there might be a new woman in Gunn’s life, one presumably that Isabelle knew nothing about. If that wasn’t just deserts, I didn’t know what was. And since the woman was wearing a fur coat, that made me wonder if it was possible that my two-timing son had found himself the female equivalent of a sugar daddy.

At the time I set out to find out who that woman was and what she was about, I told myself I was doing it for Alyse’s sake. If some kind of marital scandal was about to tear that poor child’s world apart, I wanted to know about it before it happened rather than after the fact. But the truth is, it was for Alyse’s mother’s sake, too. There was nothing that would make me happier than being able to rub Isabelle’s nose in the same kind of mess she had made for her predecessor.

That was why, the following week, when I drove her back to D.C. in time for school to start, I made an unscheduled stop in my present that took me back to my own, less-than-exemplary past.

Even now I won’t put the man’s real name to paper because it is one too many people would recognize. Yes, it’s more than thirty years in the past, and the brief affair I had with him—a man I’ll call Alf—happened twenty years before that, while Lloyd was off fighting for God and country. At the time, I was a young, attractive woman with a husband who was far away, a young child to care for on my own, and an aching need to have some fun in my life. Back then Alf, an aide to a longtime senator, had a wife back home in Dixie and more money than sense. From my point of view, he was perfect. That had been true in the forties, and he was still perfect for what I needed now—now that Alf was a senator in his own right with the same wife who was a mover and shaker in the city’s inner social circles. I had watched the couple’s rise to power from the sidelines without ever thinking I might want to contact Alf again, but now I did.

I played the “old family friend” card when I gave my name to the receptionist out front, and it worked. Within minutes I was ushered past a roomful of waiting lobbyists into Alf’s private office. He came around to greet me, hand outstretched, as though I were some kind of visiting constituent from back home. He leaned over and kissed me hello, but I could see he was worried about what I was doing there.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, leading me over to a pair of comfortable leather armchairs.

“I’m here about my son,” I said.

Alf frowned. “Forgive me,” he said. “I remember he was a cute little kid, but what was his name again?”

“Gunn,” I answered. “Short for Gunnar. He’s a military analyst who works for the Pentagon.”

A shadow seemed to fall across Alf’s face. “You need to know that I have very little influence over what goes on inside those walls,” he said. “Promotions, pay-raises, that kind of thing are totally outside my realm of influence these days.”

“What if Gunn were a spy?” I asked. I didn’t really believe that at the time. The words were only a means to an end—bait meant to get Alf to bite and do what I wanted him to do.

Alf’s jaw dropped. “You’re saying you suspect your own son of being a traitor to his country?”

“It’s a possibility,” I said with a dismissive shrug. “Gunn and his second wife, Isabelle, have lived beyond their means for years. I also have reason to believe that he’s become involved with some other woman. There are children involved, of course, and I was hoping you might be able to put him under some kind of surveillance to let me know exactly what kind of scandal our family is about to be up against.”

“You want me to investigate your son?”

“Yes, if it’s just another case of skirt-chasing, so be it.”