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  She turned and stopped. “I’m sorry. Yes, nice to meet you.”

  “No problem. So you’re the PI, right?”

  Madison wanted to go home. “Yep, that’s me.”

  “I might have a job for you. Would I be able to give you a call?”

  Madison kicked herself. She’d thought this guy was trying to pick her up, and he just wanted to hire her. Vain much? she thought. He seemed slightly socially awkward; Madison always tried harder to make a person like that feel more comfortable in social situations. She took a deep breath. “I’m kind of busy at the moment, and I usually just work for insurance companies, but I don’t mind hearing about it. Sure, give me a call.” She grabbed a card out of her purse and handed it to him.

  He took his wallet out of his back pocket and put the card in the wallet. He was tall, with closely cut “cop hair,” as Madison called it. His eyes were so blue that they were almost pastel. Madison wondered what a cop needed with a PI.

  He smiled, and this time it met his eyes and made him seem less awkward. When Madison dropped the chip off her shoulder with guys, they had a tendency to get nicer.

  He was thanking her. “Great. Thanks. Yeah, no obligation, just hear me out and maybe you can help me.”

  “Sounds good. Call me tomorrow. Have a good night.” Madison turned to walk toward her car.

  “Have a good night,” he called out.

  Madison reached her car and got in the driver’s seat. She turned back and saw that Tom had come out and was talking to Ken. They laughed about something and then walked back into the bar.

  Madison pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to the beach. She had a weird hangover from the margarita at Su Casa, and she just wanted her big bed. She had turned the evidence she possessed over to the police—well, Tom—and no one could say she was obstructing justice. Granted, she hadn’t turned over her knowledge of the phone call Felicity had received, but she didn’t feel too bad about that now. She didn’t work for the police, and she’d already found a major piece of evidence in the form of Elissa’s phone and handed it over. She would just keep telling herself that.

  Traffic was light on a Thursday night. San Diego still had rush “hour,” or maybe a few hours, unlike Los Angeles that had constant traffic night and day. She never had to give herself more than thirty minutes to get anywhere as long as it wasn’t during high-traffic times.

  Madison was trying not to be annoyed with Tom. She needed him for this case. She thought back to when they’d first met. She was a baby investigator and he was a baby cop (although older than she, as she liked to point out to him frequently). Madison’s firm had been hired by a car rental company that had been having tons of cars stolen from tourists who’d rented them. The firm had been in coordination with the police and had assigned Madison a location and a cop; the location was the harbor area, and the cop was Tom.

  When she’d met Tom down by the historic ships and the Midway aircraft carrier, there’d been an instant attraction. It was palpable. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  Her firm had investigators all over San Diego just watching rental cars: tourists would park and go into a tourist attraction, and the investigators would wait to see if the car was stolen while they were inside. When the tourists came back, the investigators drove to find a new rental car to watch. It was tedious work and long hours. Tom worked with her the first week: she would sit watching rental cars, and he would drive around and check on her. They talked a lot. They worked late into the night. One day he asked her to breakfast and spent twenty minutes trying to tell her something: he was married, but he was getting a divorce. Madison had been down that road before and told him she’d love to go to breakfast with him when his divorce was final.

  After a week and a half, the police took Tom off the case, because they felt it was no longer worth the police man hours. Madison was on her own.

  Finally, at the end of the second week, Madison’s luck came through: two guys walked up to the rental car she was watching. They were not the tourist family who had parked it. They started fussing with the passenger door. Madison called 911, as was the protocol they’d worked out. The police had all been briefed and knew who she was and what she was doing. In less than three minutes the two suspects had the car started and were driving down Harbor Drive. They made a quick right and within five minutes were on the freeway heading south toward Mexico.

