Page 13 of Filthy Liar

I don’t even try to sleep. I go home to change into something more comfortable, punish my body with a hard workout, and then take a cold shower before heading to the office.

Wilson flew in a few days ago, to be on the ground here for the final stages in our Mayfair operation. Because he and his partner live in the Pacific Northwest now, and he spends most of his time working remotely, when he’s in D.C., he sticks to west coast times. And then works around the clock, anyway.

“It’s two in the morning,” I say when I stop in the doorway to his cave-like office.

“Eleven on the west coast,” he says quietly, not looking away from his screens. “She’s still awake.”

In one corner of one of the monitors, there’s video feed from his house, and I can see Tabitha Leighton, reclusive rockstar, curled up on the couch with a sleeping baby, their second child.

“Maybe when this is over, you don’t need to come back for a while.”

He nods in acknowledgment.

“I, uh…” My throat goes dry. Nerves. I huff a quiet breath, and that grabs Wilson’s attention in a way everything else I’ve just said doesn’t.

He pivots in his chair and gives me a piercing look. “What is it?”

I gesture at the live video feed. “I need you to find someone for me.” He’s good at that. Before he and Tabitha were together, he watched her from a distance. Worried over her from afar.

How many times in the last five years have I thought about asking him to do this exact thing? But I always held back, because deep down, I knew she wouldn’t want me to find her.

But that was before tonight. My heart punches its way into my throat, like a furious fist. Then I say her name. “Ellie.”

His eyebrows spike up and his mouth drops open. “Yeah,” he says carefully. “Okay.”

He doesn’t ask why.

“Do you know where she is?” My head pounds. “Have you been keeping tabs on her?”

“No.” He frowns. “I’d have told you if I was.”

“Okay.”

“What do you have?” He pulls up a dialog box on the screen, a back end to a database.

I swallow hard as he punches in her social security details, copied from our own records. “I saw her tonight. She was waitstaff at that dinner I got myself invited to.”

He gestures at the screen. “Nothing pinging on her record since she worked here. No credit applications, no employment that I can find. Are you absolutely sure it was her?”

“A hundred percent. And she made me, too.”

“What was the name of the catering company?”

I give him the details I noted, the name on the truck out back and the license plate, too. He runs a couple of searches. “They’re a legit company, but a small firm. Let me see if I can get into their accounting… Bingo.” He tabs through a few screens. “How many waitstaff did they have working tonight?”

“Five, plus the chef in the kitchen.”

He scrolls down the screen. “That’s one more than they usually use for an event that size. And according to this, they only logged hours for four of them.”

“So she was there, but she wasn’t officially on the books.” I roll my neck, letting it crack on both sides. “What the fuck is she doing?”

“Maybe she worked for cash.”

“Maybe.” But something feels off. “Can you run another search into her background? Go deeper this time.”

When she disappeared five years ago, it had seemed obvious. I’d overstepped, taken advantage of her, and she’d ghosted me, deservedly. Wilson had told me he’d run a couple of searches to make sure she wasn’t going to blindside us with a lawsuit—which I would have settled in a heartbeat.

I’d have given her anything she wanted.

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