What She Forgot Read online

  I saw her. I saw a lot of her. Damn it.

  “She’s very pretty,” Mason said, his eyes watching me closely.

  “Uh-huh.” I opened the file and flipped through the pages. “Are you sure about these?”

  “No one is ever sure of anything when it comes to mental health. But you were looking for a tie between them, a motive, or some way to link them together. I couldn’t find one. I’d be happy to take a look at more, though.”

  “I’ll let you know.” I closed my file.

  “About Shelly—”

  I held up my hand. “I really don’t want to discuss Shelly.” That was a finished deal. I would get rid of her. That would be done.

  “I just wanted to warn you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I replied. “I’ve been warned.”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “You’re married to her twin. Of course you’d say that.” I snorted.

  “I’d say that even if they looked nothing alike. She’s a lovely woman.”

  “Why do I feel a but hanging in the air between us?”

  “But,” he said loudly, “don’t forget that she is what she is.”

  “What is she, exactly?”

  “Diagnostically speaking, she’s an obsessive–compulsive sociopath with homicidal tendencies.”

  “And if you had to describe her personally?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to.” He bit his lips together.

  “She’s your sister-in-law.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on, Mason. Tell me what you think.”

  “I’m not allowed to.”

  “By dictate of your profession or your wife?”

  “Both.” He took in a deep breath. “Just be careful, okay? Shelly has a way of being whatever you need her to be when you need her to be it. She’s like a chameleon and she can fit into any situation, anywhere, anytime. But you should never let your guard down. Never.”

  “Why did you set me up, if you had all these concerns?”

  “I don’t know anyone else who could handle her, honestly. She wants a real life, and she’s never been allowed to have one. She’s had privilege, she’s had heartache, and she’s suffered. She’s never had a chance for a lot of happiness. Hell, I think she’d settle for contentment. I think she might find that in a job. And I don’t know anyone else who might accept all those things that she is and just…let her be her. Maybe even like her. As a friend. Just as a friend,” he rushed to say when I began to protest. “No one else knows everything about her. You’re not going into this blind. You’re aware. And you need help. She can help. Let her give normal a shot, will you?”

  I stood up and smacked my file lightly against my palm. “Thanks for looking at this. I appreciate it.”

  I left without looking back.

  One thing I knew for sure was that Shelly Punter could never be normal. Not in her lifetime. Not in mine. Not ever. She was too far gone. She’d seen too much, done too much, and she had too many scars. They would chafe at her for the rest of her life. Just like mine.

  Chapter 8

  Clark

  “I want you to find my son,” the woman said as she perched on the edge of her chair, directly across from my desk. My desk was clear of papers and clutter, and that alone was distracting. But even worse than that was the lady who wanted me to find her son. He’d escaped from prison two months ago. He’d been on the run ever since.

  “I’m pretty sure that the police are already looking for your son,” I reminded her.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” She gnawed on her lower lip. “My son is innocent,” she rushed to add.

  That’s what they all said. They were innocent, right until the point where someone proved they weren’t.

  “I need for you to find him before they do.”

  “For what purpose?”

  She appeared confused. “Because I love him and want to be sure he’s all right.”

  Of course he wasn’t all right. He was running from the law. “What makes you think he’s innocent?”

  “My son is not a killer.” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He loved that girl. He didn’t do it. He was framed.”

  Of course he was. My temple began to thump, and I knew a headache would be forthcoming, a bigger one than the one that sat across from my desk. I needed some pain relief, and my bottle of anti-inflammatory was in the bathroom cabinet. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” I said absently as I got to my feet. My side still ached from last night, and today had been a royal shit show. This lady wasn’t making it any better.

  “Of course,” she said quietly. She scooted back in her chair so that her arms no longer rested on my desk.

  I got up and went to the bathroom, and then I stopped to splash some water on my face.

  I loved my job, but damn…some days were better than others.

  After I took a couple of pills, I went back out to my office. I stopped short when I saw Shelly sitting in my chair behind my desk. Her elbow rested on my desk, and she frantically scribbled notes on a pad in front of her. As I walked closer, she got to her feet, shook the woman’s hand, and led her with a gentle hand on the woman’s elbow toward the door. She closed it behind the woman and froze when I spoke.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I didn’t pick the lock,” she said, turning to face me. “The door was open.” She glanced down at her watch. “I came during regular business hours.”

  Her blue eyes met mine and my mind went instantly blank. There was nothing in my head aside from the blue of her eyes.

  “Clark?” she prompted. She tilted her head to the side. “Are you all right?”

  I gave up and sat down, then lowered my head so that each temple rested on each of my palms. I said nothing and just took a few deep breaths.

  “Clark?” she said again.

  Finally, I let my arms drop and lifted my head. “Yes, Shelly.”

  “Are you all right?” She stepped closer toward me. She was wearing those ridiculous high heels, a pencil skirt, and a button-down blouse that was almost the same color as her light-pink lips.

