The Other Daniel - A Camille Grisham Novella (5 page)

If Crawley had made the long trip here
unannounced, it meant that the situation with the copycat was worse
than Camille realized. It also meant that she would have to look
him in the eye to tell him no when he asked for her help; something
she knew for a fact that she wouldn’t be able to do.

Damn it.

Seeing no need to continue her uphill battle
against the inevitable, Camille quickly made her way up the
driveway and into her father’s open front door, not giving herself
any time to think about what she would say to Crawley or what he
would say to her.

“Just go in there, accept your Bureau
visitor’s badge, and get it all over with,” she muttered to
herself, her quiet tone laced with resignation.

She knocked on the screen door as she walked
through it. “I’m here dad,” she announced before she saw anyone. “I
would have been here sooner but I had an unfortunate run-in with…”
She froze at the sight of the woman sitting on the couch. “Oh,
hello.”

The woman’s heavy eyes lit up as she stood.
“Hello.”

Camille looked at her father, suddenly
confused. “Hey dad.”

“Hi Camille,” Paul Grisham said, rising to
his feet. He looked flustered.

“Your phone call sounded urgent. What’s
going on?”

Her eyes drifted back to the woman. The
tall, slender brunette was dressed in a beige Anne Klein business
suit. Camille had the same suit hanging in her closet; a holdover
from her Bureau days. But this woman wore it much better. A
matching clutch was tucked tightly under her arm, as if she was
wary of putting it down. Were it not for the purse, Camille would
have immediately tagged her as FBI. But the designer accessory,
along with her nervous demeanor, made it clear that she was
something else.

Paul approached his daughter while the woman
stood frozen. His six-foot-three-inch frame momentarily blocked her
from Camille’s view.

He gave her a light hug. “Thanks for coming
so quickly.”

“Based on your tone I knew I didn’t have
much of a choice.” She looked past her father to the woman, who was
holding her purse even tighter now.”

“I suppose an introduction is in order,”
Paul said as he stepped aside. “Camille, this is Meredith Park. Ms.
Park, this is my daughter Camille.”

Despite her obvious nerves, Meredith was
quick to extend her hand. “Hello.”

“Hello, Meredith. I understand you’re here
to see me.” Camille’s handshake was cautious.

“I am.”

“Ms. Park arrived this morning from New
York,” Paul added.

“Do we know each other?” Camille asked with
genuine confusion.

“We’ve never met before. But you may have
met someone close to me. He’s the reason I’m here.”

“Go on.”

Meredith opened her purse
with unsteady hands. “As your father said, I’m from New York City.
I run a boutique literary agency out there.” She gave Camille a
business card for
Park and White
LLC
.

A literary agency. The finely embossed card
stock suddenly felt like a fifty-pound weight in Camille’s hand.
She handed it back without saying a word.

Meredith took the cue to continue. “I
represent a true-crime author named Jacob Deaver. He is in the
process of writing a book and he may have attempted to contact you
about it.”

Camille’s expression darkened. “So I have
you to blame for that.”

Meredith seemed genuinely caught off guard
by the sharp reply. “You talked to him?”

“Yes I did. No less than twenty minutes
ago.”

A wave of relief washed over Meredith’s
porcelain face. “Oh thank God.”

“It’s nice to know that you’re so excited
about it. But I should inform you that I almost called the police
on him.”

“What?”

“What do you mean you almost called the
police?” Paul said in the pit-bull tone that Camille had come to
know all-too-well.

“He’s been following me.”

Meredith shut her eyes as if she were
struggling to process Camille’s words. “For how long?”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that this
morning I went to a coffee shop two blocks from my apartment and
from out of nowhere he approaches my table trying to pitch his book
idea. I politely declined the offer and left. Then I get the call
from my dad telling me to come over, and guess who I run into
outside my apartment building?”

Meredith’s breath caught. “It just doesn’t
sound like him to be that aggressive.”

“Trust me, he’s that aggressive.”

“What did he do?” Paul asked. His tone made
Camille grateful that Jacob was nowhere in the vicinity.

