Who said I can’t meet my deadlines?
“MISSING”, the 6th in the Dean and Steph
detective series is now available on Amazon. As usual the pair find themselves
facing foes dedicated to wrongdoing. This time there’s a difference though,
they’re in Britain
and they have to free a computer scientist before the terrorists can sell him
to the highest bidder.
MISSING
ONE
Peter Houseman is what we Americans would call a towhead
back home. His hair’s platinum blond and his eyes are blue. He’s six feet tall,
slim and athletic. He plays amateur soccer, looks younger than his twenty-nine
years and the fact he has a doctorate in computer science doesn’t show. He’s
also single, has a grin that makes women swoon and is the big brother of Nicky Houseman,
who is going to marry my cousin, Alex Mitchell, in a few days.
Alex is an international journalist
and I’m Dean Witton. Together with my wife, Steph, I own Teay’s Valley
Investigations, a private investigation company with two offices in West Virginia and a third in Ohio . The business always keeps us busy and it’s
not often we get a chance to take a vacation, but we’re not in the States now.
Nicky is British, and she and Alex are due to be married in a nine-hundred-year-old
church in West London this coming Saturday.
Alex and I were sitting in the bar
of The Albion, an old world English pub, waiting for Peter, who was late. When
it comes to weddings British traditions are similar to ours, brides have
bachelorette parties, which for some strange reason they call “hen do’s”, and
bridegrooms have bachelor parties, dubbed “stag nights”. Nicky was having her
bachelorette party at Smiffy’s, her mother’s restaurant and Steph was with her,
together with about twenty of her female friends.
I guess you could say Alex and I,
together with Peter, were his bachelor party. It wasn’t because Alex doesn’t
have friends, it was the fact he was four thousand miles away from most of them.
Although some were coming to the wedding, which was still nearly a week away, they
hadn’t made it in yet. We would have dinner and perhaps a drink or several with
the ones who did get here before the big day, but tonight’s outing was for
Peter and me to get to know each other and, more importantly, to get us out of
the way while the girls were partying. I’d seen Peter for a minute or two when
we first arrived but I was going to be best man and, since their father passed
away a few years earlier, he was going to be giving the bride away. We needed
to get together to co-ordinate our speeches and decide how much we were going
to say to embarrass the happy couple.
According to Alex, Peter is a nice
guy when you get to know him but it looked as though I was going to have to
take his word for it because Nicky’s brother was now over an hour late.
I glanced at my watch. ‘Are you
sure he knows he’s supposed to come to this pub?’ I asked.
‘I know he does. He’s been here
before,’ Alex replied. ‘This is where Nicky first introduced me to him. He
likes it here. Liz, the barmaid, has a thing for him.’
‘Maybe he’s trying to avoid Liz the
barmaid,’ I said with a shrug.
Alex took out his cell phone. ‘No,’
he replied, ‘they flirt. Liz flirts with all the guys. She knows Peter isn’t
after her, she’s even flirted with me, and she helped me out when I was on the
run over here in the summer.’ He touched the screen. ‘What I don’t understand
is why he hasn’t phoned or sent a text. It’s not like him. I spoke to him
yesterday and he said he was looking forward to getting to know you and Steph
and being away from work for a few days.’
‘What’s he do?’ I asked.
Alex shrugged. ‘I’m not really
sure. From what Nicky says he has something to do with the computer parts of
airplane auto pilot systems.’
‘So, computer genius runs in the
family?’ I said. Nicky also had a computer science degree and after she and
Alex were married she was coming to work for our company, running our new
computer forensics section.
Alex shrugged. ‘It seems so,’ he
replied. ‘Peter has his doctorate in computer science and, from what his mom
and sister say, he can make computers do things you wouldn’t believe. He works
for Gresham Aerospace, they’re about twenty miles west of here. He lives near
there but he’s supposed to be coming in to stay at his mom’s place for the rest
of the week.’
‘Maybe there was a problem at the
factory,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps he couldn’t get away.’
‘It’s not really a factory. Nicky
told me it’s a big old country house and they’ve converted part of it into
computer labs. She says they don’t make anything physical there; in fact, they
don’t do anything except design the software. I can’t think what could go wrong
with that apart from a server crash, but even if there was a problem I’d have still
expected him to ring.’
At that moment the barmaid came to
where we were sitting on a couple of tall bar stools. ‘I thought you said my
boyfriend was coming in tonight?’ she said.
‘I guess he stood us both up,’ Alex
apologized.
‘Story of my life,’ she replied
with a mournful sigh but then she brightened up. ‘Still, while he ain’t here
you and me can get cozy, can’t we?’
‘Sorry, Liz, I’m getting married on
Saturday so I have to behave myself,’ Alex replied.