  Madison and the suspects were only twenty minutes from the Mexican border, and she was getting nervous that the cops wouldn’t get there in time. Then cop cars began entering the freeway at each entrance: one car, two cars, three cars, four. The traffic behind her began to disappear as the cops did a “round robin” technique where they swerved across the freeway to stop all traffic. Soon it was just Madison following the stolen car with about ten cop cars behind her on the freeway; she was getting instructions from the 911 operator and hadn’t yet been told to pull off. Then the police helicopter came over the top of them, its magnified voice eerily clear on the empty freeway, shouting orders at the suspect vehicle: “Stop your vehicle! Stop your vehicle!” All the cop cars put their lights and sirens on at the same time, with the helicopter’s spotlight shining down as bright as day. The suspects stopped in the middle of the freeway. The 911 operator told Madison on the phone to slow to a stop. The cops all jumped out of their cars, using their doors as shields, rifles pointing at the suspects. Madison was now surrounded by cops and their cars, some of them still behind her with their guns drawn. The cops had ordered the suspects out of the car and they lay facedown on the pavement. Madison had a front-row seat to a felony stop in the middle of one of the busiest freeways in California.

  Madison was invited to police headquarters and got high-fives from the cops who’d been on the case for a while. A car theft ring had been busted. Tom was proud of her. He suggested they go get a celebratory drink, and she was so electrified from her night that she agreed. They went to the Aero Club, a dive bar by the freeway near the airport that had been serving stiff drinks since 1947. Madison loved a dive bar. She couldn’t abide fancy places where you had to dress up and be judged by what you were wearing. She called those places “S & M” bars, for Stand and Model. So when Tom suggested the Aero Club, it confirmed that he was her kind of guy.

  They sat at the bar with a bunch of mechanics who’d been out carousing all night and finally settled on a place that felt like home. Madison was doing shots of Jack Daniels, always a sign that she should go home, and ended up standing on the bar and singing Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia,” having recruited three of the mechanics to be her Pips and sing backup. Tom was telling anyone who would listen that she was a hero, and by the end of the night the story had morphed into her single-handedly stopping the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.

  As they stumbled out of the bar at closing and walked toward downtown, Tom grabbed her next to an abandoned storefront and kissed her. Madison was so drunk by then that she couldn’t appreciate the culmination of months of brewing electricity. When she closed her eyes to kiss him, the world started spinning.

  “I’m gonna hurl,” she said. And then she did, in the cement alcove of Paulette’s Bobbin and Stitch, your sewing supply store since 1937.

  Tom turned away. He called her an Uber on his phone. When it got there, she fell into the back of the car. They’d never discussed that night again.

  Tom had never gotten divorced, and Madison knew he never would. They’d kept in touch, but the air had been charged whenever they met. A few months ago he had gotten a little obsessed with her. Or, like he said, he had “wondered” about her. Madison had done some sleuthing herself when it came to boys: if you date a chef, the food is going to be really good; if you have a relationship with a cop or a PI, expect some surveillance. He’d said he was sorry. That was something. Even if he hadn’t totally meant it.

  She rolled down the windows and turned up the music, enjoying the open road. Sometimes driving gave her the feeling th
at she could conquer the world, and she could remember what it was like when she’d had her whole life ahead of her. So much hope. “Something Just Like This” by the Chainsmokers and Coldplay came on the radio, and she sang at the top of her lungs.

  She drove down the alley and parked in her parking space. Ryan parked in front on the street, so she didn’t know if he was home yet. Would it be awkward living so close and dating? Well, they weren’t really dating yet; one happy hour did not make a boyfriend. She locked her car and walked into the garden.

  Then she saw a shape sitting at the bottom of her stairs and she froze.

  Chapter Twelve

  “It’s me,” Dave said. “I’m freezing.”

  He was sitting in his wetsuit with a towel around his shoulders. His surfboard was standing against the garden wall.

  “Jesus,” Madison said. She walked down the path to him. “I think I’m tired of people dropping by. What are you doing here? Have you been sitting here since sunset?”

  “I figured you weren’t far.”

  “I’m not sure I like that assumption. Anyway, come upstairs and get in the shower before you catch pneumonia.”

