3 The Chain of Lies (3 page)

While she was driving, her phone began to ring, and she dug it out of her oversized leather handbag that lay on the passenger seat, noticing it was one of her friends. “Hey, Maggie.”

“Just checkin’ in,” Maggie said. “Don’t forget to pick Molly and me up at noon at Camille’s place.”

Emily had promised to take Maggie and Molly, Camille’s teenage daughter, to the airport to catch a flight for their trip to Hawaii. Maggie had invited Emily to go with her, but Emily was not ready to leave her home exposed to additional break-ins and searches, especially when she was uncovering more and more clues to her late husband’s true identity. So instead, Maggie invited seventeen-year-old Molly, the only other single female she was close to, as an early graduation gift.

What a pair they would make on the beaches of Hawaii, Emily thought. Maggie was a beauty—a southern-belle fitness queen, lightly tanned with flowing blonde waves and dazzling blue eyes. Even in her mid-thirties, she would do her bikini justice. Molly, on the other hand, was a pretty girl, tall and slender with fair skin, long red hair, and shockingly deep emerald-green eyes. The red hair had come from her mother and the green eyes courtesy of her father, but the I-take-no-crap-from-anyone attitude was all her own.

“I didn’t forget. I’ll be there at noon.”

“Did y’all get Colin off to California this mornin’?” Maggie asked.

“I did. We went out for breakfast first, then I sent him on his way.”

Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to spill the beans about the storage unit yet. There was plenty of time to do that later if it came to anything.

“And did he say those three little words y’all’ve been waitin’ for?”

Emily could hear the curiosity in Maggie’s voice and knew her well enough to know it was killing her to find out. “As a matter of fact, he did.”

“Yay!” Maggie squealed. “I’m so happy for y’all, Em. I just knew it. I told Camille he’d say those little gems before he left.”

“Actually, he told me last night at the going-away party. He promised he’d move heaven and earth to come back to me.”

“Oh, how romantic,” Maggie gushed. “Words like that make my heart melt. No one deserves to be happy more than y’all, after all y’all have been through.”

Emily swore she could hear a quiver of sadness in Maggie’s voice. As sweet and lovely as Maggie was, she had terrible luck with men—one loser after another. Emily hoped Maggie’s luck would change soon—for the better. “So do you, Maggs.”

“I’d better let y’all off the phone and finish packin’, or I won’t be nearly ready when it’s time to come and pick us up.”

CHAPTER 2

“Let’s see…four fifteen, four sixteen, four seventeen,” Emily muttered as she read the numbers on the door to each of the outdoor storage lockers. “Here it is, four eighteen.”

Nervously anticipating what might be behind it, she stood for a moment, staring at the door. Then with a held breath, she shoved the brass key into the padlock and exhaled loudly when it fit perfectly.

She twisted the key and the lock slipped a bit as it released. A wave of excitement poured through her as she unhooked the lock from the metal loop and swung the door open.

Exposed before her was a small storage area, maybe five feet wide and twelve feet deep. She had brought a six-inch pocket flashlight, suspecting there may be no lights. It proved useful toward the back of the unit, because the bright sunshine only illuminated the space closest to the entrance.

Emily stepped in and flashed the narrow beam around. Along one wall were several steel shelving units, three shelves high, each one holding white cardboard banker boxes. She stared at the boxes. What could Evan possibly have been hiding in them?

Several months ago, when she discovered the first clue that he was not who he said he was, she had been devastated. They had been married for five years and she’d thought they were blissfully happy. But months after his death, she began to uncover evidence that he was someone else entirely. Rather than a private investigator, she had eventually learned that he was a CIA operative with a vast array of secrets.

After many tears, and sleepless nights, she had finally gotten control of her emotions and accepted that his lies were to protect her. With Colin’s help, and the aid of her close friends, she was able to move on from her grief, but the mystery of who killed her husband still hung over her. Emily would never be able to completely close the door on that chapter of her life, and fully commit herself to a new relationship, until the mystery of Evan’s murder was solved.

With the flashlight poised in one hand, she pulled the snugly fitting lid off one of the boxes with the other, causing a faint cloud of dust to waft up. She batted at the air to clear the dust and peeked into the box.

Fingering through the old files and papers, she hoped she wouldn’t have to rummage through every single document in each and every box before she would discover anything of value—fortunately, there were only seven of them.

Emily wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find in this storage place, but a bunch of boring-looking file boxes was definitely not it. Unlike Evan’s secret safe deposit box that was filled with fake passports and bundles of cash, along with a suspicious gun, these boxes only seemed to contain files, papers, and old photos.

No matter what lay in the boxes, though, they had to contain something Evan didn’t want anyone else to see. So, for the next two hours, she searched through the boxes, folder by folder, page by page.

Most of the documents looked like photocopies, as if Evan had copied them to keep a set of his own files on his CIA assignments. She wondered why he felt he needed protection—or was he searching for proof of something? Documentation to back up his actions, maybe?

Along with the copied documents, there were photos of locations and people, as if he had snapped the candid shots as his target was meeting with someone, or clandestine pictures showing what his mark was up to.

Emily searched for more photos of the mysterious brunette—the one standing with Evan in the single snapshot kept hidden in his safe deposit box—but she found none. Her identity had plagued Emily since the first time she’d discovered the picture of this woman snuggled in Evan’s arms.

Digging for another picture of her husband with the dark-haired beauty was now more out of curiosity than anything else. After reading the hidden note she had found from Evan, she knew the woman had been a girlfriend, accidentally killed in the crossfire during a shootout in which Evan was involved.

