The Unspoken: An Ashe Cayne Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR IAN K. SMITH

  “Ian K. Smith’s The Unspoken is the start of a big, bold, original new series. Chicago PI Ashe Cayne is the perfect hero for our times. I can’t wait to read his next adventure.

  —Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  ALSO BY IAN K. SMITH

  Novels

  The Ancient Nine

  The Blackbird Papers

  Nonfiction

  Clean & Lean

  The Clean 20

  Blast the Sugar Out!

  The Shred Power Cleanse

  The Shred Diet Cookbook

  Super Shred

  Shred

  The Truth About Men

  Eat

  Happy

  The 4 Day Diet

  Extreme Fat Smash Diet

  The Fat Smash Diet

  The Take-Control Diet

  Dr. Ian Smith’s Guide to Medical Websites

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Ian K. Smith

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN 13: 9781542025270 (hardcover)

  ISBN 10: 1542025273 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542020855 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542020859 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  To Tristé, Dashiell, and Declan. Shimmering rainbows. Fearless adventures. Foreign lands. Picturesque sunsets . . . and tennis . . . of course.

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  “MY DAUGHTER IS MISSING, and I want you to find her.”

  The woman sitting across from me was beautiful in an aristocratic way. Her blonde hair had been perfectly coiffed and pulled back from her angular face; her enormous teardrop diamond earrings reflected light across my office like shards of glass stuck in fresh blacktop. She wore a formfitting French blue wool suit with a gold clasp on the blazer hooked by two Cs. Chanel. Everything about her reeked of wealth, including that clipped voice and its trace of venerable New England. She was old and young at the same time.

  “Have you tried the men in blue?” I asked.

  “I did,” she said, nodding her head about a millimeter. “And that’s why I’m here.”

  I raised my eyebrows and opened up my hands.

  “They’re the ones who told me about you,” she said. “They said they’d look into my daughter’s disappearance, but they weren’t convinced she was missing. I was surprised they said that. I thought if someone had not been in contact for forty-eight hours, they were officially considered a missing person.”

  “That’s only in TV land,” I said. “In the real world, there are no hard rules. It could be several days; it might be just several hours. Depends on the officer taking the report. It’s usually based on a suspicious deviation from a person’s normal behavior or their typical movement patterns.”

  “Such as?”

  “Take a guy who comes home between five and six every day, and if he’s going to be late, he always makes sure to call his wife to let her know. One night he doesn’t come home, no one has been able to contact him for several hours, and none of his points of contact know where he is. If there’s a reasonable degree of suspicion that his routine has been interrupted involuntarily, then that person would be considered missing.”

  The woman nodded. “One of the officers pulled me aside and said you could probably do a faster job than they could. That you worked with fewer restrictions. No red tape. He gave me your address.”

  “The truth shall set you free,” I said, smiling with as much charm as I could muster. “But unfortunately, I don’t take on many cases this time of year. It’s my quiet season. About two weeks left before it’s too cold to play golf, three if I’m lucky. I’m still trying like hell to bring my handicap down a couple of strokes before the season ends.”

  What I didn’t tell her was that I turned down a lot more cases than I took on. Thanks to an extremely generous settlement from Chicago PD upon my negotiated resignation and an Ivy League whiz kid who managed my money, work was now a choice, not a necessity.

  “Mr. Cayne, my name is Violet Gerrigan,” she said, moving slightly in her seat but enough for me to see her legs. I didn’t think it was intentional. They were very nice to look at, however, and very tan, especially for this time of year. Given her $5,000 suit, I figured this hue was not the work of a tanning bed crammed into some second-floor salon in a walk-up in Wrigleyville. This was coloration earned on a yacht docked in the Mediterranean or lounging poolside in one of those ritzy gated Florida communities like West Palm Beach or Fisher Island.

  “Money is no object,” she said firmly. She wasn’t boasting, simply proffering a statement of fact. “I have the means to pay you whatever it takes to find my daughter. I just want her home safely.”

  I knew the Gerrigan name. You’d have to be living on the bottom of Lake Michigan not to know it. Randolph Gerrigan was a real estate mogul, second only to the city itself in owning the most real estate in Chicago. The family’s portfolio of properties was so large that when an interviewer asked how much of the city his family owned, Randolph Gerrigan replied, “Come to think of it, I have absolutely no idea, but I know it’s a helluva lot.”

  “For the record, money alone doesn’t motivate me,” I said to Violet Gerrigan. “But it at least gets my attention. Tell me about your daughter.”