  “Thanks.”

  Dave started up the stairs and Madison followed him. “Why are you here?”

  They got to the top of the stairs and Madison used her key to let them inside. Dave set his surfboard against the wall next to the door and then started to undress, planning to leave his sandy wetsuit outside on the landing.

  “Am I charging the neighbors for the strip show?” Madison said. Dave draped his wetsuit over the railing and ran to the shower with his hands strategically placed.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Madison yelled. “Why are you here?”

  “Can’t hear you, shower is on,” Dave yelled back from the bathroom.

  Madison set her purse and keys on her desk and sat in her office chair. What a day. Her phone rang, and it was a number she didn’t recognize.

  “Madison Kelly,” she said, although normally she just said hello after business hours.

  “Yes, hi,” a woman said. “My name is Melissa Sands. I need a … I’d like to hire you to follow my husband.”

  Madison sighed. She hated domestic cases. When she first got her PI license, she’d thought it would be a lucrative business. Everyone she knew had been cheated on at one point or another. So it was confusing when she followed the significant others of three clients and none of them were cheating. Then she realized that it was so easy to catch a spouse cheating—phone numbers on scraps of paper, get into their phone or email, drive by their work when they say they’re working late—that if you needed to hire a private investigator, you’d already done all of those things and hadn’t found them cheating. Meaning you were just an obsessive person who couldn’t let your obsession go. Her last domestic client had been a man who hid the keys to the mailbox so his wife couldn’t get the mail. He made Madison follow her home from work and called every five minutes demanding to know what she was doing. “She is driving in traffic. Yes, still,” Madison would say every time he called. He was so obsessive that Madison refused his offer of five thousand dollars in cash to continue the surveillance. He hadn’t wanted to hire a male private investigator only because he didn’t want a man following his wife. Madison could still remember the terrified expression on the woman’s face in the rearview mirror as Madison tailed her in bumper-to-bumper traffic; the woman racing to get home on time to an angry and controlling husband. That poor woman. Never again, Madison had sworn.

  “I’m sorry,” Madison said. “I don’t handle domestic investigations.”

  “It’s just that … well … I really need your help,” Melissa said. “I thought, with you being a woman, that you would be willing to help me.”

  The woman sounded older, and she spoke very clearly and distinctly, with a slight attitude. When she said the thing about helping because she was a woman, Madison thought it sounded … entitled. Still, she had a point. Women did need to stick together.

  “What is it you need?” Madison asked.

  Melissa paused. “I want to leave my husband. But he controls all of the money. Everything is in his name. He sees other women and tells me too bad. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without checking with him first. I want to leave him, but there’s no way I can because I would have to walk out with only the clothes on my back. He’s even told me, ‘Go ahead! Leave!’ because he knows that I won’t.”

  Madison was quiet for a minute. This technically wouldn’t violate her rule about domestic cases, because this woman was trying to get away from a controlling spouse—she wasn’t herself the controlling one. And Madison could use some money. While she’d been figuring out what to do with her life, her savings had been getting depleted. But something didn’t make sense.

  “How is my following him going to change the fact that he controls the money?”

  Melissa’s voice sped up at the prospect that Madison would agree to the job. “I met with an attorney. Even though California is a no-fault state, he said that if we take everything to a judge, the fact that my husband is abandoning me by cheating with other women, the fact that he’s arranged it so that all of the assets are in his name, on and on, a judge would be sympathetic and award me immediate spousal support while we went through the court proceedings.”

  Madison thought that made sense. “And how would you pay me? I hate to put it so frankly, but … how would you do that if he controls all the money?”

  “I’ve been taking money out of the cash he gives me for groceries. Twenty dollars here, forty dollars there. I can pay you in cash.”

  “Okay … I mean … I charge seventy-five dollars an hour, and for a case like this I would need at least a three-thousand-dollar retainer.”