  I heaved a sigh. “I’m fine.”

  “Headache?” she asked.

  Yes, one that was about five-six, blond hair, and bright blue eyes. “I’m fine.”

  “Did you take something?”

  “Yes.” I looked down at the notes that Shelly had scribbled.

  She’s a fucking liar.

  Her son is guilty.

  He killed her and tossed her body into the dumpster like garbage.

  He’s garbage, and someone should find him, choke him to death, and dump his body in the same fucking dumpster.

  “Did she tell you all this?” I asked.

  She rocked her head from side to side. “More or less.”

  “What exactly did she tell you?”

  “Oh,” she chirped as she crossed the room and set her purse on the floor by my desk, “she told me that he’s a good boy, that he’s never been in any trouble, except for that one time another girl he was dating disappeared. The mother told me that the son was with her the night that girl had been killed.”

  Shelly lifted her slim arms, rolled her hair into a bun, leaned over my desk, opened my drawer, and retrieved a pencil. She stuck it into the bun. Then she leaned back over the desk and shut my drawer. And I could see down her shirt all the while. Jesus. I was in trouble.

  “In other words,” she said, “she fucking lied through her teeth. He’s guilty. She’s guilty for wanting to protect him. And there’s more than one dead girl out there. There will be more unless someone catches him.”

  “What makes you feel this way?”

  “I have an excellent bullshit meter.” She shrugged. She walked into the kitchenette and busied herself doing something. A few minutes later, she came back with a cup of coffee. “Black,” she said, as she set it in
front of me.

  I stared down at it. “No thank you.”

  “Caffeine helps when you have a bad headache.”

  “No thank you,” I said again.

  “Fine,” she said. “Be stubborn.”

  “Hello pot. Meet kettle,” I muttered. “What are you doing here?”

  She rolled her eyes, and it would have been adorable if it hadn’t been so damn aggravating. “Working,” she sang out. “You should get me a key so I won’t have to break in again.”

  “I had the locks changed.”

  She snorted. “I’ve never met a lock I couldn’t pick.” Then she got up, took a small kit out of her purse, turned the lock on the door, stepped through it and closed it behind her. The handle jiggled as she tested the knob from the other side.

  Twenty seconds later, the door snicked open.

  “That one was much more difficult than the last one.” She blew a lock of hair from her eyes and sat down. Then she put her lock picking kit in her bag, pulled a laptop out of it, and opened it on the other end of my desk. She logged in, clicked a few keys, and then she reached over and took the legal pad from in front of me. She looked at it for a moment, and then she set it down, and started doing whatever the fuck Shelly wanted to do. Suddenly, she looked up at me. “Would you rather I go in the reception area?” she asked.

  “Certainly not,” I said, my voice cold. “Take up my whole desk, doing whatever it is you’re doing.” I propped my head in my hand and watched her work. She really was rather striking. She was beautiful in a Katharine Hepburn kind of way, a classic beauty that was startling in its intensity. Her clothes were perfect, and she wore a thin strand of pearls around her neck.

  I finally gave up on watching her and started to read my emails.

  She made clucking noises with her tongue while she worked, but it wasn’t otherwise irritating. I did drink the coffee she’d brought and the vise squeezing my head did begin to ease.

  Suddenly, she shifted her laptop over and motioned for me to pass her the legal pad. I slid it across the desk.

  She jotted down several lines of text, and then she slid it back to me.

  “Rachel Marie Munson?” I read aloud.

  “The other woman he killed. Although technically she wasn’t a woman then. She was seventeen when she went missing. No one ever suspected him.”

  I sat back and steepled my fingers in front of me. “And how did you come to this conclusion?”

  “His mother told me the girl’s name. Well, her first name. I had to figure out the rest. This was the girl he couldn’t have killed. But I had this feeling. So I went to various social media sites, looked at his friend list, and all his friends’ friend lists, until I found her. She’s missing. Has been missing for years.” She picked at her nails like she was bored.

  I looked back down at the paper. “And this address?”

  “That’s probably where he is.” She crossed her legs and began to wiggle her foot.

  “And how did you come up with this location?”

  “Tax records for his friends.” She rolled her eyes. “His best friend’s uncle’s father has a cabin in the woods of Montana, very rural area. I doubt anyone even knows he’s there.” She tilted her head to the side. “Do you want to call the police? Or do you want me to?”

  “You know I can’t call the police with circumstantial evidence.”

  “It’s not circumstantial. It’s just evidence.” She heaved in a breath and moved her mouth like she was praying for patience. Then she opened her eyes and stared into mine. “I might have logged into the friend’s uncle’s account at the power company. Someone is there, and he has been there for the past two months. Before that time, there was minimal power usage. Now, there’s power consumption going on.”

  “How did you log into his account?” My head spun. Maybe my headache was worse than I’d thought and I was hallucinating.

  “I wrote some code,” she said with a breezy wave.