  Mrs. Gerrigan reached into her blue snakeskin purse, which probably cost more than my yearly mortgage, and pulled out a four-by-six color photograph. She looked at it for a moment, then slid it across my desk. No one would dare say that the Gerrigan daughter had average looks. She was the American dream—thick blonde hair and stunning sapphire-blue eyes. Her teeth were perfect in every way. She was innocently leaning against a tree in a black skintight dress. She looked athletic and very capable. A real heart crusher.

  “Tinsley is our middle child and our only daughter,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “She’s a good girl bu
t sometimes a little misguided.”

  Misguided had been a carefully selected adjective, the only tell a slight pause before she’d said it. I studied Violet Gerrigan. Her face was emotionless. She could win a lot in poker hands.

  “How would you define a little misguided?” I asked.

  “Sometimes she has no regard for rules or protocol,” Mrs. Gerrigan said, her jaws visibly clenching. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s not rebellious to the point of making trouble for herself or others. But of all my children she has always been the free spirit. She does what she wants and to hell with anyone who disagrees. But she has never been in trouble with the law or a problem in school. Always made excellent grades.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “So, she’s old enough to make her own decisions even if they don’t exactly mesh with yours or your husband’s.”

  “Sure, but Tinsley still lives under our roof, Mr. Cayne,” Mrs. Gerrigan said firmly. “And as long as she does, we make the rules. Her age is irrelevant.”

  “I understand,” I said. “My father put the same conditions on my living in his house after college. I lasted just shy of a month. Maybe Tinsley got the same itch.”

  “Tinsley didn’t leave us on her own. She’s gone off before without any notice, but this time is different. She was supposed to be going to her best friend’s house two days ago. She left our house and never made it there and never came home. I believe something or someone has stopped her from returning.”

  “Any idea who that someone or something might be?”

  “None.”

  I took a moment and let silence fill the room. This made whatever I said next seem as if it came from serious thinking. I had learned this trick from my psychiatrist father. He liked to call it the “pause of deep intellect.”

  “It’s a reflex for us to look for the most complicated answers to the simplest of questions,” I finally said.

  Her left eyebrow arched again, this time about a millimeter higher than the last time. “Which means?” she said.

  “I don’t presume to know your family dynamics,” I said. “But maybe Tinsley just had enough. She’s in her midtwenties. It’s a big, exciting world out there. Sometimes a kid just decides it’s time to cut the cord.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Cayne, I know my daughter,” she said. “And this is not how she would do it. She and her father are extremely close. At the very least, she would tell him.”

  I studied her face and couldn’t help but notice how perfectly her makeup had been applied. Violet Gerrigan wasn’t my type of woman, but she was definitely starting to grow on me. Her composure for a mother missing a daughter was remarkable.

  “Nothing has been taken from her room from what I can tell,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “Clothes, jewelry, luggage, personal items—it’s all in perfect order. And more importantly, Tabitha is still at the house.”

  “Who’s Tabitha?”

  “Her three-year-old shih tzu. Tinsley would never leave without that dog. Worships every inch of ground she walks on.”

  I was already trying to assemble everything she had told me so far. Lots of holes needed to be filled in, but my curiosity had been piqued. “I assume you’ve spoken to this friend who she went to see a couple of nights ago,” I said.

  “Of course we did,” Mrs. Gerrigan said, as if the question had offended her. Her next words got stuck in her throat. Her neck twitched a bit. “Hunter has no idea where she is. She said that Tinsley never made it to her house that night.”

  After Violet Gerrigan pulled herself together and we discussed my fee and operational procedures, she wrote a very generous retainer for my services, then left as distinctly aristocratic as she had arrived. I stood at the window behind my desk, which looked out onto Michigan Avenue. A thin Asian man in a black uniform and matching cap dutifully stood outside a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom, whose shiny front grill looked like it was heavy enough to need a crane to pry it loose. I saw him make a sudden move, and in seconds he had the door open and had ushered Mrs. Gerrigan into the back seat. I stood there and watched as the car slowly pulled up Michigan Avenue, looking like a gleaming yacht among rowboats. As I lost the taillights in the snaking traffic, there was one question I couldn’t get out of my mind. Why had Violet Gerrigan come without her husband?

  I picked up my cell phone and called in a favor from a friend in CPD’s Bureau of Investigative Services. Want to find a twentysomething these days? Start with their phone and their digital footprint.

