Reclaim: A Recovered Innocence Novel (11 page)

“He certainly fits the description,” I tell Lila. “But then the description is vague enough to fit my cousin Joe, my friend Dominic, and half the guys I went to school with. If
my
eyes were blue it would describe me.”

“Yes, but remember the tattoos? She said he had one on his chest and another on his left calf. She described them in detail.”

“Gotcha. I bet if I surfed the Web long enough I could maybe find a photo of our friend the DA here on the Internet with shorts on and no shirt. He might not have posted a pic of himself, but maybe a friend or relative did.” I give Lila her chair back, dropping a kiss on her forehead. “Keep going through the stuff you found on Martin’s computer. See if anything else weird pops up while I work on this. Good catch, by the way.”

“I’m going to go through the rest of this with a fine-tooth comb, but you might want to check for any more hidden files when I’m done just in case.”

“Download everything onto that computer then give me the thumb drive and I’ll go through it on this one.”

“You got it.”

I get to work scouring the Interwebs for photos of the DA, using variations on his name, his wife’s name, and their kids’ names. Someone really needs to talk to the DA’s teenagers about setting social media accounts to private. The stuff they post is shocking and I work for an online porn company. Don’t they know that the Internet is forever?

It doesn’t take long before I come across vacation photos from the Billitses’ trip to Cancún three summers ago. There’s a shot of him playing volleyball with his sons and daughter, but he’s wearing a tank top and the shots are mostly from the waist up. I scroll through until I find a shot of him kissing his wife on a lounge chair. They’re both lying on their stomachs, but Billits’s left calf is just visible in the side shot. And there, right where Carla described it, is a tattoo of a jagged knife with a banner wrapped around it three times. There’s some wording that if I just…There.
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.

I’m shaking as I take a screen shot, documenting where the image came from. I glance over at Lila. She’s concentrating on the screen in front of her. I’m almost afraid to go on with my search. We just inadvertently stepped in a big, giant pile of shit. If this is the guy…A part of me doesn’t want to believe it’s him. Especially after going through all the pictures of Billits and his happy, happy family.

I force myself to close the photo and continue the search. And it’s there on Billits’s sister-in-law’s Facebook page that I find a photo of him at a pool party. He’s smiling and holding a beer, his arm slung around his oldest son’s shoulders. And right across his left pec—over his heart—is the word
SACRIFICE
in bold letters.

Cold splashes over me. This is our guy. This is the guy who paid to have sex with Carla. This is the guy who likely fixed it so she’d be convicted for murder. This is the guy we’re up against. I have a feeling once he finds out what we’re doing and that we’re onto him, this investigation is going to take a turn that could be disastrous for us all, but Lila in particular. In her line of work she’s going to come up against this guy and his office in defense of her clients. He’s bound to have friends in high places, friends like judges who would see no problem implementing the good-old-boy network to squash a no-name bug like Lila. I bet when she took on this case she had no idea it could jeopardize everything she’s worked so hard for.

I screen-shot the photo and bring up the other pic so that they’re side by side. There’s no doubt this is the man Carla described. We’d have to show her the photos to be sure. I take a moment to find photos of men about the DA’s age and coloring and save those as well, putting together a photo array that Lila can show Carla. I then crop the tattoos from copied screen shots and print those all out too.

Now I have to break the news to Lila. She looks so calm reading through the files from Martin’s computer. I’m sorry I opened my mouth earlier about my doubts. I shouldn’t have said that stuff to her. It’s not her fault I’m an insecure jackass. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on between us other than we both want it to continue. Right now that will have to be enough and I’ll have to bite down on my tongue to keep from saying something stupid again and screwing it up.

