Family Secrets: A Jake Badger Mystery Thriller Read online

  I rode the forty-seven stories to the top floor. The elevator doors opened to an expansive reception area that was tastefully decorated with light oak paneling, what appeared to be original oil paintings, leather furniture, and plush carpeting. On the left side of the room was an open doorway, the entryway to an office suite. On the opposite side of the reception area was another open doorway, the entryway to another office suite. I looked through the doorway on the right. A stern-looking, oversized, sixty-something woman sat at an oversized walnut desk. Through the doorway on the left, I saw an attractive thirty-something woman with blond hair and a prominent chest. I selected the doorway on the left. The nameplate on her walnut desk read, Ingrid.

  As I approached her desk, she said, “Mr. Badger?”

  I smiled. “Yes.” I had chosen well.

  “You may go in,” Ingrid said, getting up and gesturing toward the double office doors. Gold lettering on the doors proclaimed that June Morrison was the CEO.

  June's office was probably a thousand square feet of the same kind of paneling, oil paintings, leather furniture and plush carpet I’d seen in the reception area, except June’s office had an entire wall of built-in bookshelves filled with leather bound books. It looked like the library of an English manor house and seemed somehow incongruous in the modernistic building it was in. Her large desk, also walnut, contained only a large Apple computer monitor and a keyboard. She came around her desk to greet me as I approached. We shook hands and she invited me to sit in one of her guest chairs. She sat in the other one.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Badger?”

  “Please, call me Jake.”

  “Jake,” she said, nodding.

  “I need to be able to talk to anyone in the company who was here thirty years ago when you and Jane began working here.”

  She nodded. “Okay. I'll have Ingrid make you a list.”

  “I also need for you to make sure they know they should talk to me.”

  She nodded.

  “It would also be helpful,” I said, “to have a list of other people who knew her then: friends, neighbors, relatives, boyfriends. Everyone you can think of.”

  I could see her thinking about the task. “That could take me a while,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Maybe there are some old photos, school yearbooks, that sort of thing, that might help jog your memory.”

  She was nodding. “Still might take me a day or so. Can I email it to you?”

  “Sure. In the meantime, though, you said that Jane started in research and development. Is that where she was when she left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who would she have been working with at that time?”

  She thought for a moment, trying to recall personnel from thirty years ago. “Probably Neil Hampton,” she said.

  “Where can I find Neil?”

  “Research and development is in our facility in Van Nuys.” She went to her desk, got some paper from a desk drawer, wrote down the address and handed it to me as she sat back down. “I'll call and let Neil know to expect you.”

  I looked at the paper for a moment and then said, “Mrs. Morrison …”

  “June,” she said. “If you’re Jake, I’m June.”

  I smiled and nodded. “June. Digging into an unknown past can sometimes generate an unanticipated level of discomfort. Your sister was obviously very upset about something or something very serious happened. Discovering what it was may not be pleasant.”

  “I understand,” she said. “But I need to know.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  Wilson and I were on our way to the Lindell Industries R & D facility in Van Nuys. It was a nice day, the kind where you’d like to go for a walk in a park or along the beach. The temperature was in the upper seventies and a gentle breeze blew puffy white clouds across the blue sky. As I drove, I put the passenger side window down and Wilson rode the whole way with his head out the window, enjoying the scents carried on the wind. The drive took thirty minutes. I parked in the visitor's section of the main lot and went in.

  The woman at the information desk in the lobby told me that Neil Hoffman's office was on the seventh floor on the northwest side of the building. Specifically, he was in 7NW14. She gave me directions. It would have been easier if she'd given me GPS coordinates and let me find it with my iPhone.

  When I found Hoffman's door, I knocked.

  From behind the door a husky voice said, “Come in.”

  Neil Hoffman's office was industrial plain and standard. It was twelve by twelve, plain white walls, metal desk, a couple of file cabinets, and a couple of metal shelves on the wall behind the desk. There were two cheap metal frame chairs with green upholstery. In one corner was a small table with a plant and an old photograph of a rather plain-looking middle-aged woman, presumably Mrs. Hoffman, probably taken twenty years ago.

  Neil Hoffman, equally plain-looking, was tall and thin, with gray hair that was beginning to thin. His skin was pasty white and starting to wrinkle. His eyes were small; his nose was big.

  As I closed his door behind me, he said, “Jake Badger?”

  “Yes.”

  He stood and offered his hand across his desk. “Neil Hoffman.”

  I shook his hand. There was a gap between his front teeth.

  “Please,” he said, “have a seat.”

  I sat.

  Hoffman said, “Mrs. Morrison called and said you had some questions about her sister, Jane. What would you like to know?”

  “Whatever you can tell me,” I said.

  He nodded. “The first thing I noticed about her,” he said, “was that she was so nice, so normal.”

  “Nice and normal,” I said.

