Free Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) by Tanya Thompson Page B

show nothing. You say, ‘Yes, Sergiu,’ and, ‘Of course, Sergiu,’ but nothing here,” he punched his heart. “But you sit here,” indicating the driver’s seat, “and ahi,” hands up and screaming followed by “brum,” his arm shot off down the road. He barely managed to chuckle, “You no drive again.”
    I’d already seen the Jaguar key with no teeth turn the ignition and thought his assertion was highly unlikely, but I wasn’t going to give him any cause to suspect it. I nodded and looked out the window, mostly just glad to be out of the house. Tricia was having nightly asthma attacks brought on by stress. She knew the cause of it, but she wouldn’t stop searching for the missing women.
    The agency was overseen by a board of directors and Jeff was Tricia’s primary contact among them. I had listened to Tricia’s even voice behind the partitions at work as she quietly told Jeff her concerns. She’d flipped through the growing stack of files, counting off the young women who had arrived at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport only to vanish.
    Jeff’s tone was at first soothing, sounding like he was placating, whispering something smooth like, No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Everything is fine .
    Tricia tried to make him understand. “No communication has ever been established. The women have no known addresses. And no one will admit to meeting them.”
    Jeff kept giving soft assurances, sounding like a father putting a troubled child to sleep, murmuring things I could only imagine. Hush now, nothing lives under the bed .
    But Tricia was clear and insistent, “I can’t find the most recent woman, Chantou. No one’s heard of her.”
    It’s the dark, shhh, you’re imagining things .
    “Who was the man? No one will say.”
    There are no monsters in the closet .
    “But he took her and she’s gone.”
    And no faces in the window either .
    Then, Tricia mentioned the Cambodian mob.
    Now Jeff was grumbling angrily. A filing drawer in her office slammed shut. Something else, a coffee cup or fist, came down hard on her desk, and finally Tricia was silenced.
    Jeff stamped out through the lobby and hit the front door with his open palm. He’d thrown it wide to slam against the weatherboards and wasn’t stopping to close it.
    I went around the corner to find Tricia ashen, too stunned for asthma, asking, “Did you hear that?”
    “Most of it.”
    “Does he know?”
    “It does appear that way.”
    She spent the next week trying to find the former director of the refugee agency, wanting to know what he knew and why he left. There was no clue of who he’d been in any of the agency’s books, so she went covertly to another member of the board for the information.
    “It was something Jacobs,” but the board member couldn’t remember and would have to get back to Tricia, then unwittingly, the matter was referred to Jeff to deal with.
    Jeff was on the phone shouting loud enough through Tricia’s earpiece for me to hear at my desk.
    Through it all, I’d been a teenager, oblivious to danger, unconcerned with mortality, thinking if there was any reason to be alarmed someone would surely react. As far as I knew, everything that was occurring was perfectly common.
    Tricia was on edge, and she was having asthma attacks, but she wasn’t running or screaming. When she looked to me for support to continue, I’d glance up from my book and think it made perfect sense to carry on with the plot.
    “Turn the page. Let’s see what happens,” was my advice.
    And I held what she was doing as secret as I did everything else. I didn’t mention the events at the refugee agency to Rick or Sergiu or anyone. Dinner with Rick had nothing to do with dinner with Sergiu, and life with Tricia was private. If she wanted to chase the Cambodian mob and missing women, I’d no more speak of it than mention Sergiu and Daniel’s weekly trips to New York.

False Gods
     
    It was November and I had been in Dallas for two months when I