The Silent Widow

In Williams’ experience, there were few people more dangerous, or more powerful, than those with nothing left to lose.

By the time he’d finished making his own initial notes, another hour had passed. It was now eleven thirty, almost lunch time, but for once Derek Williams’ stomach wasn’t his number one priority. Running a hand almost lovingly over the manila folder Nikki had handed him earlier, he opened it now for the first time.

He was curious to see which details she had chosen to include in her dossier of ‘facts’ and which she had omitted or edited out. Her honesty about Brandon Grolsch and lying to the police had been disarming. So, on one level, she trusted him. But Derek Williams wasn’t naive enough to believe that any client ever gave him the unadulterated truth. If such a thing even existed.

‘What have you got for me sweetheart?’ he muttered under his breath.

Pulling out the first page from Nikki’s folder, it took him a moment to recognize the unfamiliar feeling in his chest. It wasn’t stress, or indigestion, or heartburn. It was happiness. He was happy.

Overnight, it seemed, his luck had changed. He had a new case, a new client, a new challenge.

Derek Williams was back.

Thorough to a fault, he read the files in silence for a long time. Then he read them again. And again. Minutes turned into hours. There was a lot here, a lot of different places where he could choose to start.

In the end though, one name leapt out at him, from the scores Nikki had chosen to mention. In terms of the two murders, it was the name of a bit player, a minor figure, tangential at best to the case. And yet it was a name that Derek Williams knew well – too well – from another case, another time.

His mind wandered back.

Almost a decade back …

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Nine years earlier …

Derek Williams peeked through the glass door of his office at the couple sitting in the waiting room.

It was a great office, new and expensive, and the waiting room was impressive – high-ceilinged and furnished with designer couches and high-end ‘lifestyle’ magazines, as advised by Williams’ new wife, Lorraine.

‘You gotta spend money to make money, baby,’ was one of Lorraine’s favorite catchphrases, along with ‘You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.’ Derek tolerated Lorraine’s greeting-card philosophizing because he loved her, and because she had a terrific ass and great tits and he was lucky as all hell that she’d chosen him, out of all the guys who wanted to bone her. Also, so far at least, she seemed to be right about the ‘spend money to make money’ thing. Since taking the lease on the fancy offices he’d raised his rates sixty percent and seen his volume of business triple. ‘People feel reassured when they pay a lot of money for something. No one wants a cheap service,’ said Lorraine. She was right about that too.

Today’s couple had paid Derek a small fortune in fees, plus hefty expenses, for the job he’d recently completed on their behalf. He couldn’t help but feel bad for them, and nervous about their imminent meeting. They sat together, hands clasped, but staring straight ahead, as stiff and rigid as statues.

The man, Tucker Clancy, was stocky and well built, the type who looked as if his shirt collar was permanently choking him. He dressed in the classic preppy uniform of khakis and a white shirt, and probably had the Republican Party elephant tattooed somewhere on his super-fit body. There was nothing disheveled about him, nothing undone. And yet his face was a craggy ruin, bearing all the hallmarks of devastation and grief. He was only in his mid-forties but looked twenty years older at least. To have a child die was terrible enough. But to have your only daughter disappear into thin air, to be left with an agonizing sliver of hope that perhaps she might one day return to you, against all the odds, that the nightmare might end? Derek Williams could not imagine anything worse.

The wife, Mary, seemed to have held up better. She looked exhausted too, but resigned, somehow, to her fate in a way that her husband wasn’t. If she still held out hope for her daughter, it didn’t show on her kindly middle-aged features.

That’s good, Williams thought. At least one of them has accepted reality.

He’d spent the last three weeks down in Mexico City, hunting for any traces of the Clancys’ daughter, Charlotte, trying to piece together her last-known movements and come up with some sort of credible theory as to what might have happened to her. A slim, attractive blonde, unusually tall for her age, Charlotte would have cut a striking figure anywhere, but especially in a place like Mexico where she towered over the local girls, as All-American as apple pie. And yet no one, it seemed, had laid eyes on her since the evening she disappeared.

The Clancys hadn’t given him much to go on in their initial meeting, largely because the Mexican police had given them nothing. In the beginning, Tucker Clancy had put this down to his ingrained, knee-jerk belief that all foreign police, and especially the Mexican police, were useless and that as soon as ‘superior’ American officials got involved, things would improve. It had caused Tucker great pain to discover that neither the FBI nor the staff at the US consulate were any improvement on the Mexicans. In fact in some ways, they were worse, seeming at times to be actively dismissive of the Clancys’ concerns, rather than simply incompetent.

‘They don’t give a damn about Charlie!’ an outraged and astonished Tucker Clancy had ranted to Williams the day that they decided to hire him. ‘She’s an American citizen, for God’s sake. Why aren’t they out there looking for her? Beating the damn bushes?’

Williams shared Tucker Clancy’s outrage, but not his surprise. ‘The sad truth is, Mr and Mrs Clancy, unless you’re wealthy or politically connected in some way, the FBI are simply not going to devote resources to a case like this. Your daughter was eighteen when you last heard from her. Plenty of young people take off on their own without telling their parents.’

‘Not Charlie,’ Tucker Clancy growled.

‘And not for a year,’ his wife added, more calmly. ‘We know something’s happened to her, Mr Williams,’ she said bravely, fighting back tears. ‘We just don’t know what. People, tourists, do get kidnapped down there. I mean, it’s dangerous. Mrs Baden gave us some statistics …’

‘Who?’ Williams asked.

‘Valentina Baden,’ Tucker Clancy responded gruffly. ‘She’s Willie Baden’s wife and she runs a charity that helps search for Missing Persons. They’ve helped us more than anyone. Tried to get the word out there.’

Suddenly things clicked in Williams’ mind. He’d seen the Tuckers before, on television. One of those tear-jerker ads that charities put out. He’d only half tuned in, but the thing had aired on a game night in one of the commercial breaks, which must have cost a fortune. Ignobly, he wondered whether any of the Baden coffers had been opened with regards to his own fees, but he let the thought go as Tucker Clancy plowed on.

‘I should never have let her go,’ Tucker muttered furiously.