  2

  THE MORGAN FAMILY ESTATE sat auspiciously in the 4900 block of Greenwood Avenue in the historic mansion district of Kenwood, an exclusive enclave within the Hyde Park neighborhood. This landmark community just minutes south of downtown boasted one of the greatest densities of millionaires in the city. The tree-lined streets had been featured in every significant architectural magazine, the coverage always anchored by the rambling Adler mansion, built at the turn of the twentieth century for Max Adler, vice president of retail giant Sears and Roebuck and founder of the city’s Adler Planetarium. Each gated mansion, vividly unique in design, quietly battled its equally imposing neighbors. Tall maple trees formed a canopy over the wide street as small armies of olive-skinned landscapers diligently tended to the manicured lawns.

  I had been to this neighborhood once before purely out of curiosity. A year after making detective I had been told the story of the famous Leopold and Loeb murder, once billed as the crime of the century. In 1924 two wealthy teenage graduate students from the University of Chicago who were also residents of Kenwood kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, son of a wealthy industrialist, on his way home from school. It was considered the country’s first thrill kill—the murderers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had confessed they’d set out to commit the perfect murder purely for the thrill of it. Clarence Darrow, the most acclaimed criminal defense lawyer at the time, “won” the case by convincing the judge to sentence them to life in prison plus ninety-nine years instead of the death penalty sought by the prosecution.

  While the Leopold and Loeb houses had been demolished, the Franks house still stood. It was badly deteriorated, but the expansive yellow-brick mansion conjured images of what it must’ve been like when the entire nation followed with morbid fascination the story of the wealthy homosexual lovers, their pubescent victim, and the “trial of the century.” The Franks house was on the perimeter of Kenwood, but today I was driving farther into the affluent enclave.

  Since my visit many years ago, not much had changed except that a former US senator had ridden the wave to become the first African American president. Despite his international fame, he still owned a well-appointed Georgian brick affair just a block away from the Franks mansion. Heading south on Greenwood, the heavy concrete Jersey barriers stood like fortified sentries with two loud SECRET SERVICE signs flanking the entrance to his block. The federal agents who had once kept watch around the clock had been replaced with a single private security car that was no longer covered by taxpayers.

  The Morgan mansion was an enormous redbrick conglomerate that sat far back from the road, imperiously keeping watch over its sweeping lawn. Like the others on the street, the tall wrought iron gate was solidly locked. I rang the intercom.

  “Ashe Cayne,” I said. “I’m here to see Hunter Morgan.”

  “May I ask what this is about?” the voice returned. It belonged to an older woman with heapings of the South in her voice.

  “It’s about Tinsley Gerrigan,” I said.

  There was a short pause; then a buzzer sounded and the lock slapped back. I pushed through the gate and tried to look unimpressed as I strode up the long bluestone walkway. Two rows of meticulously trimmed hedges lined the pathway leading to the massive limestone front steps. I spotted three cameras on the house positioned at different angles and one peering from the trunk of an enormous oak in the middle of the yard. I also noticed a couple of motion detectors hidden in tw
o of the potted plants closer to the front porch. Just off to the right I could see the makings of a tennis court in the backyard and lawn furniture that looked more expensive than the best pieces I had in my dining room. Several sculptures had been installed throughout the yard.

  I had done a quick internet search on the Morgan family, and most of what I’d found had to do with the family’s attendance at society functions or mentions in the Tribune or Crain’s about their philanthropic work. Mrs. Morgan was the daughter of a DuPont cousin and through a complicated labyrinth of trusts, deaths, and divorces had inherited a piece of the DuPont fortune. She sat on a long list of charitable boards and wrote enormous checks to get the Morgan name carved into the cold limestone of hospital wings and eco-friendly parks.

  I’d tried looking up both Tinsley and Hunter on social media. I couldn’t find either of them on Facebook, but both were on Twitter and Instagram. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see anything except for their avatar pictures. Both accounts were set to private.

  As I hit the first step of the expansive porch, one of the gigantic oak double doors opened. An emaciated black woman in a well-ironed uniform and hairnet stood with a cautious smile on her face. She looked as old as the house.

  “Do come in,” she said, in that gracious southern accent. “Mrs. Morgan has asked that you join her in the east parlor.”

  I followed the old but limber woman through a maze of ornate rooms, one bigger than the next, each of them full of gilded framed artwork and custom-made furniture that looked as if it hadn’t been sat on since the house was first decorated. Every room held several vases of fresh flowers, and most of the potted plants towered over my six-foot-three-inch frame. We journeyed down one last hallway toward the rear of the house, then entered a room that was bigger than my entire apartment. The red lacquered walls had inlaid gold leaf designs that delicately sparkled under the sun rushing in from the open bay windows in the northern part of the room. Old white men with uncompromising expressions looked down sternly from gold baroque frames as if to remind those who stared back that this house had been built from the dividends of serious business. I had been in many a snazzy home before, but the opulence here was nothing short of breathtaking.