Page 32 of Pro Bono

“The food has been fine when I’ve been there.” He washed his hands at the sink and began to bring out silverware and plates and glasses.

“That’s comforting. You have a pretty pleasant lifestyle.”

“If you knew the truth, you’d feel sorry for me. Being a lawyer is spending your days in an office writing that horrible legalese that everybody else complains about and then driving home to spend your evenings finishing the work you couldn’t during the day. The rest of the time you argue or plan to argue.”

She stepped in and began to help him bring plates, silverware, and glasses to the table. They worked smoothly and easily together, so in a few minutes the dining room table was set and they were opening the bag to serve the dinner they’d brought.

She said, “This is such an odd contrast. The past few days are some of the most frightening in my life. Realizing I’ve been robbed, then beingkidnapped, then saved, then being interrogated by the police, and now having suspicious men watching my house.”

“I know it’s been bad,” he said. “But all you need to do now is to be safe and not be available to people who might wish you harm. I’ve frozen all your investment accounts, so nothing is being stolen right now. By tomorrow afternoon we should have a better idea of how the Great Oceana Corporation intends to handle the situation they’re in. If it’s satisfactory, we’ll get it in writing and concentrate on Founding Fathers.”

“You make it sound so clear and simple,” she said.

“It usually is if you can prove you’re the victim of a crime,” he said. “That’s the advantage of living in a country governed by laws.”

“No argument there,” she said. “But what I learned in this is that while we’re waiting for that process to take effect, anything can happen, and a lot did. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.”

“I know that’s a terrible feeling,” he said, “but we’ll just stay alert, try to bring the law to bear as fast as we can, and hold on.”

They finished their dinner and cleared the table. He picked up her overnight bag and led her into a hallway and past a row of doors. “This is the main bathroom. There’s also a private one off each of the bedrooms. These two doors on the right are the two guest suites. You can pick the one with a color you like or that has the best bed or feng shui or view or whatever. This door on the other side is my office, and beyond it is my room.”

“You choose.”

He went to the second room, opened the door, and turned on the light.

“This one looks great.” She reached for her bag, but he stepped forward with it and set it on the bed. “But I’m curious. Why did you pick this room?”

“Somebody looking for you would go to the closest bedroom first, and this way we might hear him go in. And this room is closer to my room, so I’d be able to help you if I had to. There are towels and the usual sorts of toiletries and things in the bathroom, if you forgot anything. I’ll be working at the kitchen table for a while, so don’t hesitate if you want a snack or anything.”

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s been a tiring few days. I think I’ll take a bath and try out the mattress.”

“Okay. Sleep tight.” He went to the table where his laptop was lying, took off his sport coat, and hung it on one of the chairs with the shoulders fitted over the chair’s back.

Vesper turned and went back to the bedroom suite he had chosen for her and closed the door. She sat on the bed and let her mind work its way through the few days since the moment when she had opened her car door near Charles Warren’s office and the two old kidnappers had pushed her in and then climbed in after her. There had been days of contemplating her death in the boarded-up room where she was being held. Then the door had swung open and the person she saw standing there was Charlie Warren.

From that moment on, the terrifying predicament she had been in had changed into something entirely unexpected and surreal. Within hours, she had been drawn into inventing, presenting, and providing evidence for a giant lie to the police. It felt like a dream. Not only was everybody else acting on motives that were brand new, but she was doing things to help them that she had never believed she would do.

She had read that people in very stressful situations were sometimes prone to mental states that seemed to outsiders like temporary insanity—identifying with their captors, even joining them, or having complete changes in their personalities. She felt sorry for them. They’dseen their normal protections to be mere assumptions that they wouldn’t be harmed, not actual barriers to harm. A small voice deep in their brains suddenly grew loud. “This isn’t working, really never worked, and wasn’t real. I’ve got to do something else.”

Vesper’s shock seemed to shake loose some things she had become attached to. She had been mourning her husband George for too long. On the afternoon when Charlie Warren had come to free her, a lot of facts had suddenly become visible to her, and one of them was the realization that she was thirty-six without ever having been thirty-three, thirty-four, or thirty-five. This was a lot to take in at once.

She began to unpack, taking each article of clothing out and hanging it up in the closet so it wouldn’t wrinkle, taking toiletries into the bathroom and arranging them in their usual order on the counter, taking her shoes out and setting them on the floor, socks and stockings and underwear in the top two drawers of the dresser. She reached into the bag for sleepwear to lay out on the bed to put on after her bath, a pair of charcoal gray flannel pajama pants and a blue pullover football shirt.

14

Charlie heard the sound of bath water running in Vesper Ellis’s suite, so he knew he was alone. He had not paid much attention to the movements of Patrick Ollonsun and Ronald Talbert since he had learned that they weren’t the ones who had kidnapped Vesper. He took out his phone to track the AirTags he had attached to their cars. He began with Talbert’s two black SUVs. He saw that one of them was in the garage on Valley Vista. The other was somewhere else.

It was on Mulholland Drive. The car was in the gated enclave where Patrick Ollonsun lived. He switched to the Ollonsun cars.

There they were—the small white Prius, the Lamborghini, the black sedan, all parked in the area behind the house. And right beside them was the black SUV that belonged to Ronald Talbert. Warren could hardly believe it. Several days ago, he had been trying to track two people he suspected of committing crimes against Vesper Ellis, but he had never given a minute’s thought to the idea that he would ever find them in the same place on a Monday night. Ollonsun worked for Great Oceana Monetary and Talbert worked for Founding Fathers Vested. They werecompetitors. Ollonsun was a few years older and seemed to be richer than Talbert. All they had in common was working in financial services.

He had read their official biographies posted on their companies’ websites and on LinkedIn. They had never worked in jobs at the same company. They had never gone to the same school or college or grown up in the same city. What the hell were they doing together? Was it to make some kind of joint response to Warren’s meeting with the legal staff of Great Oceana tomorrow?

Warren stood up and went down the hall toward the bedrooms. He went into his room and began to change. He took off his business clothes and put on black jeans, a blue hoodie, a black baseball cap with no logo, and running shoes. He put a black KN95 face mask into his pocket, and then took another one in case the elastic snapped, and put black gloves in the pockets of his hoodie. He went to the door of Vesper Ellis’s room and knocked.

He heard Vesper’s voice. “Hello?”

“Vesper, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go out for a while. You’re perfectly safe here, but if anything happens, call me and I’ll answer and come right away. And there’s always nine-one-one.”

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