The Notorious Mrs. Wright

“Playing tourist. I decided I might have better luck getting close to her if I walked in the front door and ordered dinner like everyone else.”

“Sounds as if you’ve got a handle on it.”

Whit snorted. “I sat two feet from this woman tonight and we carried on a conversation, yet I still can’t tell you exactly what she looks like.”

“Huh? I don’t understand?”

“Long story. I’ll explain when I get back.”

“Okay, buddy. Let me know if you need help. I’m available.”

“Thanks, Cliff.”

He hung up and called Allen Morrow in California, talking briefly to the man about his criminal case and reassuring him that the San Pedro office of Lewis Investigations could locate his witness.

After a shower, he unlocked his laptop computer and opened his file on Emma Webster. The blasted woman had begun to occupy his thoughts day and night, and he didn’t like it. He had other cases he was working on, cases that could benefit from the time and attention he was giving Emma, but they didn’t interest him at all.

She had aroused his curiosity. And tonight—if the woman he’d talked to was indeed Emma—she had aroused much more. He’d gotten worked up over a body made of foam rubber. Damn, that galled him.

Well, it served him right. He knew better than to let his emotions cloud his perspective, especially over a woman with her background.

She’d been a criminal and maybe still was, and Whit didn’t like criminals. He’d spent most of his life catching them, or at least locating them. He’d been a special agent with the FBI for ten years before opening his own national firm seven years ago.

He had offices in four states and a hundred and fifty top-notch investigators, all experts in a particular field: corporate security, encryption, terrorism, insurance fraud, witness location. His personal specialty was finding people. And he was very good at it. Usually.

This case baffled him. He could understand why Emma had run away as a child, but most runaways didn’t bother to stay hidden after adulthood. Many actually attempted to reconcile with their estranged parents and find their siblings.

Emma had been close to her brother. She had to expect that one day he would seek her out. So why was she still running? And from whom?

He clicked on the photo he’d scanned of her, and brought it up on the screen. The quality of this shot was poor, and in it she was only twelve, but there weren’t any others, not even from school. She had dark hair and sad, dark eyes. The facial resemblance to her brother had been strong back then, and still should be.

When he’d started this investigation, Whit had used a software program developed for the bureau to age Emma’s features by twenty-six years, to see what she might look like now at thirty-eight. He brought up that altered photo.

Beside it, he opened the most recent driver’s license photo of the woman calling herself Susan Wright, maiden name Susan Roberts. She wore glasses in this one, so he couldn’t tell much about the eyes. “Hazel” was the color listed, rather than brown.

The facial bone structure seemed similar to the first photo. The hair was long here, though, not short as in the aged photo of Emma or as Susan Wright supposedly wore her hair now. But it occurred to him that she could be wearing a wig. And the nose…different somehow. Longer. Maybe a bit wider. She didn’t look forty-five, as her license said.

He brought up a third photo he’d acquired only yesterday by courier. This one, a black-and-white, was from the 1973 yearbook of Marsville High School in Virginia, where the real Susan Roberts had been a sixteen-year-old student at the time. He used the software to colorize it and age the photo twenty-nine years, to her current age of forty-five. He replaced the long hair with short and gave her brown eyes.

Two bits of information stood out in his mind as important: One, Emma Webster and Susan Roberts had both been runaways. Two, the woman calling herself Susan Roberts Wright had named her son John Thomas, the same first and middle names as Emma Webster’s brother. Coincidence? Maybe, but he didn’t think so.

Emma had been proficient with disguise, just like the Susan Wright he’d talked to earlier tonight.

The software allowed him to analyze the three photos using a sixty-five-point system of comparison. He did that, but the results were inconclusive.

He leaned back in the chair, put his hands behind his head and studied the different faces. Sometimes experience was more valuable than technology.

His gut was speaking again. What it said disturbed him. The “widow” Wright might or might not be Emma Webster, but she clearly wasn’t the real Susan Roberts. So what had happened to Susan? And more importantly…did the woman impersonating Susan have anything to do with her disappearance?

CHAPTER TWO

“SUSAN! DIDN’T YOU HEAR me calling?”

Emma jumped. As always, a fraction of a second passed before she associated herself with the name. She closed the textbook and casually slid it under the ledgers on her desk, hoping her action hadn’t called attention to it.

She’d tried all morning to study, but one problem after another had broken her concentration—late linen, a smoking motor on the ice machine, two kitchen assistants who’d shown up late. Saturday was always the worst day of the week.

But she couldn’t complain. She adored this place. After years of waiting tables and washing dishes in every cheap dive from California to Maine, after years of scraping by from paycheck to paycheck, she was living her dream.

She owned this restaurant. She had money in the bank. The respectability she’d craved all her life was within her grasp.

And soon—she hoped—she could fulfill another dream, that of receiving her high school diploma. And before Tom, who’d be a senior when he started back in the fall. She’d worked in secret for several months to prepare for the equivalency exam.

“What’s wrong now, Abby?” She’d asked not to be disturbed for a couple of hours.

Abby stood in the office doorway with her hands on her hips and a look of panic on her face. “Houdini’s loose in the kitchen.”

Emma sighed. Not again. She was going to strangle that stupid bird. “Please tell me he hasn’t gotten into any food preparation areas.”

“No, he flew right into the storage room, but that crazy Spaniard you hired is threatening to fricassee him for lunch.”

“Great. Exactly what I need today.”

“Really, Susan, he’s impossible.”

“Who, the parrot or the chef?”

“Both. At the moment, I’m not sure which one of them is crazier. The bird’s squawking insults, and Santiago’s waving a very large knife. Did Tom teach the bird Spanish? If he wasn’t so gorgeous, I’d say boot his butt out the door.”

“Who? Houdini?”

“No, silly. Santiago.”

Emma often felt she was missing something in conversations with Abby. Like…understanding.

She walked to the wall and punched the button on the intercom to her apartment. “Tom? You still up there?”

“Yeah, Mom. Just walking out the back door to go to work.”

“I need your help for a second. Houdini’s gotten out of the aviary and made his way down here somehow.”

“Ah, sh—”

“Watch your language, young man.”

“Sorry. Be right there.”

Emma went with Abby through the kitchen to the storage room and found chaos. Santiago Chaves, their young, brilliant but sometimes volatile chef, cursed and waved a meat cleaver at the gray parrot running nervously back and forth along the top of a shelf filled with sacks of flour.