“The same thing he did in the coffee shop.
Only this time he wasn’t so quick to take no for an answer.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“No dad, it wasn’t anything like that.” She
turned to Meredith. “But you need to know that your client is a
certified creep.”

“I don’t know what to say about that. I’ve
never known him to be that way.” She paused to blow out a deep
breath. “I’m just happy to know that you’ve seen him.”

Camille’s eyes narrowed. “After hearing
everything I just told you, how could you possibly be happy?”

Meredith waited a long beat before
answering. “Because he’s been missing for almost three weeks.”

Unsure that she heard the words correctly,
Camille turned to her father for clarification.

“That’s why she’s here,” he concurred.

Camille felt something tighten in her chest;
the instinct that she had felt before but suddenly wanted to
ignore. “The Jacob Deaver I saw looked pretty damn alive and well,
so maybe you should explain what you mean by missing.”

Meredith looked at Paul. “Do you mind if I
sit?”

“Absolutely,” Paul replied as he pointed her
to the couch. Camille sat down next to her.

“Jacob has been working on a book about
Daniel Sykes for the past few months. He-”

“Wait,” Camille
interrupted. “
Jacob
is the one working on the Sykes biography?”

Meredith eyed her quizzically. “Yes. If you
met with him I figured you would have known that.”

“He told me that someone else was writing
the Sykes book.”

“Someone else? Who?”

“He didn’t offer a name. He only said it was
a friend.”

“Well that’s certainly news to me.”

“And is it also news to you that the book is
scheduled to be released in the next few months? Because your guy
seemed pretty confident that it would be.”

“I can assure you that isn’t true.”

Camille let out an exasperated sigh. “And
Jacob’s author friend?”

“As far as I know he doesn’t exist. Not as
Sykes’ biographer anyway.”

“So he was lying to me the entire time.”

“I’m really confused,” Meredith confessed.
“The entire purpose of him coming out here was to tell you about
his work on Sykes’ book and to ask you to be a part of it. Why
would he claim that someone else was writing it?”

“I don’t have an answer for that. All he
said was that the book was going to be filled with inflammatory
information about myself and the FBI and he wanted to write a book
about me as a means of counteracting that. It all sounded perfectly
noble. Unfortunately I had a difficult time believing it. Now I
know I had good reason.”

“It just doesn’t sound right. None of it
does.”

Camille noted the hint of panic that came
across Meredith’s face as she rose from the couch and began pacing
the room.

“Why don’t we go back to what it was that
brought you here?”

Meredith stopped pacing long enough to
collect her thoughts. “The last time I spoke to Jacob was the day
after he arrived here. That was nineteen days ago. He told me that
he had conducted a couple of internet searches and came up with
this address as your last known residence.”

“A couple of internet searches?” a wide-eyed
Paul cut in. “Please tell me it’s not that easy for a stranger to
find out where I live.”

“I’m sorry to tell you dad, but it’s that
easy,” Camille replied.

Meredith continued. “He said that he had
seen you and your father loading some moving boxes into your car.
He was going to approach you then but he didn’t feel it was the
right time. He said he would wait a day or so and get back to me
with an update. That was the last time I heard from him. I must
have called his cell phone fifty times since. He never answered.
When I called the hotel he was staying in, the clerk told me he had
checked out after one night. He isn’t married, he doesn’t have a
girlfriend that I’m aware of, and I didn’t have any family
contacts. So all I could do was sit on my hands and wait to hear
something.”

“You didn’t think to call the police?”
Camille asked.

“I called them, along with practically every
hospital in the state. There was no sign of him and the police told
me that without any evidence that he had been here beyond his one
night stay at the hotel, there wasn’t anything they could do.”

“So after not hearing from him for nearly
three weeks, what made you come out here now?”

Meredith took a labored breath as she
reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. After
scrolling through it for a moment, she handed it to Camille.
“Because last night I received this.”

