Topaz Dreams (3 page)
Authors: Marilyn Campbell
San Francisco, California
The great fault in women is to desire to be like men.—Joseph Marie, Comte de Maistre
"Well, if it isn't Lady Stephanie!'The great fault in women is to desire to be like men.—Joseph Marie, Comte de Maistre
"Ooh, Stephanie, we missed your pretty face so-o-o, my dear."
"Hey, Stephanie, we all have to attend a kung fu seminar this afternoon. I hear you're the instructor!"
She
held back the usual retort and let their raucous shouts and laughter
wash over her. She hated the prissy name she was given at birth, and
these guys knew it. Her father had always called her Steve, and that
was the only name she answered to, that or Barbanell, her ex-husband's
surname.
If her coworkers did not like her, however, they would not
tease her, so she let them get it out of their systems. After all, it
was she who insisted that they treat her as an equal rather than their
employer, or worse, a woman. It would never do to let them see they
could get to her. Nose in the air, shoulders back, Steve marched past
them to her office as if she was six feet five instead of twelve inches
shorter. Her private office was the only concession she made to her
position in the firm.
Stopping in the doorway, she turned and looked
each of them in the eye—Harris, Pollock, and Wang: a black, a gay, and
an Oriental. No one could say the Dokes-OHara Private Investigative
Agency was not an equal opportunity employer. Out of respect for her
father and disrespect for her ex-husband, she had not changed the
agency's name after she inherited her father's half of the business.
Steve batted her eyelashes and smiled innocently. "By the way,
gentlemen, I'm replacing all three of you with superwomen just like me!"
Her
low sultry voice remained another source of teasing, but at times like
this she used it to her advantage. The men broke out in another round
of laughter. The bad thing about her voice was that she never sounded
very convincing when she meant to be. The last dirtbag who thought she
did not mean what she said was still in the hospital. Of course, that
was also part of what got her an unplanned week's vacation.
"Barbanell!" Lou Dokes's stern voice preceded him into the bullpen.
Steve
smiled quickly at the gray-haired, big bear of a man, knowing he had
little resistance to the familiar gesture. "Good morning, Lou. Glad to
be back."
"My office," he said curtly, turning away before he gave in to the urge to return her smile.
Steve
settled into the chair on the opposite side of his desk and waited for
the lecture to begin. He had been too angry with her to deliver it in
its entirety when he insisted she take a week off to unwind.
"You
may be interested to hear that your latest victim has regained
consciousness and has agreed not to press charges against you for
assault if you will do the same. Now, if he can be persuaded not to sue
the agency—"
"What?" Steve's voice went up an entire octave from the beginning to the end of the word. "That bastard pulled a knife on me!"
"And
you had a gun. Why the hell didn't you just point the damned thing at
him and say, 'Drop it, scumball! like anyone else would would have?"
With a wave of his hand, he referred to the men sitting beyond the
closed door of his office.
"I did."
"And?"
"He laughed and
made a graphically explicit suggestion of how we could better spend our
time together. Actually, I was considering the agency's public image,
as you're always reminding me to. I figured disarming and subduing the
subject was preferable to blowing his brains out."
"Disarming him?
You undoubtedly accomplished that with your first highkick. I suppose
you're going to tell me that subduing him required your administering a
concussion, three broken ribs, a smashed kneecap, and an arm fractured
in two places. And this has nothing to do with our precarious public
image dammit!
"The man pulled a deadly weapon on you. If he refused
to drop it, you could have shot him, according to the book. You have
been preached at before about putting yourself at risk unnecessarily.
When your father died, he left you his half of this agency because he
believed you could take his place. I need a partner I can count on to
stay alive until I get ready to retire. Hell, Steve, I've seen you pull
the trigger when you had to and you're not squeamish about it. So it
has to be that you get some kind of perverted pleasure out of beating a
man senseless. Don't you dare smirk at me, girl!"
Steve worked the
muscles of her face into a semblance of seriousness. Lou was the only
person alive who could get away with talking to her like this without
getting a taste of her temper in return. She respected and loved him as
much as she had her father.
