Hidden

“Your home. Cars. Offices. Everything.”

“I have nothing to hide.” But it wouldn’t look good to his constituents. And once doubt was cast…

Damn Kassar. Thomas had wiped the floor with his Democrat opposition—who’d been fully endorsed by Kassar—during last year’s election. The man would stoop to anything to get his own back. He’d seen Thomas’s remarks to the press as a personal attack. It wasn’t personal at all. Publishing a man’s accomplishments or lack thereof, as the case might be, was just part of politics.

Douglas, resting against Thomas’s desk, glanced down at the papers he held, nodding. Thomas recognized the blue folder. It contained the complete record of Thomas’s experiences with San Francisco’s law enforcement—one traffic ticket when he was sixteen, and everything relating to Kate’s disappearance.

The familiar jolt that shot through him as he stared at that folder, remembering his beautiful and spirited wife, hurt worse than usual today.

“I don’t like it,” Douglas said. “You have an airtight alibi. They shouldn’t still be poking around. I plan to appeal.”

Douglas was the best on his team, but only because Thomas, once the city’s highest-paid defense attorney, wasn’t practicing anymore.

Thomas shook his head. “Appeal on a warrant decision is so rare, it would play right into Kassar’s hands, drawing even more attention to me. Besides, if we do that, some people are going to think I have something to hide.”

“You know as well as I do that your being clean won’t stop them from finding potential evidence if they try hard enough.”

“They won’t try. They don’t have a case and they know it. They don’t want to come out of this with egg on their faces, either. Kassar aside, as far as the D.A. is concerned, this is merely a formality. So he can tell the mayor, and the mayor can tell his voters, that it’s been done. San Francisco’s second wealthy young beauty has just disappeared. They have to turn over every stone on this one.”

These were all facts he was comfortable with. Still, out of curiosity…

“What were the reasonable grounds?”

“You’re associated with both women.”

“What wealthy young woman in San Francisco don’t I know?” Thomas asked. In the past ten years, he’d done enough campaigning, socializing, smiling and schmoozing to get elected president of the United States if he decided to make a run for that office. “What wealthy person don’t I know?”

“You were the husband of one and escort of the other.”

Thank God that well-known fact was all they had to go on. He was innocent in both cases, but the prosecution might come to a different conclusion—the wrong conclusion—if they had all the facts.

“They’re going to see if they can find something among my things—phone calls I’ve made, bills I’ve paid, food in my refrigerator, whatever—that might connect the two disappearances.”

He hadn’t practiced courtroom law so successfully for seventeen years without learning how to outthink the prosecution.

“Leah and Kate were best friends.”

“So maybe they ran off together!”

Douglas chuckled without any real humor. “You don’t really believe that.”

Thomas rubbed his hand across his face, an unusual display of weakness. Revealing emotion, especially negative emotion, was something he almost never did. A Whitehead kept up appearances at all costs. In his world, that rule had been the most important condition for sustaining life. Breathing came in a close second.

“No,” he said, looking up at his attorney and closest friend. “I don’t believe that.” His voice broke and he stopped a moment to calm himself. “Kate and I…we—”

“I understand, buddy.” Douglas’s hand on his shoulder kept him from making even more of an idiot of himself.

“Sorry,” he said, standing. The ability to detach himself had always served him well—in the courtroom and in life. He wouldn’t lose it again.

“Hey, Thomas, this is me. No need to apologize.” Douglas rounded the desk, shoving the folder back in his hand-tooled leather briefcase. “Frankly, man,” he continued, his voice a little muffled as he bent over the chair in front of Thomas’s desk, latching his case, “I don’t know how you do it. If it were me and I’d lost Kate—let alone the baby—they’d have had to pull me out of the river. And now Leah. It’s…unsettling, you know?”

“I know.” Arms crossed over his chest, Thomas stood beside his desk, nodding slowly.

Douglas straightened, stared at him for a long silent minute. “Yeah, I guess you do. Listen, you want to hit the club tonight? I could use a drink.”

“Maybe.” He’d be drinking, that was for sure. “As long as Mother’s okay.”

“What’s it been, six months now since your father died?”

Thomas nodded.

“How’s she doing?”

“Like the rest of us, I guess. She has good days and bad ones. Nights are the hardest.”

Shaking his head, Douglas moved to the door. “You guys have had it rough lately, but you know what that means.”

“What?”

“That your turn’s coming for something really big.”

Thomas was counting on that.

Scott’s four days off made it difficult for Tricia to get to the paper every morning, but that didn’t stop her from driving herself crazy until she had the most recent edition of the San Francisco Gazette in her hands. She hated lying to Scott, hated being impatient with him when he accompanied her and Taylor on their morning walks, and then suggested going to the Grape Street dog park so the little boy could run and play with the animals. For some reason, her son was smitten with dogs. She’d never had a pet in her life and she’d certainly never considered having one that not only lived in the house but shed, drooled and didn’t wipe after it went to the bathroom. But watching Scott and Taylor with the unleashed pets in the park, she couldn’t help laughing.

And wishing that life was different—that she had a place where she felt secure enough to buy her son a puppy.

Still, she made excuses every day to get out of the house on her own. Thread she’d suddenly run out of. A quick trip to the grocery. A rush job that she’d forgotten had to be delivered.

He’d raised his eyebrows at that one, but had said nothing.

Which was pretty much what she got from the San Francisco Gazette. Nothing. Senator Thomas Whitehead had returned from an annual fishing trip. He’d stopped by the precinct the moment he’d heard about the heiress’s disappearance and no arrest had been made.

He was in the clear. Again.

On Saturday, the last day of his off-rotation, Scott stood in the doorway of the smallest bedroom in his modest three-bedroom home, watching the woman he thought of far too often for his own good. She sat there, some kind of dark garment in her hand, doing nothing.

He always wondered where she went when she did that. But he didn’t ask. The answer could very well take him into territory they’d agreed not to travel.

“You almost done?”

She jumped, bent her head for a second, and then turned to him, her ready smile in evidence. “Almost, why?”

Whatever had been on her mind, she wasn’t sharing it with him. Not that it mattered. He had no business knowing what made her jump in the middle of the night—or in the middle of the day when her lover spoke to her from a doorway in their home.

Soon after Tricia had moved in with him—which had been right after he’d met her, six months pregnant, in a bar where he used to hang out with the guys on his shift—he’d given Tricia this room for her sewing. He didn’t know anything about what she did, since he’d never seen his mother or his cousins so much as hold a needle, but even he could tell she was skilled at it.

He didn’t mind giving up his office/weight room for the sewing machine the dry cleaner had lent her so she could work at home while her baby was young. In the almost two years that followed, they’d added a cabinet from the flea market to hold her growing collection of materials, threads, scissors and tape measures, buttons and fasteners.