  “Didn’t expect it,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Her father was Lyell Lindell. She was rich and, one would assume, pampered. She’d gone to one of those hoitsy-toitsy prep schools and then to Harvard. When I heard I'd be working with one of the boss’s daughters, I figured she'd be spoiled and stuck up. But Jane wasn't like that. She was like the rest of us. An ordinary person. She worked hard. She cared about people. She was nice and she was normal.”

  “Do you remember the day when she didn't show up for work?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the time preceding that day,” I said, “days before, weeks before, did she seem different in any way?”

  “Different how?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Distracted, maybe. Concerned. Unhappy.”

  He took a breath and thought for a moment. As he thought, he rubbed the back of his neck like he was trying to relax a tight muscle. Finally, he said, “Now that you mention it, she did seem sort of distracted sometimes. Far away.”

  “Any idea what the problem might have been?”

  He shook his head. “No. She was kind of private. She didn't talk a lot about personal matters. I figured that it was because her life was so different, you know, privileged, that she didn't talk about it.”

  I nodded.

  Neil went on. “If she talked to anyone about it, it would have been Cole Jamison.”

  I wrote down the name. “Why Cole Jamison?”

  He shrugged. “They became friends. They were the same age. They liked the same kind of music. That sort of thing.”

  “You think Mr. Jamison might have some additional insights about Jane in the days before she left?”

  “Might. I don't know.”

  “Where can I find Cole Jamison?”

  “At the moment, he's on the island of Santorini.”

  “In the Aegean?” I asked.

  Hoffman nodded. “Cole left Lindell Industries a long time ago. Right after Jane left, in fact. Opened up a used bookstore in Chatsworth. Never see any customers in there. Don't know how he makes a living. He says he sells a lot of books to collectors, does a lot on the internet. Must be doing okay because he goes to Santorini for a month every year.”

  “Any
idea when he'll be back?” I asked.

  “Two weeks,” he said. “He'll be back on the seventeenth. We get together once a month to have pizza and play a game of chess. I'll see him on the nineteenth.”

  “Any way to contact him while he's away?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No internet, no phone. He likes the isolation.”

  “You got a number for him so I can contact him when he gets back?”

  “Sure.” He wrote down Cole Jamison's cell phone number for me.

  “Anyone else working here who would have known Jane when she was here?”

  He thought for a moment, his eyes wandering over the wall behind me. “Yes. One other person, I think. Linda Costello. At that time, Linda was our department secretary. She and Jane were the same age. They'd go to lunch a couple of times a week.”

  “What does Ms. Costello do now?” I asked.

  “She's a project manager now.”

  “Here? In this facility?”

  “Yeah. Her office is just down the hall.”

  “Think she'd have time to talk with me?” I asked.

  He reached for his phone. As he punched in a four-digit extension he said, “I'll pass on Mrs. Morrison's message to her.”

  Chapter 6

  Linda Costello's office was very much like Neil Hoffman's, except it looked like a woman's office: several plants, family photos, personal items, some color, some warmth. The office looked better than the woman who decorated it. Linda was short and overweight. If she was the same age as Jane had been, she was fifty-six. She looked several years older. Tired. Life had not been good to Linda Costello. She invited me to sit in one of her guest chairs.

  “So, Mrs. Morrison wants me to talk with you about Jane.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Jane died recently,” I said.

  Ms. Costello shrank a little at the news. “I hadn't heard. I'm sorry.”

  “Mrs. Morrison has hired me to look into the possible reasons for Jane’s departure thirty years ago.”

  “And you think I might know something about it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Sometimes people know more than they think they know.”

  “I wouldn't even know where to begin,” she said.

  “Neil said you and Jane were friends, that you went to lunch a few times a week.”

  She nodded. “We were casual friends. Office friends, I guess. We went to lunch. We didn't really see each other in any other context.”

  “You remember when she left?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything different about her in the days or weeks before she left?”

  “I remember that she seemed distracted.”

  “Neil remembered the same thing,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “What do you think might have been distracting her?” I asked.

  She shook her head. Thinking about it seemed to make her more tired than she already was. “I remember thinking she was seeing someone. But it was strange. She would be happy one day and distracted the next.”

  “Did you ask her about it?” I asked.

  “We weren't close enough for me to ask her. She was kind of a private person. If she had wanted me to know, she'd have told me.”

  “But you think she was seeing someone.”

  “That's what it seemed like to me.”

  “Forgive me for asking,” I said, “but I'm just a man. Why did you think she was seeing someone?”

  She smiled. “Women can just tell. A young woman looks and acts a certain way when she's in love.”

  “You think she was in love?”

  “I think she thought she was.”

  “But some days she seemed distracted,” I said.

  Linda nodded. “And maybe a little sad,” she added.

  “But you’ve no idea about what.”

  “Not precisely. But if she was in love, my guess would be that things weren't going as well as she would have liked.”

  “Do you know who any of her close friends were?”