Her inheritance of the partnership did
not alter the fact that Lou was technically her superior, but she
managed to remind him of their lifelong acquaintance whenever she felt
the need to soften him up. "C'mon, Uncle Lou. The guy was a real
lowlife."
Lou's ears turned a bright shade of red. "When you are in
this office, you address me as sir. What do you think your father would
do to you if he knew about the kinds of scrapes his precious daughter
gets herself into all the time?" Dokes shook his head slowly and let
out a frustrated sigh.
Steve tried to look contrite and decided
staring at her lap was as respectful as she could manage. Lou was wrong
about her father, but only because he chose to raise the dead man to
sainthood rather than remember him as he truly was. Actually it was her
dad who had taught her how to cuss, and who had remained a maverick
until the day he was killed.
He would not have been ashamed of her.
She had turned out just the way he had raised her, to follow in his
impressive footsteps as the meanest, son-of-a-bitchin' private
investigator on the West Coast.
Dad had also taught her to keep
quiet once Uncle Lou started reminiscing about the good old days, when
the two men had begun their careers together in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
One thing Steve could count on: once Lou got going
about her father and some case they had worked on together, he dropped
all pretense of lecturing her for her unprofessional behavior and other
misdeeds. She only needed to listen with one ear; she had heard all the
stories a hundred times. They had replaced the bedtime stories other
kids heard when they got tucked in at night. And Steve cherished every
one of them.
She had always been more than just Daddy's little girl;
she had been his protegee. Her mother had been the calming influence
between the two explosive tempers and had always taken equally loving
care of them and her quiet son.
Because her father told her it was
necessary, Steve had kept her nose in her school books, and when the
other little girls were learning ballet and tap, she was learning the
disciplines of tae kwon do and jujitsu. By the time Lou and her father
had left the Bureau to open their own agency, Steve had a B.S. in
criminology and was headed for law school at Georgetown, because that
was the way her old man had done it.
Occasionally she had felt a
touch of envy for the pretty, popular sorority girls, but she had
accepted the fact that she was a brainy Plain Jane, with her straight,
short-cropped brown hair, dark hazel eyes, and freckles on her ordinary
nose. At any rate she had been too busy studying and turning her firmly
muscled body into a weapon to be bothered about a few silly school
dances. The irony was that she almost fit in now that it was the style
to have a hard body and a boy's haircut.
In her last year at
Georgetown, Vinnie Barbanell had turned her quiet life around.
Inexperienced as she was, he had easily dazzled her with his footwork
and passionate kisses. Steve had been so overwhelmed that such a
handsome young man wanted to marry her that she hadn't really listened
to his reasons for choosing her. She had agreed to remain in Virginia
with him and to put off her career until they started their family.
Thank God she had retained enough sense to finish school before
succumbing completely to his charm.
Though he had never admitted it,
her father was terribly disappointed when she had not returned to San
Francisco to take her place in the Dokes-O'Hara Agency. But Steve had
never stopped trying to reassure him that all their plans were not
forgotten, only postponed, until she gave Vinnie the family he wanted
so badly. Her husband had promised they would move west in a few more
years.
Steve had never had the chance to back up her promises and to
set things right between her and her father. The man she had always
considered invincible died in a car accident during a high-speed chase
one month after her second child was born.
A second devastating blow
had followed immediately after the first Each time Steve had tried to
talk to Vinnie about beginning her career it had ended in a screaming
battle. During one of their fights he had stated that no wife of his
was going to work outside the home and leave his children with
strangers, and especially not at a job where she would endanger her
life. Steve had then realized that he had married her assuming that she
would be so grateful to him she would always remain a dutiful wife.
Well, she had certainly been the perfect candidate—shy, plain, and a
virgin, with a healthy body that would bear the brood of children he
had anticipated having.
By the time their son was six months old,
Vinnie had found someone who understood him better than his
disagreeable wife. He had even managed to forget that he was the father
of two small children. The divorce had been ugly, but Steve had
survived—fawner baby, Vince, Jr., his two-year-old sister, Mary Ann,
and the promise she had made to her father.
Three and a half years had passed since then. Sometimes it felt like a lifetime, sometimes like it was only yesterday.