  “You…wrote some code?”

  “It was nothing.”

  “It was illegal.”

  She jumped to her feet. “Do you want more coffee?”

  “I can get my own coffee.”

  “So…is there anything you want me to work on? Anything specific?” She looked around the room. “If not, I can work on your invoicing.”

  “My invoices are on my computer. They’re private.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly. Then she winced. “So last night, I sort of, kind of, maybe just a little bit might have hacked into your computer so I could compare your paper invoices with your computer invoices. Then I transferred your files to my computer, just to make things easier.” She held the wince on her face.

  I jumped to my feet. “You did what?” I slammed my palms down on the desk in front of her.

  She stood up opposite me and took a similar pose. “You can say thank you now,” she spat out. We stood nose to nose and I realized her mouth smelled like cherry lip balm. I looked down at her lips.

  “Don’t do that,” she said quietly.

  “Don’t do what?” I whispered back.

  “Don’t think about kissing me.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about kissing you.”

  “Yes you were.”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “Puhleeze,” she said as she straightened up and put her hands on her slim hips. “You were totally thinking about what my lip gloss would taste like.”

  Fuck me. She was right. “Why do you do that?”

  “I like the truth.”

  “No, why do you say everything that comes into your head?”

  Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You distract people by delivering the truth. You notice things that will throw them off balance.”

  “I do?” She stared at me, her blue eyes soft and yielding for the first time ever.

  “You do.”

  “I throw you off balance?”

  “Very much so.”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  Then she picked up her computer, reached into my desk drawer and removed a file labeled “invoices.” Then she went to the desk in the reception area. I assumed she was going to work, even though I wasn’t paying her, and I didn’t want her here.

  She leaned around the corner of the doorway. “Do you want me to call the building maintenance people to get them to try a new lock?” She didn’t even smile when she asked the question.

  “No thank you,” I replied.

  She shut the door between me and her, and for the first time since she’d arrived, I was finally able to take a deep breath.

  Chapter 9

  Clark

  Two days later, when Mason Peterson showed up at my office, I should have known something was up. He came in and walked straight to my desk.

  “Dude, you need a receptionist,” he said. He jerked his thumb toward the outer office area.

  “Apparently, my receptionist only works nights,” I said absently.

  He laid his palm on the back of the chair across from my desk. “May I sit?” he asked.

  I closed the file in front of me. “Is this about the vigilante killer?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. It’s about Shelly.”

  “What about her?”

  He glared at me. “Are you going to keep her?”

  He spoke of her like she was a stray puppy that no one really wanted. “I wasn’t aware that I had her to begin with.”

  “Oh, you have her. She called Lynn this morning gushing about the case you solved a couple of days ago. She was really proud of you.”

  “What case?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “It was on the news this morning. The cops in another state found a fugitive from here. You called in the tip…” Suddenly he winced. “Jesus,” he muttered, as he rubbed his temple. “Shelly strikes again,” he sang out.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “At her apartment, I’d assume.”
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  I jumped up and rushed across the room, sliding into my jacket as I went. “Where is her apartment?”

  Mason stood up too. “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tell her thank you, of course.”

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “No, I’m a really good liar. What’s her address?”

  He pulled out his phone and started to dial. “I’ll just need to ask her if it’s okay to give you her address.”

  “Never mind,” I muttered as I breezed past him. As long as she hadn’t moved, I knew where she lived.

  He yelled my name and sprinted to catch up with me. “What are you doing to do?” he asked.

  I was going to get rid of Shelly Punter. That’s what I was going to do.

  He followed me all the way to street level where I’d left my car. “Are you really mad at her?” he asked, cutting his eyes toward me in the elevator.

  I said nothing.

  Hell yes, I was mad. With one misplaced word, she could ruin my reputation, my business, and my life.

  I got in my car and slammed the door. I saw Mason pull his phone from his pocket as I pulled away, but I really didn’t care if he warned her. She was going to see me. We were going to finish this. Shelly Punter could not enter my life and then whirl around like the tornado she was, ruining everything in her path.

  I stopped in front of her apartment building and pushed buttons until someone buzzed me in. Then I took the stairs up three flights and stopped at her door. I didn’t even wait to catch my breath. I knocked. Hard. So hard that my knuckles throbbed.

  No one answered. I knocked again.

  The lock slid free on the other side of the door, the scraping sound of it doing nothing to calm my nerves. The door opened, just a crack. I leaned forward to look inside. I saw no one, so I laid my palm on the door and slowly pushed it open. “Shelly,” I called out.

  I didn’t step inside. At least not yet.

  The first thing that hit me was the slight scent of perfume. It smelled like Shelly, like cherry lip balm and freshness. The next thing I noticed was how tidy her apartment was. The last time I’d been here, the white tile floor had been covered in Mason’s blood and Shelly had been confessing her desire to kill him as Lynn sat, stunned, on the floor next to her.