  She shook her head and said, “Like I said, we were just work friends. You'd think, though, that Mrs. Morrison would know. They were identical twins. Aren't identical twins supposed to have some kind of a special connection?”

  “Good question,” I said. “I'll have to ask June about Jane's love life.”

  I paused to think about what I'd learned. Ms. Costello waited for me.

  Finally, I asked, “Do you know anyone else who was close to Jane?”

  “No. She got along well with everyone she worked with. But being a Lindell, she lived in a different world.”

  I nodded.

  “I'm sorry I can't be more helpful,” Linda said.

  “No,” I said. “You've been very helpful. I appreciate it very much.”

  It was lunchtime when I left the R & D facility, so I stopped for lunch at In-N-Out Burger. I got a double double and some fries for myself, and a plain double double for Wilson. We ate in my Jeep, listening to the Beatles. I shared some of my fries with Wilson. Then it was back to Century City to ask June about Jane's love life.

  Chapter 7

  “My sister was a little on the shy side when it came to men,” June said. “She only had a few dates all through high school and college.”

  “Why do you think she was shy?”

  “I don't know. Some people are just shy.”

  “You don't seem to be shy,” I said.

  She smiled. “No. I've never had a problem with shyness.”

  “Over the years,” I said, “I've known a few sets of twins. Sometimes one of them would be the more dominant. Might that have been the case with you and Jane?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I never really thought about it. What does this have to do with Jane's leaving?”

  “I don't know. Maybe nothing. I'm just trying to get a clear picture of who Jane was.”

  June nodded.

  “How close were the two of you?” I asked.

  “We were very close. We were best friends.”

  “Do you think you had a psychic connection?”

  “You hear about that with some twins, don't you?” June said. “Especially with identical twins. I've read about it. We knew another set of twins at Harvard that claimed to have a psychic connection. They said that each knew what the other was feeling. If one of them was upset, the other one could feel it. But Jane and I never had anything like that. We were just sisters who loved and liked each other.”

  I paused to have a sip of the tea that June had had Ingrid bring when I arrived.

  “You said your job was in marketing, while Jane's was in R & D.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you were in different locations.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you probably put in some long days. Moved in different circles, had meetings with different people.”

  “Of course,” June said.

  “Is it possible that she might have been seeing someone without you knowing it?”

  “It's possible, I suppose. I just don't think she would have kept that from me.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled. “Because that's the sort of thing we always shared with each other. Most sisters do. At least the ones who are close.”

  “Linda Costello said she thought Jane was seeing someone and thought she was in love.”

  June frowned and thought about that. She shook her head. “I think if Jane had been seeing someone, I'd have known about it.”

  “What about if she were upset about something? Would you have known about that too?”

  “I guess it would depend on what she was upset about,” June said. “And probably also on how upset she was.”

  “Both Neil and Linda said that they remembered Jane being distracted, concerned about something. Do you remember anything like that?”

  June thought some more and then shook her head. “No. But then in those days they probably spent more time with Jane than I did.”


  “Was Jane the kind of person who got upset easily?”

  “No more so than anyone else.”

  “She was distracted enough for people she worked with to notice it,” I said. “Any idea what it might have been that would distract her like that?”

  June shook her head. “No idea. What kind of things upset you enough to distract you?” she asked me.

  I smiled and nodded. “I know,” I said. “Sometimes the questions don't sound like they are based on a great deal of thought. But you'd be surprised. Sometimes the silliest question can yield something significant.”

  “Anything significant coming from this exchange?” June asked.

  “Too soon to tell.”

  June finally took a sip of her tea. “I'll have the list of contacts ready for you tomorrow.”

  That meant it was time for me to go. She was, after all, CEO of a company that employed many thousands of people worldwide.

  I stood, thanked her for her time, and left.

  Chapter 8

  I had asked enough questions for the day. I needed to process what I had learned and create a tentative plan for how to proceed when June sent me the list she was working on. I hadn't talked to Alex for a couple of weeks, which was uncommon, so I called him to see if he wanted meet for dinner. He said he did. It was his turn to come in my direction so we decided on Kung Pao at six on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City.

  Alex Watson and I met while at the FBI academy. He had a bachelors degree in computer science from UCLA and a law degree from Pepperdine University. Academically he was brilliant, the kind of candidate the FBI was looking for. However, he was also a world-class nerd, the ninety-eight pound weakling, so to speak. He couldn't shoot, couldn't fight, didn't really know how to be aggressive. But he wanted to be a field agent. He noticed that I did know how to do those things and asked me if I would help him. I told him I enjoyed a challenge, and would work with him if he agreed to do what I told him to do. He agreed. We ran; we lifted weights. I designed a meal plan for him: meat, eggs, cheese, and protein shakes. I taught him to shoot and to fight. By the time we graduated, he'd gained thirty pounds of muscle, could bench press his weight, run five miles, could put five rounds in the center circle from thirty feet, and hold his own in a fight.