“I have a present for you,” a sultry feline voice said, breaking the early-morning silence.
Elise Carrington looked up from her computer screen and frowned at the petite woman heading across the reception area in her direction. Curly sandy-brown hair with copper highlights flew wildly around her heart-shaped face and bounced against her shoulders with every step she took. Her plump lips were shellacked to perfection with a frosty fuchsia-tinted gloss and curved into a smile wide enough to sink the matching dimples in her cheeks. And the naturally arched brows above her deep-set, amber-colored eyes were poised, as if they expected to take flight at any moment.
Elise was immediately suspicious of the woman’s intentions and slightly amused at the same time. Looking at another person and seeing an exact replica of herself still startled her every now and then, even though she’d been doing it for over thirty years and should’ve long since grown used to it. “Only you could manage to look bright and chipper at seven o’clock in the morning,” she drawled, reaching for a mug of steaming coffee on the tabletop. “The rest of us poor schmucks are still cracking our eyelids open.” She sipped the hot liquid gingerly, taking a moment to appreciate the creamy, caramel-flavored blend as she eyed her identical twin over the rim of the mug. She knew without having to be told that the file folder in her sister’s hand didn’t contain good news. The ones that tended to land in either of their laps these days rarely did. “What’s up?”
“We have a runaway on our hands,” Olivia Carrington said. “Well, I guess I should say you have a runaway on your hands.”
“Excuse me?” Elise watched incredulously as Olivia smoothed her silk tunic over her hips, plopped into one of the upholstered chairs across the table from her and crossed her legs. The blouse’s bright fuchsia color matched Olivia’s lip gloss perfectly, reminding Elise that she hadn’t bothered with anything more than leggings, a tunic-style hoodie and a fresh-scrubbed face this morning.
“I’m in the middle of the Donaldson case,” her sister began, “but since you wrapped up your last case a few days ago, I figured that it was okay to accept a new case for you.”
Elise’s frown deepened. “That’s my present? A new case?”
“Yep,” Olivia chirped, dimpling prettily.
“Seriously. I don’t know why I put up with you.” Unconsciously mimicking her sibling’s pose, Elise sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “It’s not like I don’t have enough paperwork to do before I can finally close the file on my last case. Plus, I was hoping to take a break before I accepted another assignment, maybe sneak off to the Bahamas for a few days with a few of the girls and relax.”
“Okay, first of all, you put up with me because we’re twins. I’m two minutes older than you are, so you have to. Secondly, you don’t have any girls. Plus, I couldn’t have turned this one down if I wanted to and, believe me, I really wanted to. Do you remember Joel Barclay?”
“Sure, I remember Joel.” How could she forget him? He and Olivia had carried on a scorching affair for several months back in high school. Despite the fact that he was twenty at the time, almost twenty-one, and a junior in college, and Olivia was barely seventeen and a high-school senior, what had started out as a carefree summer fling had quickly turned into an intense, nearly year-long relationship. Up to that point, Elise had never known a member of the opposite sex to hold Olivia’s attention for longer than a few weeks at a time, and, as far as she knew, there had only been one or two others who’d managed to accomplish the feat since. It was a toss-up as to which of them—Joel or Elise—was more shocked when Olivia turned down Joel’s marriage proposal and then broke up with him shortly afterward. “How is he?”
“He’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Olivia said, suddenly serious. “His daughter is missing, and we have to find her.”
Surprised for the second time in as many minutes, Elise stared at her sister as she reached across the table for the file folder that Olivia held out to her. Setting her coffee aside, she opened the folder and scanned the 5x7 color photo that was clipped to a thin stack of written notes inside. The teenage girl staring back at her was the spitting image of the Joel she remembered—raven-haired, with classic features and a warm smile. According to the notes in the file, her name was Meagan, she had just turned eighteen a little over a month ago and she’d been missing for nearly twenty-four hours.
“I remember when he got married right after college,” Elise remarked absently as she continued scanning the case notes. “You had the nerve to be upset because you weren’t invited to the wedding, as if you hadn’t just broken the poor guy’s heart ten minutes before he walked down the aisle.”
“It did seem like he got over me rather quickly, now that you mention it.”
Elise’s gaze flickered up to her sister’s briefly and then skated away. No way was she touching that subject. Of the two of them, Olivia, bless her heart, was by far the vainest. As a teenager, Elise had always preferred the company of a good crime-fiction novel and a steaming mug of chamomile tea over that of chattering girls and hormonal boys. But Olivia was the exact opposite. She’d always been smart and had ultimately graduated cum laude from Loyola University, but only after their parents had spent most of their daughters’ adolescent years worrying themselves sick over whether or not Olivia would ever get serious about something other than boys, lip gloss and gossip.
She’d also dated enough for the both of them in high school, which was just fine with Elise, since it had taken most of the pressure of adolescent expectations off her. But Olivia’s tendency to make everything about herself could be a bit much if you didn’t know her well enough to know that her heart was just as big as her head.
“So this is their kid, huh?”
“Their one and only,” Olivia said. “So you can see why I couldn’t say no to the case, but I couldn’t exactly take it on myself, right? It would be...weird.”
“Yes, I can see how it might be.”
It was a high-profile case, one that would definitely get its fifteen minutes worth of fame if the media caught wind of it. After marrying his pregnant rebound girlfriend right out of college, Joel had set his sights on a career in politics and law. He was currently in his first term as a circuit court judge, a seat that he’d just barely won in the last election, thanks to his teenage daughter’s penchant for scandalous public exploits. Add that to the fact that, before he’d become a judge, he was the kind of young brash defense attorney who himself had a tendency to take on the kinds of controversial cases that kept him in the public eye, and the result was a private life that didn’t exactly lend itself to voter sympathy. The last thing he or his wife needed was the kind of publicity that a presumably out-of-control runaway child would attract, especially since his name was now on the short list for appointment to the Illinois Appellate Court. That had to be why he’d bitten the bullet and reached out to Olivia. His was just the kind of case that Carrington Consulting specialized in.
In the three years since Elise and Olivia had grown tired of taking orders from power-hungry men and gone into business for themselves, they’d taken on countless missing persons cases and, at last tally, they were operating at a more than 90 percent success rate. With Elise’s background in law enforcement and Olivia’s forensic experience, if anyone could find Meagan quickly and with a minimum of fuss, they could.
Glancing at her watch, Elise pushed back from the table and got to her feet.