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  “I’m afraid I have to confess something right off the bat.” Melissa looked fake-sheepish. Like she was acting Oh now don’t be mad at me; I made a boo-boo. She opened her Prada purse and then closed it. It had a clasp at the top that reminded Madison of old-time purses, the kind her mother had that Madison used to play dress-up with; it had a satisfying snap. Melissa opened it and closed it again. Rather than being indecisive about getting something out of her purse, she seemed to have a nervous tic. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Suddenly Madison wanted to grab it out of her hands.

  “Okay. Shoot.” Madison thought it was a little early in their relationship for confessions, but okay. “What do you need to confess?”

  “My husband saw my diary. I had written your name and phone number, and I wrote ‘P.I.’ next to your name. He confronted me, and I admitted I was thinking of hiring you.”

  Madison was floored. Her first thought was how much she disliked stupid women. It was harder for her to tolerate than a stupid man; she didn’t know why. Probably because she expected more from women. She was sitting next to a domestic case—one she didn’t want to take on in the first place—and this woman had thrown Madison under the bus before she’d even gotten a retainer. She almost got up and walked away without saying a word.

  Madison took a deep breath. She should probably make allowances for Melissa: if you weren’t used to being sneaky, something that came naturally to Madison, it was easy to make a blunder like this. Madison could also be impatient with people, a trait she’d been trying to work on.

  Madison cleared her throat. “Well, that certainly makes my job more difficult. For one thing, even if someone is suspicious that an investigator has been or will be hired, they are usually looking for a man. So not only does he know there will be an investigator following him, now he will be looking for a woman.”

  “I’m afraid there’s more,” Melissa said.

  Of course there is, Madison thought.

  “He was very angry.”

  “How angry?” Madison asked.

  “He said that if you investigated him, he would hunt you down and kill you.”

  That wording again. Was Melissa’s husband Anonymous? Or were these two separate death threats in the same week? Madison didn’t think she deserved such special attention; there weren’t many people who had someone out to kill them, and Madison might have two.

  “When did this happen?”

  “About a week ago,” Melissa said. “I wasn’t sure I was still going to use you, but I couldn’t find another female private investigator. And the men that I spoke to were so condescending I couldn’t stand it.”

  If Melissa had told her husband a week ago about hiring Madison and he had threatened to find Madison and kill her, he could’ve written the note left on Madison’s door. That didn’t jive with the fact that the wording in Felicity’s phone call was almost identical to the note. But Madison couldn’t ignore it. It was a string, and she had to pull on it.

  “Is your husband violent?”

  Melissa involuntarily reached her hand up and touched the bone surrounding her eye socket. Madison looked closely and realized there was the faintest yellow oval under her makeup. An old bruise.

  “He can be.”

  What had this woman brought to Madison’s doorstep? She was starting to not care that she needed money to replenish her savings account or that this was a “women helping women” sort of case.

  “Can you tell me what kind of car he drives?” Madison did not want this guy sneaking up on her.

  “He drives a dark-blue Tesla.”

  “Okay. So what is the point of me following him? California is a no-fault divorce state. You can get half his assets in a divorce regardless of the reason for the divorce. I know you said something about your attorney felt the judge would be more sympathetic to your plight if he knew your husband was also cheating? I would think judges are sort of immune to that sort of thing.”

  Melissa looked down at her purse. At least she had stopped snapping the clasp. “I signed a prenuptial agreement. I was young and in love and I didn’t know what I was signing. Or I didn’t care. I basically walk out with the clothes on my back if we get a divorce. But my attorney said if I could prove he was cheating, there might be a loophole in the prenuptial agreement. And he must be cheating. I can just tell.”

  So that was it. A prenuptial agreement. Melissa wanted to break the prenup and get more money than she’d agreed to when she got married. “But he hits you. Can you tell me why you don’t just leave him and sort this all out later?”

  “It’s complicated,” Melissa said.

  Madison knew there could come a day when you gave up on the idea of happily ever after. When you gave up on the idea that you could pull yourself out of a rough patch, a sticky situation, or have everything turn out okay. Once you lost that hope, it was hard to see a future that was anything other than more of the same. It could cause a woman to stay in a place where she wasn’t safe. Madison tried to be sympathetic.

  “Too complicated to try?”

  Melissa ignored the question. “Will you do this for me?”

  Madison sighed. “I really can’t. I’m sorry. Cases like this bring a lot more trouble than they’re worth. I’m sorry to reduce your life down to ‘a case,’ but I have to look out for my safety. And trying to catch a violent guy cheating is not something I am interested in pursuing. The cards have been stacked against me, since now he has my name and number. However, I will help you find resources so that you can leave him and be safe.”

  Melissa jumped up from the bench, and her purse fell to the ground. She stooped to get it. “You said you would help me.” She stood up and pointed her finger in Madison’s face. “You said I could trust you. But you’re just like all the others!”

