The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection by Frost, J (great novels .txt) 📕

tried to get him into low calorie beer.” She gives me a fragile, broken smile. “He called it horse piss. He liked his craft beers, and his gin. But he wasn’t really a big drinker. A couple of beers a week and a few gin and tonics on the weekend. He never smoked cigarettes . . . well, he never smoked that I knew of. I guess he could have been doing two packs a day, for all I know.”

My chest clenches, hearing her doubting everything about the man she was married to.

“Mrs. Black, can I offer you a word of advice?”

Which she’ll probably ignore, but her glaring, grating pain makes me ask anyway.

She frowns at me, but she nods.

“Finding out a secret about a loved one can be painful,” I say. “And I can see finding out about your husband’s alternative lifestyle has hurt you. But that doesn’t mean he was a different person from the man you knew. We all have secrets.”

“Do you . . . keep your kink or whatever a secret?”

She keeps throwing it back to me, invading my privacy, as a way of assuaging her grief. I’ve seen it before. I try not to take it personally.

“No, not anymore. But I certainly never told my parents while they were alive.”

She sighs and curls in on herself, her shoulders sagging, and I have that overwhelming urge to hug her again. And to put her over my knee.

“I don’t understand why Bill thought he couldn’t tell me. Did he think I wouldn’t understand? That I’d, what, reject him?” She loses the battle against the tears welling in her eyes and they streak down her cheeks for a second before she pulls out a tissue and blots them away. “God, I’m sorry. That’s not why you’re here. What can I tell you that will help you find out what happened to him?”

“What did he tell you about the business trip? Who was he going with? Where was he going? Who he was meeting?”

She shakes her head, but not in denial. I think she’s trying to remember conversations that at the time probably seemed inconsequential.

“It was a business trip like a hundred other business trips,” she says haltingly. “Bill was in recruitment. He travelled frequently to meet new clients, or new candidates. This trip was longer than most, but he went on longer trips once or twice a year.” She steeples her hands and presses them to her lips but continues speaking around them. “Those longer trips, they probably weren’t business trips at all, were they?”

“They could very well have been,” I say, trying to keep her on track. “Was he travelling with anyone?”

She nods. “He had two assistants. Jay and Chrisjean. One or the other usually went with him.”

“Did either of them go on this trip with him?”

“Both, actually. He was annoyed about it. Chris was supposed to be accompanying him because she had the contacts with the Mexican telecom companies, but she had some family thing come up, so she had to fly back early. Jay went out for the last few days of the trip. I know he was there because I spoke to Bill every day at noon. A ‘nooner,’ he used to call it.” Her smile is so sad, the ache in my gut redoubles. “No matter where he was in the world, he’d call me every day at noon. He put Jay on to say ‘hello’ during the call from Puerto Vallarta.”

I make a note. “Could you give me Jay’s full name?”

She does and I write it out.

“And Chrisjean?”

She gives me that, too.

“Could you tell me about Jay and Chrisjean? What kind of relationships did they have with your husband?”

“Sexual relationships, you mean?” she asks, arching that dark brow at me again.

I rub my fingertips against my palms to quell their twitching. A hard spanking would give her the emotional catharsis she needs, help her start processing her grief so she’s not striking out at strangers every five minutes. And I’d feel so much better after delivering a spanking. Her pain’s twisting me in fucking knots.

“No, I don’t mean sexual relationships, unless you knew your husband was having sexual relations with his assistants,” I say evenly, although it’s an effort.

She has the grace to blush. “No, he didn’t. Or I don’t think he did. I don’t know anymore. He had a previous assistant, Rosario. He was involved with her before we were married. But he let her go and hired Jay when our relationship got serious. Jay was his protégé. They were very close. Bill was grooming Jay to take over. He used to say, ‘five more years and I’m out; Jay will be ready.’ Of course, he’s been saying that for seven years, but that’s Bill. He never could let go of his work. Chrisjean’s a recent hire. Maybe a year, eighteen months, something like that. Bill wasn’t sure whether she was going to work out. He said she was unreliable. He was angry about it, actually, during the trip. He mentioned it several times during our nooners and again when he got back.”

“Did he mention what the family problem was that made her leave the trip early?” I ask, bending over my notepad and scribbling.

“No. Bill was good like that. He understood that people had lives outside of work. He didn’t pry into other people’s problems.”

“Mm-hmm.” Or he valued his privacy, given what he was doing with it, and didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to pry. I ask her a few more questions designed to relax her. Details of her husband’s company, his working hours, their trips together. Then I get to the questions I know will upset her most. “Did your husband ever take drugs?”

“What do you mean?”

“Recreationally.”

She shrugs. “Doesn’t everyone?”

I don’t. I don’t tolerate it in my bottoms, either, and have broken it off with two of them because they wanted to continue stuffing junk up their noses. I should be all the high my bottoms need. “What did he take?”

“Ecstasy at