I HAD NO IDEA what I was searching for in the place that Lisa Morneau had called home until a week ago.
Tony had said that her clothes closets upstairs were always full, that he used to tell her that she better figure it out, he wasn’t moving her to a bigger damn place because she couldn’t stop shopping like the world was about to end. Now there were empty spaces and empty hangers in the big walk-in closet attached to the master bedroom, so some clothes must be missing. There was just no way of telling how many. And just because she had packed didn’t necessarily mean she was safe. Or had left of her own volition. Or was still alive.
But the clothes that had been left behind told me she had outstanding taste, the closet featuring a lot of brands far more expensive than what I could ever afford. As much as Tony complained about what he had to spend on her, he had obviously kept spending. And the floor of the closet showed me that the woman sure did love her shoes, with a particular fondness for Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik. And Prada. If I ever did find her, and before I called Tony—if I did call after hearing her story—I imagined that my first move might be asking her to go shoe shopping with me.
As Tony had said, the laptop was gone. I wondered just how much of Tony’s business was on it. There was no landline, something hardly uncommon in the modern world.
There was no Alexa, the Amazon virtual assistant who’d managed to become one of the most famous women in the world, on either level of the place. I had once been aided in tracking down a missing college student by the memory on the Alexa she’d left behind in her dorm room.
I went back to the master bedroom, searching the closet methodically but finding nothing more exciting than some particularly bad-girl things from Victoria’s Secret. In the second drawer of the bedside table I found some marijuana edibles that I recognized only because Spike had once tried in vain to get me to try them. I hadn’t declined because I was a prude where weed was concerned, just remembering that in college all it had done was make me want to go stick up a Baskin-Robbins.
There was an unlabeled bottle containing some big blue pills, with Pfizer written on them. If they weren’t Viagra, I was going to turn in my license.
“Tony,” I said. “You dog.”
He’d told me he used the downstairs bathroom, and shower. I went to Lisa’s much larger bathroom next, and conducted a brief inventory of makeup, facial wash, moisturizers, hair products. The basics. A lot of it was still visible on the large counter that included two sinks. But I felt as if there should have been more. I couldn’t find a hair dryer anywhere. Or medication of any kind. There was no shampoo in her shower, or conditioner. More reason to believe she hadn’t been taken, because clearly she’d taken at least some of her girl stuff with her.
I ended up back at the desk in the office, looking for something or anything. There were no false bottoms or compartments in the drawers, underneath the surface, or in the swivel chair. No old-school Filofax, no checkbook, none of the spreadsheets that Tony had described.
Nothing here to indicate that she had been taken, either.
But where had she gone? And for how long?
Maybe she had gotten a better offer, from Gabriel Jabari or someone else in Tony’s orbit. Or she had simply found someone she liked or even loved more than Tony Marcus. Not hard to wrap my head around that one.
Somehow she had changed her life enough to make it to the boardroom at Tony Marcus Inc., even if that involved being in the bedroom with him, too.
So what sort of change had she made this time?
Tony Marcus had said that somehow, in the years she’d spent on the street and the work she’d done for him since, she’d managed to stay out of the system, something he most certainly had not. But maybe Tony only thought she’d stayed out of the system. Or maybe she’d been in it before she went to work for him. I would call Lee Farrell, my best friend at the cops, and ask him to check.
Tony had said there was no safe, on either floor. It didn’t mean there wasn’t one that she had installed without telling him. But as hard as I searched, I was unable to find one.
I finally sat on the couch in the living room and tried to mimic the voice of Tony Marcus and said, “Where you at, girl?”
It sounded like a shout in all the emptiness and quiet around me, all the gone-girl-ness of the place.
Tomorrow I would regroup and reach out to her friend Callie. I felt there were things I could accomplish tonight, I just wasn’t sure what. But one of Sunny Randall’s boldfaced, tried-and-true rules of detecting went something like this:
When in doubt, find someone to annoy.
I called Spike at Spike’s.
“Hi-ho!” he said in a singsong voice.
“I’d tell you that was too gay,” I said. “But you know I think there’s no such thing.”
“How are things in your ridiculously complex life?” he said.
I could hear the sound of the restaurant behind him. It sounded busy. I asked if it was. He said never too busy for me.
“You up for going to a strip club?” I said.
“I told you I’m trying to quit,” he said.
Then I told him I wasn’t talking about HunkOMania.