But why did he keep only that photo—the photo of the two of them—hidden in the safe deposit box? Why not here with the others?

After spending a couple of hours methodically pouring over the contents of a few of the boxes, she realized it was time to take Maggie and Molly to the airport. As she was sticking some files back into one of the boxes, a small, black-leather notebook slipped out from between a couple of the folders and smacked onto the cement floor.

“How did I miss that?”

Emily crouched down and picked it up. She flipped through it, recognizing the handwriting as Evan’s. It was an address book with cryptic names and numbers written in it.

She read a few of the names, but then her gaze landed on an entry that said,
Handler, Izzy
, with a phone number. Was Handler someone’s name or was it someone’s position?

Izzy.

Suddenly, she recalled Evan referring to Isabel as
Izzy
. Was Isabel’s maiden name Handler? Or was Evan noting that Izzy was his CIA handler, writing that information in the book as if that was the person’s full name—Izzy Handler—to throw anyone who got possession of this book off the track. Or was it an alias? Or code?

Maybe she should take the boxes back to her house? Then Emily’s breath caught in her throat. The person in the black sedan, possibly a BMW, could very likely be the one who had broken into her home, and maybe they were looking for something in these boxes, like this book.

Giving her head a shake for being temporarily oblivious to the mysterious stalker, Emily peeked out of the storage unit to see if anyone was watching her now. She glanced around but saw no one.

She didn’t have any more time to look through the black book at the moment. Maggie and Molly would be waiting for her. So she tucked the book, and the flashlight, in her purse for later. She’d have to give the
Izzy
question some more thought.

CHAPTER 3

While Maggie and Molly were winging their way to Hawaii, Emily returned to the storage unit, keeping an eye out for any tail. Page by page, she again foraged through each box, reading about her late husband’s exploits as a secret agent at the CIA. Though some of the comments were abbreviated, she found she could decipher most of the text, but she wondered when she kept seeing orders for him to handle someone with extreme prejudice. What exactly did that mean?

He appeared to have been in some very dangerous situations. She didn’t know he could be so bold and cunning, so physically aggressive. The Evan on those pages was not the man she had fallen in love with.

She had grieved for him, mourned the loss of their love and life together, for more than six months when the series of accidental discoveries led her to realize the man she had married was
not
who he said he was. So she really shouldn’t be surprised now. She was grateful, though, that she hadn’t uncovered these things earlier on. It would have been more than she could handle, piled on top of the shock and sorrow of his death.

These discoveries, as painful as they were, forced her to dig down deep and become a stronger woman, which presented her with the opportunity to follow in his footsteps as a private investigator. The things she had learned as she had covertly helped Evan on various cases had given her the skills.

Her thoughts drifted back again to the note he had left for her, folded and concealed in the center of one of the bundles of cash he had secreted away in the safe deposit box. He had to have known she would eventually find his hidden stash, because the note was addressed to her. In it, he explained who he really was and why he did what he did.

Studying the case files, reading about the operations, Evan’s face came to her mind—his sandy blonde hair, his piercing blue eyes, that sexy off-centered smile that she loved so much. Even though that note said his real name was David Gerard, she knew she would always think of him as Evan Parker.

Some of the descriptions of the dangerous secret operations read like something out of a bestselling spy novel. She thought for a split second that maybe she would turn these gripping scenarios into a novel one day, but that made her laugh. She was no writer. If there truly were
grammar police
she surely would be given a citation or two. Better to just continue to solve mysteries rather than write about it.

Poring over the files, minutes quickly turned into hours. Before she knew it, several had passed and she realized it was time to head home. Even though Maggie was gone, the rest of the girls were getting together for their weekly Thursday night girls-only potluck supper, and it was Emily’s turn to host again.

The theme this week was end-of-summer barbecue. Isabel promised to provide barbecued chicken, enlisting Alex and his superior
grilling skills—at least that’s what she had told him to get him to help her. Camille, with her culinary flair, offered to bring scrumptious twice-baked potatoes and a luscious lemon crème cake. Not being known for great cooking, Emily offered to provide a crisp green salad and a fresh loaf of sourdough bread from the local bakery, which happened to be the same contributions she had made to last month’s Italian-themed potluck.

She raced home to her little bungalow, stopping first by the bakery around the corner to buy the bread. Rushing around, setting the table, making a big pitcher of sweet tea, doing a bit of last-minute picking up, she thought of Colin and wondered how far he’d made it by now.

The phone began to jangle in her purse as it sat on the breakfast bar. She raced to grab it and saw it was Colin calling.

“I was just thinking about you.”

“That’s always good to hear.”

His warm and comforting voice brought a smile to her lips.

“Where are you now?” Emily slid onto a bar stool and crossed her legs.

“I just drove through Reno, so I’ve got a few more hours to go. Enough about me, how was your day?”

“I got Maggie and Molly to the airport. They should be landing soon in Hawaii.”

“Lucky dogs.”

She was glad he called, happy to tell him about her day. She
needed
to tell someone. “Oh, by the way, I wanted to let you know that I figured out what that mysterious brass key goes to.

“From the safe deposit box?”

“Good memory.” Emily remembered standing in her walk-in closet the day the whole mystery about Evan came to light. She’d been contemplating packing his clothes away, hoping it might help her move on with her life. As she began taking his folded t-shirts off a shelf, a long silver key fell out from between the shirts and bounced on the floor. Once she’d figured out it was to a safe deposit box, well, her entire history with Evan came into question then.

“How did you find out what the key went to?”