Page 71 of The Wicked

I told one more tiny but oh-so-necessary lie.

“I’m ready.”

25

GARRETT

I’d promised Saralisa no lies, but today, I’d lied. I’d fucked her into exhaustion and then told her something urgent had come up at home, but now I was in my office, alternately pacing and googling everything I could find about the Baldwin-Forlani family because what she’d told me last night was insane.

Crazy.

I’d dated a fantasist before, a woman who’d claimed to be the daughter of an English earl before the background check revealed her to be an out-of-work actress from London. The dalliance had lasted less than two weeks before I sent her packing, and I hadn’t cared one way or the other. She’d been nothing, a nobody, a warm pussy to sink my cock into while I waited for the right woman to come along. If she’d asked, I’d have given her a reference because her acting skills had actually been pretty good.

Saralisa wasn’t a fantasist. She hadn’t misrepresented herself, and all the revelations she’d made last night had been intended for my ears only. Fishing for sympathy? No, that didn’t strike me as her game either. But I wasn’t convinced her recollections were correct.

The part about the car crash was true; I’d found out that much. Claire Forlani and Peter Baldwin had died in a car wreck sixteen years ago in northern Virginia. Their nine-year-old daughter (name withheld) had been found the following morning and taken to the hospital suffering from shock and hypothermia but otherwise unharmed. There was no mention of a shooting, no mention of a murder attempt on the kid. A short obituary talked of a loving mother who’d worked on Capitol Hill and a doting father who’d followed his dream to become a painter. I checked out a number of his works, and they sold for a tidy amount these days.

As for Saralisa herself, she seriously underplayed her dancing achievements. I’d found old videos of her in competition, and although the quality of the footage wasn’t great, there was no mistaking the girl who’d turned into the woman currently unconscious in Johannes’s spare bed.

The basic facts were all there, but her tale of murder and cover-ups, of silence and surveillance, that was the part I couldn’t swallow. I believed that she believed it—there was no way she’d faked her fear last night as the story came spilling out—but was there any truth in it, or had her mind created the scenario because it was easier to accept than her father’s mistake? Cars were easy to crash. I’d wrapped one around a tree myself when a deer ran out in front of me. Whiplash, a mild concussion, and I’d walked away, but not everyone was so lucky.

My phone buzzed, and I answered the call.

“I’m here.”

“Come on up.”

Two minutes later, Carson Broad walked into my office on the third floor. His name didn’t suit him. He was a tall, wiry man with eyes that missed nothing and a mean left hook.

“Thanks for coming.”

“What’s so important on a Sunday?”

“I need a background check on a woman.”

“Another one?”

“This one’s different.”

“Aren’t they all?”

“I also need a second check on a man.”

“Planning to get adventurous?” Carson chuckled at his own joke as he headed for the coffee machine in the corner.If only he knew.

“It’s complicated. I’ve learned a considerable amount about the woman already, but there’s one particular aspect of her life I’m interested in.”

“Which is? Do you have any more of those Colombian java pods?”

“In the cupboard underneath. Her name is Saralisa Baldwin-Forlani, and she was orphaned approximately sixteen years ago. I need to understand the circumstances of her parents’ death. It happened in a car crash. The police say it was an accident, and she says it was murder.”

Carson found the blend he wanted and pushed the pod into the machine. “Murder? Isn’t that the kind of thing the police would look into?”

“At best, she believes they dropped the ball, and at worst, there was a cover-up.”

The coffee machine beeped, but both of us ignored it as I laid out the story Saralisa had told—not all the personal details, just the bare facts. Nobody needed to know about the babysitter issues or her parents fighting or the absolute shitshow that was the Baldwin family. Carson made notes as he listened, and only when I was done did he retrieve his mug.

“That’s a big allegation,” he said.

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