“I know what you’re thinking,” she said softly. “Don’t worry, Liam. I’m not regretting the white dress and the flower girls and the endless family conferences about who gets to sit at which table—”
“Why not?” he asked, sending a silent curse in the direction of his dead father, the most recent in a long and useless line of similar curses. “It’s a huge day in your life and it ought to be as special as you can make it.”
“It will be special.” Megan sounded completely sure of herself. “I’ll be marrying Adam, so it’s bound to be wonderful wherever we have the ceremony.”
The elevator clunked to a stop. Liam got out on his floor, amazed by his sister’s quiet exuberance. “You really love the guy, don’t you?”
“Yes, and fortunately he loves me, too.” She laughed. “That kind of puts the where-shall-we-have-the-ceremony issue into perspective. Before I met Adam, I used to fantasize about the perfect wedding. The only problem was that I had this huge hole where I was supposed to have a mental image of the groom. Now I realize the only thing that matters about a wedding is having the right person as your partner when you make your vows. The bridesmaids, the cake, the fancy dress and all the rest of it are basically irrelevant.”
“Speaking as a divorce lawyer, I can only say that I’m sure you’re right. I wish more people were as smart as my little sister.”
“No, you don’t, or you’d be unemployed!”
Liam laughed but there was a lump in his throat. Since he couldn’t deal with his emotions, today of all days, he spoke with deliberate briskness. “Adam seems like a good guy. Nowhere good enough for you, of course, but almost in the ballpark. Be happy, Meggie.”
“He’s a great guy, and I plan to be.” She broke off. “Oh my gosh, wait! We’re wading so deep into the sentimental stuff that I almost forgot the reason I called you in the first place. It’s about Dad.”
Liam winced, stopping outside the entrance to his offices. “Please don’t tell me Adam has uncovered more financial problems.”
“None that we didn’t know about already, thank goodness. Between the platinum mine in Belize and the disputed wills, I couldn’t take another financial disaster, or more documents to sign and send off to the probate court. No, this is something quite different. Do you remember Tricia Riley? She’s a distant cousin on Dad’s side of the family. Her grandmother and our grandmother were sisters.”
“I have a vague image from Grandma’s funeral.” Liam wrinkled his forehead. “She’s got curly hair a bit like yours, right? She was on the ditzy side, but smart in a geeky sort of way. As I recall, she used to work for a dotcom in Houston. She must be in her fifties by now.”
“Yes, that’s the one. She still does work in Houston, apparently for a company that manufactures household robots. She asked me to call her back when I had time to talk. She claimed she had something important she needed to discuss with me.”
“That sounds ominous. If she’s asking you to invest in her robots, I recommend you ask for a demonstration first.”
“That was precisely my thought, but we’re both offtrack. I called her back this morning and what Tricia had to say turned out to be a lot more worrying than robots designed to scrub the floors. Liam, she told me that she’d seen Dad in a shopping mall in Houston.”
“What? You’re kidding. She’s claiming to have seen Dad recently?”
“She says she saw him last week.”
“Good lord, she must be even more ditzy than she looks. So is she claiming to have seen him for real, in the flesh? Or are we talking visitations by a ghost?”
“Absolutely not ghosts. Tricia says she saw Dad going into Nieman Marcus in Houston. She called his name and hurried to catch up with him, but he ignored her. By the time she got into the store, he’d vanished.”
“Obviously she suffers from an overactive imagination,” Liam said, not sure whether to be irritated by his cousin or to pity her. He never understood why some people felt the need to turn commonplace events into major dramas, with themselves as the stars. “The guy didn’t turn around because he had no idea he was being called. He didn’t respond to somebody calling Ron Raven for the simple reason that wasn’t his name!”
“You’re singing my song. That’s exactly what I suggested to Tricia, but she wasn’t persuaded. She says she’s sure the man she saw was Ron Raven, or else his double. I pointed out that she didn’t know Dad all that well and that she hadn’t seen him in the twelve years since Grandma’s funeral, and she informed me that I was wrong. She’d had dinner with him in San Antonio a couple of months before he died. Apparently they discussed the possibility of Dad investing in her darn robots! She claims that she knows exactly what Dad looked like right before he was murdered and that this man—quote—had Dad’s way of walking.”
“That’s what Tricia’s basing her identification on?” Liam was torn between laughter and exasperation. “The way this man walked? She saw him at a distance, from the side at best and possibly even from behind, and now she’s positive it was Dad?”
“Apparently. That and the fact she insists the man saw her and recognized her. According to Tricia, he dodged into the store in order to avoid her.”
“She’s paranoid. Not to mention delusional.”
“Very possibly. But she’s already called the police in Miami to tell them they’ve made a mistake in assuming that Dad was murdered. Cousin Tricia has informed them he’s alive and they need to refocus their investigation.”
Liam rolled his eyes. “And what did the cops have to say?”
“Nothing that satisfied Tricia.” Megan groaned. “They thanked her for letting them know what she thought she’d seen and said they would investigate her claim as time and manpower permitted. In other words, they totally blew her off.”
“Are you surprised? My sympathies are with the cops on this one. They’d never get any work done on the real cases if they allowed themselves to get distracted by reports like Tricia’s.”
Megan hesitated for a moment. “You don’t think we ought to follow up with a private detective?”
Liam leaned against the wall outside his office, wanting to finish the call before he went inside. “Follow up what? How? There’s nothing to follow up.”
“That’s true, I guess.”
“You sound uncertain.”
“I am. Tricia may be nuts—”
“Tricia is nuts.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that much. But there are problems with the official police account of what happened the night Dad disappeared. The cops in Miami have closed the investigation, except for a half-hearted effort to track down Julio Castellano. But as I already told you, when Adam and I were in Belize, we met Castellano and spent quite a bit of time with him. He swore he wasn’t the killer.”
“I know. And you told me you and Adam are both inclined to believe him.”
“We’d be dead if not for Castellano,” Megan pointed out. “He put himself significantly at risk for our sakes, which makes it hard to see him as a brutal killer. And if he didn’t kill Dad, who did?”
“Well, if Tricia saw him in Houston, apparently nobody! Did she have any suggestions as to why Dad hasn’t let anyone know he’s still alive?”
“She suggested he might have amnesia.”
“If he has amnesia, why would he have run when