White Lies (The Arcane Society #2)(54)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

The receptionist was starting to look uneasy. She reached for the phone. “I’ll call the manager’s office. I’m sure he can tell you where Dr. Mowbray is.”

“This is his office,” Elizabeth insisted.

“I’m sorry.” The receptionist gave Clare a pleading glance.

“How long have you been here?” Clare asked, moving to stand beside Elizabeth.

The receptionist hesitated. Then the glimmering of relief appeared in her eyes. “Miss Connors opened her office about three months ago. She hired me at that time. Perhaps Dr. Mowbray was the former tenant.”

“That explains it,” Clare said. She smiled. “My sister came to this office over six months ago. Obviously Dr. Mowbray has moved his practice.”

“Obviously,” the receptionist said. She gave Elizabeth a wary look. “That explains the mix-up.”

Elizabeth relaxed visibly. “Yes, it does. Sorry to have bothered you. Do you have any idea where Dr. Mowbray went?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Thank you,” Clare said. She took Elizabeth’s arm and steered her toward the door. “We’ll talk to the building manager.”

“His office is on the first floor,” the receptionist volunteered, clearly eager to see her visitors gone.

“Thank you,” Clare said.

Outside in the hall, Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Sorry about that. I almost lost it in there. When the receptionist said she’d never heard of Dr. Mowbray, those dreadful months with Brad flashed before my eyes.”

“I had a hunch that was what was going on.”

“All I could think about for a few seconds was how Brad convinced everyone that I was having fugue states in which I blanked out and couldn’t recall anything I’d said or done.”

“Well, now you know that you didn’t forget a thing,” Clare said. “You remembered the exact location of Mowbray’s office. Let’s go find the building manager.”

“He just disappeared,” Raul Estrada said.

The building manager was in his mid-thirties, professionally dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark trousers. His desk was covered with neatly stacked piles of papers, notebooks and logs. There was also a computer on the desk. Next to it was a photograph. The picture showed Raul, smiling proudly, together with a pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman and two laughing children.

Clare suppressed the little pang she always got whenever she saw a happy family portrait. Probably not a perfect family, she thought. No family was perfect. But something about the Estrada family picture gave her the feeling that whatever bad stuff might come, the Estradas would handle it as a family.

“No forwarding address?” Clare asked.

Raul shook his head. “Left owing a lot of rent. We tried to track him down but no luck.”

“Do you happen to know the date he vanished?” Elizabeth asked urgently.

Raul eyed her thoughtfully for a moment. “This is important, isn’t it?”

“It’s critical,” Elizabeth said. “I used to be one of Dr. Mowbray’s patients.”

“More like his only patient,” Raul said.

Clare tensed. Beside her Elizabeth did the same.

“Are you sure about that?” Clare said carefully.

Raul nodded. “After he vanished I talked to some of the other tenants on that floor. They all said that Mowbray kept to himself. He spent very little time in his office. Folks up there on four could only recall seeing one couple who showed up on a regular basis. They assumed the woman was the patient and the guy with her was her husband.”

“He had no other patients at all?” Elizabeth asked faintly.

“I can’t swear to it,” Raul said. “But I think it’s safe to say Mowbray didn’t have a large practice. I can tell you this much. Until you two showed up today, no one has come around looking for him.”

“Any mail or package deliveries?” Clare asked.

“No,” Raul said. “It’s like the guy never existed.”

Elizabeth sagged back into her chair, stunned. “He was a complete phony.”

Clare looked at Raul. “It would help us a lot if you could tell us the date he vanished.”

Raul watched Elizabeth for a long moment.

He swung around in his chair and pulled a logbook off a shelf. Swiveling back, he opened the log on the desk and flipped through several pages before stopping to examine one page more closely.

“Here we go. January seventeenth,” Raul said. “That was a Saturday. The weekend security guard made a note that Mowbray showed up very early that morning, collected some files and left again. Haven’t seen him since.”

“What about his office furniture?” Clare asked.

“The furniture was all rented.” Raul closed the log. “He left it behind. The rental company wasn’t too happy with him, either. He left owing them a couple thousand bucks. I checked with their accounting department a few months ago to see if they’d had any luck finding him. But they came to a dead end, too.”

Clare couldn’t think of anything else to ask. She rose from the chair. Elizabeth did the same.

“Thank you very much,” Clare said to Raul. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Let me know if you find Mowbray.” Raul got to his feet and came around the side of the desk. “He still owes us for breaking the lease.”

“We will contact you if we learn anything,” Elizabeth assured him.

Clare looked at the family picture on his desk. “Cute kids.”

Raul grinned. “Thanks. My son’s birthday is coming up next week. We’re all going to San Diego to play on the beach for a weekend. It will give us a break from the heat. I’ve got a new camera I’m looking forward to trying out.”

Clare thought about the pictures that would be taken over the course of the weekend on the beach. There would no doubt be lots and lots of images of two happy kids frolicking in the surf with Mom and Dad.

No such thing as a perfect family, she reminded herself. But what the Estradas had looked pretty good.

“Have fun,” she said.

The interior of the Mercedes had turned into a sauna again by the time Clare and Elizabeth returned to the vehicle. Elizabeth went through the ritual of lowering the windows, taking down the sunscreen, switching on the engine and firing up the air conditioner. She pulled two bottles of water out of the small ice chest behind the seat and handed one to Clare. She opened her own bottle and studied the office tower with a strange expression.