  “That’s no problem. I’ve been saving this money for a year. Money won’t be a problem.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow and I’ll at least listen? I can’t promise anything.”

  “Well, okay.” Madison didn’t think she sounded that appreciative.

  “Where would you like to meet?”

  “Don’t you have an office?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m in the field most of the time. Do you know the La Jolla Library?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m on the board.”

  “How about one PM tomorrow?” Madison wanted to go in the late morning to the bars in the Gaslamp to see if any of the staff would talk to her.

  Melissa sounded doubtful, like she was beginning to regret calling the female PI with no office. “Alright, I guess that will work. Yes. See you then.”

  Madison hung up and stared at the phone. Something about Melissa Sands didn’t sit right. It sounded like she was concerned about the prospect of losing a fortune rather than afraid for her life or her future. If you were really trapped, you took your thousands of dollars in cash that you’d saved from the grocery money and you left. You didn’t hire a PI with it. Well, she’d made the appointment, so she’d just have to go and see.

  Toward the end of the call, Dave had come out of the shower with a towel around his waist and sat in the wingback chair. Now he leaned back and stared at Madison, who was still staring silently at the phone.

  “Rough day?”

  Madison’s head popped up, and she regarded him. When she first met Dave, she’d been struck by how comfortable she felt around him. She felt like she could drop all of her pretenses and her sometimes-false confidence. She could drop her guard. By the time she met him, it had been some time since her parents had died; she hadn’t realized how much of a guard she’d had up until she met Dave. She could be herself with him.

  “Such a rough day,” she said. She went over to the chair and sat on his lap and put her head on his chest. His was the first face she’d seen when she woke up from her mastectomy—a surgery she’d chosen so that she wouldn’t die of breast cancer like her mother had. They’d put tissue expanders under her pecto
ral muscles to begin the process of reconstruction; a second surgery was required to switch out the tissue expanders with the permanent breast implants, a surgery where they would cut her pectoral muscles and sew them back down a second time. She woke up with small wrinkled mounds on her chest that would eventually get bigger, but no nipples—it was too dangerous to leave even that small amount of tissue for the cancer to grow in. “You’ve got Barbie boobs!” Dave had said to make her laugh, even though she wouldn’t let him see them for months. He’d never made her feel anything other than beautiful, despite the massive scars etch-a-sketching their way across the middle of her chest.

  Dave broke the comfortable silence. “Have you heard from that guy again? The note guy?”

  Madison realized this was why she’d gotten an impromptu visit in the middle of the week from Dave. But she wasn’t going to tell him about the second note. She picked her head up and leaned back to eye him.

  “Are you here to protect me?”

  “No,” Dave said. “I just thought I’d see how you were doing. You don’t need protecting.”

  Dave knew that Madison got scared sometimes, but he never would’ve said it out loud. It would’ve been like telling another girl she was fat.

  Madison stood up, grabbed his hand, and pulled him out of the chair. “Take me to bed or lose me forever.”

  “Top Gun!” he laughed. “I feel the need, the need for speed!” He picked her up and twirled her around the room as he carried her into the bedroom.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Madison listened to the waves for a minute before she opened her eyes. The sun was shining through her bedroom window, which faced east. It was still early. She listened to the quiet in her apartment and realized Dave must have gone to surf sunrise. Being a trust-fund kid meant all he had to do with his life was surf; nice work if you can get it. She needed coffee.

  Today was the day she planned to go to the Gaslamp District and try to interview the staff at the bars where the girls were last seen. It had been four years since Samantha went missing and two years since Elissa went missing. There was normally a high turnover at restaurants and bars, so she wasn’t sure she would find out anything from the staff that remained. But in order to be thorough, she had to try. She grabbed her phone from her bedside table and stood up. Her teddy bear, Harold Comfort Bear, flew across the room. He had been caught in the comforter and was catapulted as she stood. She picked him up and put him back on the bed. Some people might judge a grown woman for sleeping with a teddy bear. Madison didn’t know any of those people.