  Madison hadn’t said anything like that. She stayed seated and spoke in measured tones. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m just telling you that I don’t feel comfortable taking this case. I told you last night on the phone that I couldn’t promise you anything. I have heard you out, and I can’t take this case.” Madison stood up as she started to get heated and faced Melissa. This woman didn’t even care that she was physically in danger—or that now Madison was—she just wanted her multimillion-dollar payout. “And frankly, you have put me at risk by doing something so stupid as to leave your address book with my name and phone number in it for your husband to find. A husband who you know is controlling and violent. You literally have put my life at risk.”

  Melissa turned to storm off, but her St. John’s knit jacket caught on the reclaimed-wood bench and snagged. She grabbed the jacket and pulled, ripping a hole in it. She walked down the path to the sidewalk. Madison watched her go until she was out of sight.

  “Another day of winning friends and influencing people,” Madison said aloud. Time to go home and get ready for surveillance.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Madison still had several hours before she needed to be in front of Frank Bronson’s house. She made herself an early dinner, leftover grilled chicken breast and a sweet potato made in the microwave, and sat at her desk and stared at the whiteboard.

  She especially looked at the subject of her tweets. Something about her tweets, as her current theory went, caused Anonymous to want to punish her. But she couldn’t see anything she had said that was particularly revelatory; while it was true that she could sometimes be inspired, she couldn’t see that she had been in this case. She was suggesting things that everybody else was suggesting. Was it just because she was a private investigator and perhaps in a position to do something about it? That had to be it. And also she was in San Diego, so too close for comfort? Other people were tweeting from around the country, too far to do anything about their theories. Madison went back through, in between bites of chicken and sweet potato, and wrote on the whiteboard her actual tweets, not just the clues contained in them.

  Do we know if the police have checked with the rideshare services regarding the driver
s?

  Wasn’t it Fleet Week when Elissa and Samantha both went missing?

  Has anyone looked into the bouncers working the night the girls disappeared?

  What about the bouncers at Hank’s?

  This last one gave Madison pause. It was the only time she had mentioned the same thing twice. Bouncers were notoriously full of their big-shit-on-turd-hill power. Many of them couldn’t make it in the police force or even in a security company that did background checks, which would reveal their criminal record, but all they had to do was be huge and mean to be a bouncer, especially at Hank’s, where there were a lot of fights. A bouncer has unique access to girls, especially drunk girls, as in the case of Samantha. And most girls would trust a bouncer, thinking that he worked for the bar—not thinking he could be a thug with a criminal record and that no background check had been done before he was hired.

  Madison got up from her desk and went to the sink and cleaned her plate. She was using her grandmother’s butterfly china. There were only three copies of this pattern in the world. Before a fourth copy could be made in 1935, the manufacturer’s facility had burned down. The set was made of beautiful ceramic with a high gloss, and each piece had delicately placed butterflies, each with a different design. It was a treat to eat on these plates; she felt like she was eating dinner with every person who’d ever used them. What had the dinner conversation been about? Who had been there? She used to keep the china set carefully packed away, until she wondered to herself, What am I waiting for? Best to enjoy life while you’re living it. She dried the plate and carefully put it away.

  Returning to the whiteboard, she realized she hadn’t made an attempt to call the friends of Elissa or Samantha. More ground that had already been picked over by the police, but to be thorough she had to talk to them or at least one person from each group of friends. She looked at the names she had listed on the board and selected a somewhat uncommon one from Samantha’s friends to look up in her private investigator’s database: Simone Levin. The more uncommon the name, the easier it was to find in the database.

  She found a Simone Levin living in Nebraska, which she discarded as unlikely. She found another one living in Ocean Beach, and that seemed more likely. She called the number listed.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Simone?”

  “Yes?” There was a screaming toddler in the background. “Come here!” The sound of the screaming got louder as she apparently picked the child up. The screaming was now going directly into the phone. Madison pulled the phone away from her ear. She put it on speaker.

  “My name is Madison Kelly. I’m a private investigator and I’m looking into the disappearance of Samantha. I wonder if I could speak to you for a minute about her. Maybe we could meet for coffee?”

  More screaming toddler. The child was saying, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!”

  “I don’t want to,” Simone said.

  Madison was confused for a minute; she thought Simone was just mimicking the child. Then she realized that Simone was answering her.

  “You don’t want to … meet with me? Talk about Samantha?”

  The child had calmed down slightly and was now just sort of whimpering. “That was the worst day of my life. People say it wasn’t my fault, she was a grown woman, but the fact remains that I was out with my best friend and she disappeared and has never been seen again. I let her down. I don’t know how we got separated, but we did. I was drunk too. Have you ever been out with friends and gotten drunk?”

  “Of course,” Madison said. It had been a long time, and was mostly in high school with a fake ID, but she’d done it.

  “Imagine that silly night turning into a nightmare. A harmless girls’ night out turns into a tragedy I will never get over. No, I don’t want to talk about it. I talked to the police and told them everything I knew at the time. I’m done.”

  “Even if it might help find her?”

  Simone laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “Find her? You think after four years Samantha is coming back alive? I have to go on with my life. It’s either that or die wondering ‘what if’: What if I had stayed with her that night? What if I had seen her walking to the door and stopped her? What if I hadn’t gotten drunk? What if we hadn’t gone out that night? What if, what if, what if. No, sorry, I don’t want to talk about it. But yes, I hope you find her.” And with that, she hung up the phone.