I can’t even manage to not fuck up the best sex of my life. You’d think that would be a no-brainer, but apparently not for me. I need to stop questioning her motives for wanting to continue this thing between us and just enjoy it for however long it lasts. Speaking of…

I sneak out of the office, grab the two extra cameras out of the hall closet, and go into my bedroom. Where to put them? Glancing around the room, I calculate the best angles. If I had more I’d set them all up. I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to this. Voyeurism has never been my thing. Working for the sex websites is the perfect side job for me because I’m not tempted to sample the merchandise. But this is different. This is Lila. And watching Lila come is almost—okay, not even close to being—as good as it was when I was inside her as she came. An experience I very much want to have again.

If I don’t manage to fuck it up.

The cameras are a quick install since there’s no need to hide them. I set them to activate with motion and head back to the office, where I find Lila leafing through the photos I printed.

She looks up at me with wide, dark eyes. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah, damn.
Damn it.
I have to report this.”

“To who?”

“The police.”

“What exactly are you going to report? What’s the crime besides prostitution, which will only come back on Carla?”

She looks down at the pictures. “I
will
have to report it. If we can definitively connect the DA to Martin and show that he influenced Carla’s defense.”

“What would happen to him? Realistically?”

“Realistically? Probably not much—sanctions, maybe ejection from the California Bar Association—unless we can prove he had something to do with Martin’s disappearance.”

“Martin could’ve disappeared himself. People do it all the time. He had a lot of secrets, a wife who was spying on him and took whatever was in the box he was hiding, money coming from who knows where, and he was a public defender who was in the pocket of the DA. He had a truckload of reasons to vanish. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on an island somewhere telling barely legal women how to touch themselves while he jacks off.”

“If you were to disappear, how would you do it?”

“Some might start with a new identity, but that’s too obvious and not as easy as it sounds. Although with Martin’s occupation he probably came across a lot of people who could help him in that regard. Establishing himself with a new identity wouldn’t be easy. He could get a bank account, but wouldn’t have a credit history to rent an apartment or set up utilities or buy a car.”

“Then he has to be using a different identity.”

“Not necessarily.” I lean against the doorframe, cross my arms and rub my chin, really getting into this. “He’d need access to his money. Unless he set up a new identity before he tapped into whatever it was that was funding his porn habit—and the fact that he had a bank account in his own name proves he didn’t think that far ahead—he’d have needed his ID to get his money out of the account.

“I think…Of
course.
” I come off the doorframe and go to the computer Lila was working on. “I want to see his bank statements again.” I pull them up and scroll through, looking for the one weird charge. “There.” I point it out on the screen. “Goddamn, this guy is an idiot.” I jump back over to my computer.

“What? What is it?”

“The only out-of-place charge on the account.”

“A bookstore? He could’ve bought anything there.”

“Maybe. But here’s the thing, Martin’s not smart enough to have disappeared on his own. He had help. The trails he left all over the place prove that.”

“What kind of help?”

I do some not-exactly-legal maneuvering on the Internet and hack into Martin’s online account with the bookstore. And there in his order history is the help Martin got—
How to Vanish Without a Trace for Numskulls.

“Idiot,” I say out loud. “He violated the first rule of
How to Vanish Without a Trace for Numskulls
—buy the book with cash.”

“You’re kidding me. There’s a Numskull book for how to disappear?”

“There’s a Numskull book for just about everything, including how to give a woman an orgasm. Which I’ve read by the way.”

“Clearly. So you think Martin used the book to disappear?”

“Yeah. I think that’s exactly what he did. The only other option is that he’s dead.”

“But we’d know if he was dead. There’d be a death certificate and the police—” She gasps. “You mean
murdered.
”

“That’s a possibility, but it’s a distant second. The police haven’t come across anything so far that leads to his having been murdered. Hang on. I’ll be right back.” I go out to the living room, pull my copy of
How to Vanish Without a Trace for Numskulls,
and bring it back with me to the office.

