Кей Хупер - Hiding in the Shadows

"Did she... does she use you only to arrange financial deals?"

"Almost exclusively. Miss Leighton's family attorneys tended to view her philanthropy with a great deal of unease, from what she told me. I had the virtue of complete personal disinterest in her and in what she chose to do with her money. She told me what she wanted done, I did it."

"Like the financial arrangements for me," Faith said.

"Exactly so, Miss Parker."

"You never asked her why she did it?"

"As I said, my value to Miss Leighton lay in my discretion and my disinterest. It would not have been to my advantage to ask her questions."

Kane tried another tack. "Okay, then tell us this. Did you notice, in the course of performing your duties for Miss Leighton, anything out of the ordinary? Anything that might give us some idea of what happened to her?"

"You must know I can't talk in specifics about Miss Leighton's business affairs," Sloan replied immediately.

"I'm not asking you about her business affairs," Kane said with just enough patience to make the effort noticeable. "I'm asking you if you know anything — if you saw or heard anything — that might help us to find your missing client."

This time, there was a pause. A rather deliberate one, Faith thought. Her heartbeat quickened as she gazed at the lawyer's face. He knows something. He knows something, and he's just been waiting for somebody to ask him. But nobody had asked, because his relationship with Dinah had not been a public one — and Sloan was not a man who would ever volunteer information. Which explained why he had not come forward when Dinah had vanished.

"Please, Mr. Sloan." Faith knew her voice was unsteady. "Please help us if you can. Did anything unusual happen in the days before she disappeared?"

"Just one thing." His voice was composed. "Two days before she vanished, Miss Leighton asked me to recommend a good private investigator, one who specializes in missing persons." Faith looked at Kane in confusion, and it was he who said, "Did she say why?"

"The only thing she said to me, Mr. Macgregor, was a rather cryptic remark to the effect that she needed someone to look for a corpse."

"And that's all he'd tell you?" Bishop asked.

"That's all." Kane wedged the receiver between his ear and shoulder, reached for a legal pad on the coffee table, and scowled at the notes he'd jotted down earlier. "Just that Dinah wanted to hire a P I. specializing in missing persons because she needed someone to find a corpse."

"Did he know if she actually hired the P I.?"

"He said that when Dinah disappeared, he called the two people he'd recommended, and neither had heard from her. I'm inclined to believe him. For one thing, news of the reward has been played up heavily in the media, and I doubt very much that a professional investigator would pass up the chance to make a million bucks if he had any knowledge at all about Dinah."

"That is a point." Bishop paused. "Where's Faith?"

"I dropped her off at Haven House. There's a woman there who seems to have known both Faith and Dinah months ago, and Faith wanted to talk to her. Understandably, men aren't welcome there, so I've been checking out a few other things. Faith's bank, where she has no safe deposit box. Dinah's other bank, where the manager was very cooperative and is even now sending Richardson all the records."

"Did you take a look at those records?"

"Yeah. And they verify what Conrad told us, that Dinah used that bank account the way she used Sloan, to handle those bequests and donations she wanted to keep quiet. Guy's team will go over all of it wit a fine-tooth comb." He paused.

"Since you're still at Quantico, I assume you've been able to look into that restricted file?"

"I'm not still at Quantico," Bishop said, then went on before Kane could ask him anything about that.

"But, yeah, I found out why the files on the murders of Faith's mother and sister are restricted."

"Why?"

"Ties in to what you told me about her former husband and the abuse. It seems that he was, and still is, under suspicion for the crimes. The theory is that abuse escalated to open violence when she dared to divorce him, and that she escaped being killed only because she was unexpectedly called in to work that night."

Grim, Kane said, "That doesn't explain why in formation about the investigation is restricted."

"Yes, well, it makes sense when you learn one more salient fact. Faith's ex-husband, Tony Ellis, is an FBI agent."

Katie was at school, but Faith left new sheet music on the piano for her. Kane hadn't asked any questions when she'd requested the stop at a music store; she'd told him the gift was for a child, and he had made a couple of suggestions as to what might appeal to a budding young pianist.

Even last names weren't offered, which Faith assumed was one of Haven House's policies — turned out to be a not very tall, solidly built woman of about twenty-one, with wary brown eyes that had already seen far too much. She was watching over a small group of toddlers when Karen took Faith down to the roomy nursery in the basement of the house to introduce her. The children's mothers, the director had explained, were working, or job hunting, or busy with lawyers or police attempting to divorce, arrest, or prosecute abusive husbands.

But it was late in the day, and even as Faith was introduced to Eve, women of various ages were beginning to arrive to claim their offspring.

Karen suggested she take over the nursery to give Eve a chance to talk to Faith, and they went upstairs to the second-floor sitting room near Eve's bedroom.

"So you've lost your memory." Eve's voice was a little abrupt, but not unsympathetic, a tone explained when she added, "Happened to me once. Got knocked into a wall and out cold. When I came to, more than six months were a total blank."

Faith winced. "Did you eventually remember?"

Eve shook her head. "Not really. But I pieced most of it together, talking to people. I guess that's what you're doing?"

"Trying to. Can you help me?"

"We weren't close," Eve said frankly. "Friendly, just not confiding. So I don't know much, except that you were very angry."

"Angry? Not frightened?"

"I don't think you were as afraid of your ex as some of us were. Maybe because he was so far away, or maybe because you had other things on your mind. I think you and Dinah were up to something."

Faith blinked. "Up to something?"

"Yeah. A story of some kind. I don't know what it was about, but I got the feeling Dinah was trying to hold you back in some way. To keep you from doing something she didn't think you should do. I think she was worried about you."

Faith wondered again if it was her fault that Dinah it I it was in such danger, and was conscious of a cold, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. But all she said was, "Were you close to Dinah?"

Eve's rather immobile face softened. "She talked to me a lot for her story. And, after, she gave me the money I needed to go back to school. I got my GED, but I wasn't going to do anything else until Dinah convinced me it was the best thing for me to do. I'm studying computers," she finished proudly.

Faith smiled at her. "That's great."

"Yeah, I think so. I have a future now. Dinah said..." She broke off and bit her lip.

"What did she say, Eve?"

The younger woman hesitated, then said slowly, "I've thought about it since she disappeared, and crazy as it sounds, I think she always knew she'd... she didn't have a future of her own. She seemed almost sad when we talked about my plans. Once, she said I had so much to look forward to, and that she wished she'd be here to see it."

"Maybe she was ... just planning to go away," Faith said.

"I don't think so. You didn't see her face the way I did, hear her voice. I think she could see the future sometimes, that she knew about things before they happened. She never said so, but once she warned me not to go back to a certain club I liked, and later I found out my ex had been there looking for me. I heard her tell Andrea she should go see her mother, and just a couple of weeks later the poor lady died of a heart attack. And there were other things. The way she looked at Katie and the other kids. The way she moved really fast to arrange things whenever she donated money to Haven House or one of us, as if she knew she had to hurry." Eve shook her head. "I think she knew she didn't have much time left."