Lou
finally wound up his tale. "Michael Ohara was one of the best there
ever was, and don't you forget it, little girl." He paused a moment and
rubbed his eyelids with his forefinger and thumb, as if it was a strain
to remember that the child who had worshipped him and her father was
now a thirty-three-year-old woman and his business partner.
"Listen,
Steve, you don't have to prove anything anymore. No one doubts that
you're a good investigator, and we all know you can hold your own in a
bad situation. Hell, you probably could without all that karate shit.
But if you keep up the cowboy, or perhaps the correct term is
cowperson, routine, your luck is bound to run out one of these days
just like your dad's did. You have got to put a leash on that Irish
temper of yours. I know you've got a good brain. Use it! No more stupid
heroics. Got it?"
Steve's suspicious nature came alert She had
expected at least another half-hour of haranguing before he let her off
the hot seat. "Yes, sir."
"Good, because we've taken on a new
client, and the investigator on this case is going to have to use more
diplomacy than muscle. It's kid gloves all the way."
"Are you going to lay it out or do I have to cross my heart and hope to die if I don't behave first?"
Lou ignored her sarcasm. "Remember Bob Crandall?"
"Sure. He and his wife visited Dad and Mom a few times. He was in the Bureau with you, right?"
"Right.
But he left it years before we did. Now he's president of QRT, Inc., a
think tank in Silicon Valley. They're our new client.
"What happened? Someone steal an idea?" It sounded funny to Steve, but Lou frowned.
"Worse. One of the thinkers is missing."
"How long?"
"A
little over six weeks ago. The man's name is Karl Nesterman. Bob said
he's one of the top computer scientists in the world. They felt
privileged to have him working at QRT.
"Nesterman had been working
in his study in his home in San Jose when his wife, Evelyn, went out to
go shopping. Two hours later she returned and found that he and all his
clothing were gone. She immediately called the police and was told
she'd have to wait the usual twenty-four hours."
"What made her call
the police? Was there a note? Any evidence of foul play? Or was it just
that she couldn't believe her husband would leave her?"
Dokes gave
her a shake of his forefinger to remind her to hold her questions.
"There was only one thing which would seem insignificant to someone who
didn't know Nesterman. He had left the power on for his computer system
and a floppy disk in the disk drive. His wife insisted he would never
go farther than the bathroom without shutting down and putting
everything neatly back in its proper place.
"I had the new kid do
the preliminary legwork for you while you were out last week. She
talked to Mrs. Nesterman, then checked out his neighbors and coworkers.
Nesterman was a real straight arrow, no hanky-panky in his personal or
professional life, and just as fastidious as his wife claimed. You can
review those interviews yourself.
"There was no hint of mid-life
crisis, financial problems, or anything else that would indicate he had
a reason to walk out. Everyone questioned was positive he would not
have been involved in anything illegal, and he never touched drugs or
alcohol.
"Although his clothing and some luggage were gone, no
mementos, reading material, not even his portable computer were
removed. For that matter, not a single item anywhere else in the house
was tampered with. No fingerprints except the residents. No forced
entry or indications of a struggle. The doors and windows were all
still locked when Mrs. Nesterman returned home. He left no note, and
there has been no ransom demand. So what the authorities had was a big
zero!
"Had?" Steve interrupted. By now she knew it was Lou's way to
eliminate methodically everything a case was not before describing what
it was. She described him as a plodder. It worked for him, but it
usually drove her up the wall.
This time Dokes smiled indulgently at
her impatience. "QRT has a lot of government contracts. At the time he
disappeared, Nesterman was working on a top secret Defense Department
project—something involving the development of a series of microchips
for a new weapons system. When the local police didn't immediately come
up with anything, Bob contacted Defense.
"Based on the assumption
that it was a professional kidnapping and Nesterman's current project
could be the real target, the FBI was called in. They didn't do any
better than the locals. Since there was no ransom demand after a month
had gone by, it seemed apparent that the perpetrators wanted to keep
Nesterman. That meant that a foreign government or industrial
espionage, U.S. or otherwise, could be involved. But from what we know
now it looks like one of QRTs American competitors might be behind it."
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