Camille took the phone.
The email message on the screen had been composed yesterday
afternoon at 2:42 P.M. The subject line consisted of only two
words:
Camille Grisham
. The body of the message consisted of three short
sentences:

Meeting at Grisham residence tomorrow at
10:30 A.M. Closing the deal. Need you there.

“Jacob wrote this?” Camille asked as she
continued studying the perplexing message.

“Apparently so,” Meredith answered without
much confidence. “I don’t recognize the email address, but most
people I know have more than one.”

“Did you write back?”

“Several times. No response. Then I tried
his cell phone.”

“And?”

“Disconnected.”

Perhaps that explained why Jacob offered the
number to his hotel instead of a personal one. The tightness in
Camille’s chest returned. “You realize there was no meeting
scheduled here today, right?”

“I realized that before I left New
York.”

“So why do you think he sent this?”

Meredith let out a nervous chuckle. “Since
you were apparently the last person to talk to him, I’m hoping you
can tell me.”

“I don’t know much beyond what I’ve already
told you. Before we ended our first meeting he told me he was
staying at the Brown Palace and tried to give me the phone number
to his hotel room in the event I wanted to discuss his proposal
further. But I didn’t take it.”

“The Brown Palace?” Meredith said with mild
surprise. “As far as I knew he had been booked at a Doubletree near
the airport.”

“I’d call that a fairly significant
upgrade,” Paul chimed in with a light smirk.

“Considering his fledgling author status,
I’d say the same thing,” Meredith added.

“So you don’t hear from Jacob for the better
part of three weeks, then out of the blue you receive this cryptic
message telling you to fly out here to meet him.”

“On the same day he approaches you for the
first time,” Paul said to Camille. “That obviously isn’t
coincidental.”

“Then what is it?” a visibly concerned
Meredith asked.

Camille hesitated before answering. The
tightness in her chest, the intuition, told her exactly what she
needed to say, but she knew how dire the consequences would be once
she said it. She had only known Meredith Park for a short time, but
she wanted nothing more than to spare her the pain that she knew
was an inevitable consequence of a truth only she was willing to
give voice to. But there could be no hesitation. Just like there
would be no sparing of pain.

“Do you happen to have a picture of
Jacob?”

Meredith once again reached inside her
purse. “I brought one in the event I would have to show it to the
police.” She handed over the wallet-sized photo.

As Camille stared at the bright, smiling
face of a man whom she had never seen before, the tightness in her
chest began to subside. In its place came a surge of adrenaline
that both fueled and frightened her. “We have to go to the Brown
Palace. Right now.”

“Why? What’s the matter?” Meredith asked in
a voice that was riddled with shock.

“We have to find Jacob Deaver. And the man I
met this morning might be the only person alive who knows where he
is.”

CHAPTER FIVE

DELIVERY

After an intense round of
negotiations that bordered
on hostile,
Paul reluctantly agreed to remain on standby at the house while
Camille and Meredith made the drive to the Brown Palace. He
imagined the trip would be made in record time, given the HEMI V8
engine that powered Camille’s car and her penchant for using that
engine to exceed every posted speed limit that she came
across.

This would mark the second time in four
months that he waited behind while she made a dangerous trip. The
first instance resulted in her being shot. Though the circumstances
of this instance appeared to be very different from that one, the
sense of dread that coursed through his veins was just as
potent.

Unlike last time when he was completely
powerless to help, Paul made sure this time that he was prepared
should his services be required. The twenty-six-year DPD veteran
knew a thing or two about running backup and had all of the
required tools at the ready, from the address of the Brown Palace
Hotel, to Meredith Park’s cell phone number, to the signal of the
GPS tracker that he had installed on Camille’s cell phone before
she moved out of the house. The moral implications of secretly
installing such a tracker on his adult daughter’s cell phone were
not lost on him, and he long ago resolved to access it only in an
emergency situation. As far as this protective father was
concerned, every moment she was outside his immediate field of
vision qualified as an emergency situation, but he had yet to give
in to the instinct to turn it on. Someday he would feel comfortable
enough to deactivate the tracker altogether.