  Well, that’s that, Madison thought.

  She hadn’t imagined she’d get much from these friends anyway; she was just trying to be thorough in her investigation. She decided to mix it up and call a friend of Elissa’s. She selected Amanda Gutierrez. The name was unfortunately fairly common; however, it was less common than the other names listed on her whiteboard as being friends of Elissa’s. She found thirty in the United States. There were eight in San Diego County but only one in El Cajon. Since Elissa had lived in El Cajon, Madison went with that one.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, my name is Madison Kelly. I am a private investigator, and I’m looking into the disappearance of Elissa. I was wondering if I could talk to you about her?”

  There were sounds of glasses and dishes and loud voices in the background. “Oh yes,” Amanda said. “Her mother told me she met with you. She really liked you. You found her phone, right?”

  Madison wasn’t surprised that Mrs. Alvarez had shared the news that Elissa’s phone had been found. It was the first break in two years.

  “Yes,” Madison said. “I found her phone. It was sort of a miracle.”

  “It is a miracle,” Amanda said. “And we need those right now. I’d be happy to meet with you. Are you in East County? It’s my day off, so I’m down at the beach today.”

  “Actually, I live at the beach,” Madison said. “I have some time right now, if you’re available. Or are you with friends?”

  “I’m with friends, but that’s okay,” Amanda said. “We’re at PB Cantina in Pacific Beach.”

  She named a fun Mexican restaurant about three miles from Madison’s apartment. Too bad Madison had to do surveillance later, or she would love to drink a pitcher of margaritas on a Friday afternoon.

  “Would it be okay with you if I came over? I could be there within thirty minutes.”

  “Sure,” Amanda said. “I’m not gonna lie: we’re all a little buzzed right now, and we’ll be drunker by the time you get here. But two of the girls that were there that night are here, so you can talk to them as well.”

  “I don’t mind if you’re drunk,” Madison said. And she didn’t: people who’d been drinking had a tendency to say things they might not say otherwise. “I’ll see you shortly.”

  Madison decided to get ready for surveillance and just stop at PB Cantina on the way to Frank’s house. She changed into black yoga pants and a black tank top and brought a black hoodie in case it got cold. She would wear her jean jacket into the restaurant; that and her black-and-white Chuck Taylors made anything into an outfit. She made sure to stock her surveillance kit: a gym bag that she filled with protein bars, water bottles, a towel, a phone charger, her laptop, a laptop charger, the cigarette lighter adapter that powered her equipment, and her camera. She had a Panasonic handheld video camera that recorded onto a tiny SD disc. She had tried every brand of video camera, but Panasonic was the best. When she was waiting for someone to come out and do something worthy of videotaping, sometimes she would see the person for less than a minute; sometimes only for ten seconds. But they might do something in those ten seconds that she needed to videotape: bend at the waist, walk quickly and easily in direct contradiction to their claims of being injured, etc. If she had to wait for the camera to wake up from its sleeping state, since she had been sitting quietly doing nothing for three hours, she would lose that vital videotape. Panasonic warmed up and started videotaping with almost no delay. And her camera had pretty good night vision, which she would need for her surveillance on Frank.

  The other thing she had in her surveil
lance kit was something that male private investigators didn’t have to worry about: portable urinals that worked with a woman’s body. A guy could do surveillance for eight hours and pee in a bottle if he needed to. Madison could not pee in a bottle. But she did not want to miss out on good surveillance just because she was a girl and had to drive to find a gas station. She had discovered on Amazon some small disposable plastic urinals called Travel Johns that were miraculous. She also packed ziplock bags and paper towels to dispose of them when she was done. Oh yes, she often thought, surveillance is so glamorous: I’m peeing in my car.

  She brought a book just in case she would be able to read; surveillance could get very boring. Sometimes she might wait hours for something to happen. If Madison could read, she could wait endlessly. However, it didn’t always work: if she was parked far away, staring at a front door the size of a postage stamp because of the distance and waiting for someone to exit, she couldn’t take her eyes off the door. Looking down for even a second would mean that someone could walk out that door and she would miss them. However, if she was parked not that far away and watching, for example, a bright-red sports car, she could probably read. She would see the red sports car move over the top of her book. She hoped she could catch up on the latest Thomas Perry book. It was a new Jane Whitefield mystery, which was her favorite series.

  Now Madison sat on her bed and stared at the spot of carpet under which there was a safe. In the safe were important documents like her social security card and passport. Also in the safe was a gun.

  It was a Smith & Wesson double-action-trigger revolver. It was not an automatic; it didn’t fire rapidly from a clip. She had to put each bullet in one at a time, and once the bullets were fired, she had to reload. Her father had gotten her the gun when she moved out at eighteen. They’d gone together to the shooting range, and the instructor had been impressed with Madison’s marksmanship. Madison had always heard that women had great aim in all things target related: bowling, archery, and target shooting.