Free Hit by Tara Moss Page A

man might respond to the same situation by getting himself a good baseball bat, and then there were serious domestic violence issues to contend with on top of everything else. It was that ugly side of the business that gave it a bad name, depending on the way the operator handled it.
    Even the most respected PIs found themselves on the occasional infidelity case, though many of the big agencies denied it and discouraged such jobs in favour of corporate clients. However, infidelity was the bread-and-butter work. The three full pages of ads for Investigators in the Yellow Pages were a testament to the popularity of marital mistrust:
    DO YOU NEED PROOF OF INFIDELITY ?
    IS YOUR PARTNER CHEATING ??? DON ’ T BE THE LAST TO KNOW .
    To her many female clients, some of whom were likely soon to be divorced, Marian represented not only a ‘private dick without the dick’ but a necessary role model at a time when the clients needed a reminder that successful singledom was possible. Marian had been widowed some twenty years and yet she was happily solo and successful. A photo of her late second husband, Reg, still sat in a frame on the filing cabinet. As Marian had confided in Mak, Reg had been a much older man who was her ‘soul mate’. He had respected her independence, her business acumenand her decision to never bear children; she clearly felt no need to replace him. Marian spoke of Reg often. She never talked of her first husband, however, and Mak guessed it had not ended amicably. Perhaps one of those desperate-sounding ads for AAAA CHEATERS Investigation Agency—the ‘AAAA’ ensuring the first listing in the phone book—was what had given Marian the idea of becoming a private investigator in the first place. Maybe she had taken it upon herself to bust the kind of bastard she had first married?
    ‘Sit down, honey,’ Marian said. ‘This is a good one. Top rates.’
    Top rates for Mak meant $80 an hour for research and $100 an hour for field work. The job paid well, though not as well as some of her modelling gigs had, of course.
    Mak’s special ‘entrapment’ rate for luring errant husbands to hotel rooms was much higher because of her close proximity to the target—and her particularly good qualifications for the job. So far she had a 100 per cent success rate in the handful of such jobs she had completed. Had Mrs Anderson’s glowing report spurred Marian into giving Mak this new job? Or was it just that none of her more experienced investigators was available?
    Mak took a seat. Her black leather pants squeaked faintly as she crossed her legs.
    Marian had a couple of notes in front of her but she didn’t look at them. She closed her eyes asshe spoke, recalling the meeting with her formidable memory. ‘The client is Mr Robert Groobelaar, a real estate agent, originally from South Africa. He has a company called Trident Real Estate. His personal assistant was found murdered in her apartment last night. A young girl. Good-looking.’ Marian pushed a glossy photo across the desk. It showed a smiling girl with a pale blonde bob that fell just below her jaw.
    Wow. A murder case.
    Mak felt a weird mix of sadness and a rush of excitement. This was more than the usual domestic dispute or corporate espionage case. She pulled a large notepad out of her backpack and wrote down the details. Trident Real Estate. Robert Groobelaar…
    ‘Her name?’
    Marian closed her eyes again. ‘Meaghan Wallace—he says she was unmarried, no children, twenty-three years of age,’ she explained. ‘She worked for him for about the past six months. I’ll get my contacts to run off a file for you with her stats.’
    Mak wrote it all down. ‘Okay.’
    ‘The police have a suspect in custody. The client wants to know everything you can get on him.’
    ‘No problem.’ A few background checks would not take a lot of time. Marian had great contacts she could rely on to get leads on up-to-date information. A fair number of