She turned her attention to me. She
was somewhere around her mid-thirties, her hair was an unnatural shade of auburn
and her makeup was heavy, especially around the eyes. She was not the type I’d
have gone for even before Steph, but she was pretty enough, and as she leaned
closer I got a hint of some subtle, pleasant smelling perfume.
‘How about your friend?’ she said, staring
deep into my eyes. ‘I bet he’s not getting married on Saturday.’
I lifted my left hand from the
table and waggled the third finger in reply. My wedding band caught the light.
Liz sighed again. ‘You Yanks are no
fun.’
‘Sorry Liz,’ I said, ‘if I’d known
you were available I swear I’d have waited for you.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she replied, her
voice full of disdain. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Are you pair going to have
another drink or do I have to come around there and throw you out for taking up
space?’
‘We’ll have another drink,’ Alex
laughed. ‘And since it looks like Peter’s a no-show, we’ll go ahead and order
food too. If he makes it later he can eat while we drink.’
The food was very good and I found
I had a liking for British beer, even though we didn’t drink a lot of it. The two
of us didn’t make for much of a party but we did get chance to catch up and have
a few laughs. Alex was concerned about the silence from Nicky’s brother and he
tried calling and then texting him again but the phone went straight to voice
mail and the texts were left unanswered. After finishing the meal with a very
good cognac, we agreed we were both tired and neither of us wanted any more to
drink so we said goodbye to Liz and left.
We were staying in the same hotel and it was getting on for
eleven o’clock when we walked back to find Steph already sitting in the lounge
reading a book.
‘Hey Beautiful,’ I said, sitting
beside her and leaning over to kiss her cheek. ‘I thought you’d still be out
partying with the girls.’
She smiled and closed her book. I
glanced at the title. It was “A Standard Guide to Forensic Pathology”. This is
typical of my wife. She takes her work very seriously and never misses an
opportunity to continue learning.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They said they were
going on to a nightclub. I’m a country girl from West Virginia , big cities aren’t my scene
and neither are night clubs. I must be getting old because I prefer coming back
to spend quality time with my husband.’
‘You’re not getting old but your
husband is very happy you came back,’ I said, taking her hand, raising it to my
lips and kissing it.
‘So, how did you guys get on?’
Steph asked. ‘Did you have a good time?’
‘We ate dinner and had two or three
drinks,’ Alex said. ‘Peter didn’t show up, so it was just the two of us. Dean
isn’t the sort I usually date and he’s the kind of party-pooper who wouldn’t
let me make out with the barmaid, even though she was coming on to me, so we
came back here.’
‘Peter wasn’t with you?’ Steph
said.
‘No. I talked to him yesterday and
he said he’d definitely be at the pub tonight but he wasn’t.’
‘He wasn’t at his mom’s place
either. She said he was supposed to drop his bag off there, and then go on to
meet you guys. When he didn’t show, she thought maybe he was running late and had
gone straight to the pub. She tried to call him but he didn’t answer.’
‘I tried to get him several times
as well but I couldn’t get a reply either,’ Alex replied.
‘That’s odd.’ Steph frowned. ‘I
wonder what’s happened to him?’
‘Hmm, maybe we could investigate
and make this trip pay for itself. We could call it the case of the missing
brother of the bride.’ I grinned.
‘Don’t joke,’ Steph said. ‘This
could be serious.’
‘You, Sweetheart, have been reading
too much of this stuff,’ I said, tapping the cover of her book. ‘He could have
been delayed and maybe his phone has no battery left. He’ll most likely come
first thing tomorrow, so there’s no use getting riled about it tonight.’
She smiled tiredly. ‘You’re
probably right. I’m sure he’s fine and I’m still suffering from jet lag. I
guess I’m not thinking straight.’
‘Okay, let’s go to the room. We can
phone your folks to make sure our favorite little boy is behaving himself and
then go to bed.’
Our favorite little boy was our
son, Jake. We’d decided he was too young to fly, so Steph’s mom and dad get to spoil
him for a week or two while we’re in England . We liked to talk to them
at least once a day, just to say hello and to put our minds at rest he’s
alright though.
‘Sounds good to me,’ she replied,
stifling a yawn.
‘I guess I’m going to bed too,’
Alex said. ‘See you both for breakfast at nine tomorrow? Nicky’s coming over
and she said she’ll take us sightseeing.’
‘Her friends dragged her off to the
night club with them,’ Steph said. ‘I doubt whether she’ll make it out of bed for
nine.’
Alex grinned. ‘She’ll make it, she
said she wants to impress her new bosses so my guess is she’ll ask her mom to wake
her no matter what time she gets home.’
End of this excerpt from MISSING. Click on the links below to see the full book;
No comments:
Post a Comment