Page 58 of The Perfect Poise

“Checking,” Beth said, pausing briefly before going on. “Hold on, this is kind of weird.”

“What?” Ryan asked.

“Jamil, can you backstop me here?” Beth asked. “Make sure I’m not missing something?”

He stopped his work on potential escort clients, rolled his chair next to hers, and looked over her shoulder at her monitor. Jessie could tell from his expression that he was as amazed as Beth.

“What is it?” she asked.

“According to multiple federal and state databases,” Jamil said, shaking his head, “prior to four years ago, Adrienne Shaw, didn’t exist.”

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

“You need to shut up.”

Paulina Fitzgerald—better known to the world as Adrienne Shaw—was fed up with this little brat’s muffled sobs. Part of her regretted abducting the pain in the ass. In retrospect, maybe she should have just gutted the girl on the spot like all the others.

But she had bigger plans for Lila Warwick. The woman was her opportunity to finally lay bare the disgusting excesses of these skanks. When the world understood the obscene amounts of money these women burned on a daily basis, all when there were countless sick, starving people everywhere, maybe something could finally be done about it.

The thought made her smile slightly to herself as she looked out on the Los Angeles skyline from the roof of her apartment building, where she was keeping Lila until the moment was just right. She brushed her long, dark hair out of her brown eyes and wrapped the blanket tighter around her curvy frame to protect against the cutting nighttime wind.

Of course, if she was honest with herself, Paulina had to admit that her recent actions weren’t exclusively altruistic. After all, at one point she been one of these uber-rich bitches too.

That felt like ages ago. Sometimes it seemed like a dream, or more accurately, a nightmare. She still remembered how her stepfather first snuck into her bed when she was twelve, and how he’d continued to do it for fifteen more years.

It was still hard to fight off the guilt that came from having let it go on so long. All through college at Loyola Marymount University and while she got her master’s in Finance from USC, she lived at home, in the massive compound in Bel-Air that was paid for by her stepfather’s unimaginable wealth, all due to shady oil deals, many of them with men who had been labeled war criminals by various international bodies.

And all that time he would visit her, sometimes after her mother, Carmel, was passed out drunk. Other times, he didn't even bother with that formality. It was only when she was 27 and had been working as a junior financial advisor for a full two years at a Beverly Hills firm, that she finally screwed up the courage to tell her mother what had been happening right under her nose.

She knew the horrible truth the second the words came out her mouth and she saw Carmel’s face. The woman had known all along. Maybe that was what drove her to drink. Worse, she didn’t seem to care. Paulina threatened to go to the authorities.

Her mother said that she didn’t believe her, almost certainly because to say anything else would have put her extravagant lifestyle at risk. Until she married Donald Fitzgerald when Paulina was five, the two of them led a tough life, surviving on public assistance while Carmel worked as a cocktail waitress. That’s how she met Donald. Paulina knew that after years of easy living, her mother would never risk going back to that old life.

Paulina realized just how desperate to hold onto her current life her mother was almost immediately. Carmel told her daughter that if she went to the police, she would tell them that Paulina was lying, that she had emotional issues which had never been properly addressed. She even went to Paulina’s stepfather and told him about the allegations.

Soon after that, both her parents came to talk to her in the cavernous breakfast room where she was sipping her coffee one morning before heading off to work. She still remembered that it was a lovely fall day, just a week before Thanksgiving. They sat down opposite her, stern expressions on their faces.

They told her that they were cutting her off financially, and in fact disowning her as their daughter. They reiterated that no one would believe her allegations and that if she insisted on going to the authorities, they would bury her in lawyers, filing defamation lawsuits against her and trying to get her committed to an institution.

Stunned but deep down, not really that surprised, she agreed to move out and not pursue any legal action. With the tiny nest egg that she’d scraped together since she started working, she decamped to a weekly motel in Mar Vista that let her pay in cash and didn’t ask for any ID to verify the fake name she used when she checked in.

But somehow, her stepfather found her anyway. He had people for that. And apparently, he'd paid off the night desk manager at the motel to give him a key to her room. When he opened the door, she woke up and found him undressing. She said that if he didn't leave, she'd go to the cops.

“Who will ever believe you over me?” he asked dismissively.

Then he got under the covers with her and climbed on top of her. Fighting him for the first time in her life, she managed to shove him to the side and scramble away to the bathroom. She tried to lock the door, but he slammed it open. She was knocked backward, and his momentum sent him forward too fast. His leg hit the edge of the bathtub shower.

He careened in and slammed his head against the tile before slumping down in a heap, semi-conscious and groaning. PaulaPaula rushed out of the bathroom and started for the front door, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and panties. But then she stopped.

She looked over at the tiny kitchenette in the corner of the room and remembered the steak knife that she’d used earlier in the evening to cut her microwaved chicken nuggets into extra-small pieces to make them last longer.

Without stopping to think, she hurried over, grabbed the knife from the drain tray, and headed back to the bathroom. Her stepfather, the wealthy, illustrious Donald Fitzgerald, was lying naked in the bathtub, struggling to pull himself upright. His eyes were glassy, and he blinked repeatedly.

Paulina took two steps toward him, pulled the plastic shower curtain across the tub, then grabbed a washcloth and shoved it in his mouth. His eyes popped wide as she leaned down and plunged the steak knife into the side of his neck.

He flailed wildly. Blood spurted everywhere. He tried to scream, but the washcloth muffled it. Then she stabbed him again on the other side of the neck. More flailing. But she stayed focused, keeping her hand pressed against the washcloth while jamming the knife into any soft spot she could find, of which there were many.

It took thrusting the knife into her stepfather a good fifteen times before he finally stopped fighting. She pulled back and watched his last, fitful, wheezy breaths. Then he stopped moving entirely.

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