Hero for Hire

“Yes.”

“Tell your clients they couldn’t be in better hands. Good luck, Chad.”

He smiled. “Thanks.” Breaking the connection, he flipped the cover shut on his phone.

Veronica watched him put away his phone. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she spoke again and found that her lungs ached. “Now what?”

“Now I continue asking you questions.”

She wanted to be doing something. Hitting something. “But the kidnapper…”

He’d seen all he needed to in the boy’s room. Gently he escorted her out into the hallway. “He’ll call again. And we’ll be waiting for him.”

The operative word, she knew, was waiting. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to much longer.

Chapter 3

“Who calls you Ronnie?”

Veronica stopped at the head of the stairs and turned to look at Chad uncomprehendingly. “What?”

“The voice on the other end of the line called you Ronnie.” He didn’t see her as a Ronnie. Ronnies were dark-haired women who excelled in competitive sports and laughed out loud when something tickled their funny bone. The woman before him looked far too sophisticated to manage more than a small smile. “Who calls you Ronnie?” he repeated.

Her response was immediate. “Nobody.” And then she stopped, backtracking. Remembering. “Robert did. And sometimes I do—in my mind when I’m frustrated,” she added. “But nobody else does.” That wasn’t altogether true. “Except for Stephanie,” she amended. “That’s my younger sister. She was the first one to call me that when she couldn’t wrap her tongue around ‘Veronica.’” That seemed so long ago now, she thought. She found herself wishing her sister was here, instead of on the other side of the country.

She hadn’t mentioned a sister before. Getting information in dribs and drabs was not something he was unaccustomed to. “And where is your younger sister?”

Veronica could feel herself growing defensive. “In New York. She’s a curator at the Museum of Natural History. And not a candidate for suspicion.” He was wasting time looking in directions that led to dead ends.

He could almost read the thoughts crossing her mind. “I’m just trying to get a clear picture, that’s all, Veronica.”

She was vaguely aware that he’d stopped addressing her formally. “The picture is crystal clear. Someone, not my sister, not my brother-in-law, but someone,” she emphasized, “came to Andy Sullivan’s birthday party and walked off with my son.”

According to her, there had been a great many people at the party. Still, children that age did tend to shy away from people they didn’t know. “Would he go off with a stranger that easily?”

Feeling suddenly weak, Veronica leaned against the wall. She ran a hand over her pounding forehead, but the throbbing continued. The headache was nearly blinding. She should have been stricter with Casey, should have made him more wary of people.

She could feel the sting of gathering tears again and willed them back.

“I wish I could say no, but other than a phobia of clowns, Casey is the world’s friendliest kid. I’ve tried to tell him over and over again not to talk to strangers, but…” Helpless, she tried to ward off the feeling with a shrug.

That one simple gesture transformed her from a regal queen into someone who embodied vulnerability and frailty. Chad felt something distant stir within him, prompting responses that were nearly foreign to him. It made him want to comfort her.

The best comfort she could possibly have would be the recovery of her son. He pushed on. “And there’s no one else who calls you Ronnie?”

Fighting her headache, she straightened again. “No, why? Is it important?”

He shrugged noncommittally. “Might have narrowed the playing field a little. ‘Veronica’ is rather a formal name while ‘Ronnie’ is on a different, more intimate level.”

She gave a laugh, short and without humor. “Which is a polite way of saying that ‘Veronica’ sounds like a snob.”

Memories from her past, cruel ones with taunting children who took painful shyness for aloofness and used insults and gibes to make themselves feel better, surfaced. She pushed them aside. This wasn’t the time for that, or for feeling sorry for herself.

She rarely felt sorry for herself. Hadn’t felt the inclination since Robert had died. Now the emotion waited for a moment of weakness to suck her in.

“My word would have been ‘regal,’” Chad told her easily. “‘Ronnie’ sounds familiar. As if whoever’s on the line knows you.”

The idea was completely foreign to her, completely unacceptable. When she finally spoke, her voice was hollow. “I don’t know anyone who would do something like this. It’s not hard to get money from me, Mr.—Chad. I’m a soft touch.”

Soft wouldn’t be the first word he’d think of, looking at her. But it had definitely suggested itself in the first few minutes.

He studied her for a moment. “Are you?”

“Yes.” She thought of Robert. The few times they’d had words, it was over her largesse, her tendency to be taken in by every sad story, not so much because she believed it word for word, but because she hated seeing people worried over money matters. Money was there to ease suffering, not be the cause of it. Robert disagreed. “So much so that my husband took over the finances when we were married. He said that otherwise, I would single-handedly get rid of money in a decade that took three generations of Lancasters to accumulate.” She dismissed her generosity of spirit with a single disparaging sentence. “I’m a sucker for any sob story.”

He sincerely doubted if the dictionary definition of the word was applicable to her. “Funny, I wouldn’t have pegged you as a sucker.”

This time her laugh was softer. She raised her eyes to his, surprised he could make a kind assessment. He looked very hard to her. As if nonsense was something he hadn’t even a nodding acquaintance with. “Which just goes to show that appearances are deceiving.”

His point exactly. “Right. I want you to remember that.”

She felt like someone who’d fallen into a trap without seeing any of the telltale signs. “Meaning?”

“Meaning that someone around you might have decided that a handout wasn’t enough. They realized that they now want the whole hand.” He studied her face, watching for any giveaway. “Know anyone like that?”

That same defensive feeling rose again, higher this time. She refused to believe what he was telling her. Veronica had spent years building up her confidence, convincing herself that there were people who wanted things from her other than just her money. That they were satisfied with her company.

She raised her chin defiantly, her eyes daring him to prove her wrong. “No.”

She was lying, he thought, and wondered why. Was she reluctant to reveal something to him because he was an outsider? It wouldn’t be the first time. Hiring a private investigator was a mixed bag. You were asking a stranger for help in exchange for money. Along with that money, you were being forced to bare your soul, something that didn’t come easily to most people. Certainly not in times of crisis.

Chad took no offense. He was accustomed to being on the outside. It had become his personal niche over the years, standing on the far side of everything. It made him an observer. And good at his job.

He pushed a little. “I’m on your side, Veronica,” he reminded her. “If there’s someone you think you’re protecting…”

“Why in heaven’s name would I hire you and then try to protect someone?”

It wasn’t so farfetched. Megan had had a case where the kidnapper had turned out to be the ex-husband. His wife, their client, had gone on defending him to the end. Chad fixed Veronica with a long look. “I don’t know. That’s for you to tell me.”

“I’m not. Protecting anyone,” she added after a beat. “You have to believe me, nothing and no one means as much to me as my little boy.” Veronica waved her hand around the well-lit hall with its collection of paintings that could easily have been housed in a museum. “I’d give up everything in a blink of an eye to have him back unharmed. As for protecting anyone…”

Veronica stopped for a moment. She pressed her lips together, debating. Her eyes slid over the photograph she still held in her hand. The one that Chad was going to have copied to show to people. Casey’s photograph. The scale tipped.

There was fresh resolve in her eyes when she looked up at him. “I know several people with cash-flow problems and one person who is being blackmailed.”

Blackmail. Someone being blackmailed could turn desperate. Discreetly pressing the record button on the tape recorder in his jacket pocket, he took out a pencil and began to write on a fresh page in his notepad. “I’m going to need names.”

Second thoughts sprang up. She didn’t want to put anyone through more than they were already enduring. “None of them would take Casey. They wouldn’t have to. I’m a very loyal friend, Chad.” If she had it, she’d give it. The word no was not in her vocabulary when it came to money.