I flip through the book to a section I’d highlighted. “Here.” I tap the page. “Disinformation. Leaving behind a trail so wide and tangled that it would take forever to sort out. That’s why we found the bank statements in his office. He
needed
them to be found. It’s part of his disappearing act. I bet if we pull his credit report we’ll find that he applied for utilities and a place to live in another state. Maybe even a couple of different cities. But none of them will be for where he actually is. Disinformation. It’s brilliant. Except that we have access to the road map he used, which means we know that all the clues he left are really dead ends.”

“So how does that help us find him?”

“We’ll have to hope he slipped up somewhere. I’m betting it’s the online porn sites. That level of addiction will be hard for him to break. He might think he’s clever using different services than he used on that bank account, but I have no doubt he’s regularly visiting those sites. We just have to figure out which one or ones.”

“You said you couldn’t access their billing records.”

“I can’t. It’s on a different server than the cameras. But I can access usernames. Using his bank statements I can try to re-create his pattern—the days and times he’s most likely to be online and for how long. From that I can look at the usernames online during those times. You’d be surprised how many times people use the same username over and over.”

“That sounds tedious.”

“It would be, but I think I have a program I can adapt and run to help me find him.”

She sighs. “Well, at least I now know why Martin didn’t file the motion to dismiss the charges. The DA stopped it. But how?”

“The money. I bet if we dig around enough we’ll find that Billits funded—either purposefully or accidentally—Martin’s disappearance.”

“That makes sense. No one would think to look for a tie between the two of them. After all, what could they have in common? Martin disappears and no one’s the wiser to their plot. Carla’s in prison. She didn’t say anything about their possible connection during her trial and, by nature, she’s not someone who would rock their carefully crafted boat. She was the perfect victim. They both got something out of her conviction: Billits covered his paying-for-prostitutes tracks—if that was what this is really about—and Martin got his chance to disappear.”

“You bring up good points. What is Billits’s motive for wanting Carla convicted? She’s a poor, illegal immigrant prostitute. How could she possibly hurt him? Anyone would believe him over her. He exposed himself to her by walking into that meeting between her and Martin. Why? All he had to do was not open that door. I can’t believe it was an accident unless Martin set him up. That I could believe. Maybe that was how the extortion started. And why did Martin want to disappear? There has to be more to it than a nosy wife.”

“Reminds me of that movie
Strangers on a Train.
Two unlikely people meet and plot murder for each other. But in this case it’s a plot to convict a young woman who lost her son.”

I snap my fingers. “That’s it. That’s exactly it. We’ve been trying to figure out the why of Martin going along with Billits and assuming it had to do with money, that Billits paid Martin to throw Carla’s trial. But what if it wasn’t? What if Billits did something for Martin in return and the money has nothing to do with any of this? I bet if we track down the source of the money it won’t have come from Billits.”

“I see where you’re going, and it makes a lot more sense than trying to make it all about the money. The question then is, What did Billits do for Martin and how do we figure out what it is?”

“We need to dig deeper into both Martin’s and Billits’s backgrounds. There’s a connection there. I can feel it.”

“Let me see what I can find out from the legal side of their lives. I can discreetly inquire about them from friends and from a couple of courthouse clerks I know and trust. They know all the good dirt on the attorneys—who’s sleeping with who, who’s having an affair, who has a gambling problem, and so on. It’s a regular hive of gossip and intrigue.”

“Be careful,” I tell her. “Billits went through a lot of trouble to get Carla convicted. He’s hiding something there. Something worth potentially destroying his career over. In fact, if you can keep it quiet that we’re working on Carla’s case that will give us more room to move around. I don’t want him tipped off before we have what we need on him.”

“I’ll talk to the director of the Freedom Project about not putting Carla’s case up on the website. Everyone in the office already knows I’m working the case though. There’s no way to contain that without tipping our hand.”

“Good point. Maybe we should engage in some disinformation of our own in that regard.”

“I like the way you think.” She smiles really big and something sharp and pointy stabs me in the chest. This woman is going to twist me up. I can already tell. And I’m going to like it.