shook his head. “No, nothing can change that, but I’ll learn to live with it.”
Then he turned and walked away. D.R. yelled from the door of his private office, but not at Duncan. He yelled at his secretary, a middle-aged woman who had been with D.R. for ten years. “Helen, call security. Mr. Bishop is leaving. He’s to take nothing with him, have no access to his office or anything to do with this company.”
Helen chanced a furtive glance at Duncan, and he could see the look of commiseration on her face. She knew what it was like to be browbeaten by the CEO. As he strode out the main office door, the last thing he heard was Helen saying, “Yes, sir, right away, sir.”
Duncan didn’t go anywhere near his office. He went straight down to the parking garage, got in his car and took nothing with him when he went through the security gates for the last time. He didn’t look back as he pulled out onto the congested streets of downtown Los Angeles bathed in the late afternoon sun of a clear May day. He drove to his apartment, packed his bags, told the superintendent he’d be in contact and left.
When he met with Adrianna, he found out the old man had been right about at least one thing. Adrianna wasn’t having any part of his explanations. She didn’t get it, either. Finally, he gave up and left her, too. When he drove away from Los Angeles, he drove away from his old life and everything in it. And he didn’t look back.
Los Angeles,
Six Months Later:
“I’M A MAN OF PATIENCE,” D. R. Bishop said as his secretary left, closing the door securely behind her. “But even I have my limits.”
Lauren Carter never took her eyes off the large man across the impressive wood-and-marble desk. D. R. Bishop was dressed all in black. He was a huge, imposing man, and definitely, despite what he said, a man with little patience. He looked tightly wound and ready to spring.
Lauren sat very still in a terribly uncomfortable chair, her hands in her lap while she let D. R. Bishop do all the talking. She simply nodded from time to time. The longer he talked, she got the impression he was the type who drove his life by the sheer force of his will, the same way he did business.
“My son walked out on everything six months ago,” he said.
She finally spoke. “Why?”
He tented his fingers thoughtfully with his elbows resting on the polished desktop as if he were considering her single-word question. But she knew he was considering just how much to tell her. His eyes were dark as night, a contrast to his snow-white hair and meticulously trimmed beard. “Ah, that’s a good question,” he said, hedging for some reason.
“Mr. Bishop, you’ve dealt with the Sutton Agency enough to know that privacy and discretion are part and parcel of our service. Nothing you tell me will go any further.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders and sank back in his chair. “Of course. I expect no less,” he said.
“Why did your son leave?”
“I thought it was a middle-age crisis of some sort.” He smiled slightly, a strained expression. “Not that thirty-eight is middle aged. Then I thought he might be having a breakdown. Maybe gone over the edge.” The man stood abruptly, rising to his full, imposing height, and she could have sworn she felt the air ripple around her from his movement. “But he’s not crazy, Ms. Carter, he’s just damn stubborn. Too damn stubborn.”
She waited as he walked to the windows behind him and faced the city twenty floors below. When he didn’t speak again, she finally said, “You don’t know why he left?”
The shoulders shrugged again sharply. “A difference of opinion on how to do business. Nothing new for us.” He spoke without turning. “We’ve always clashed, but in the end, we’ve always managed to make our business relationship work.”
The two of them had made Bishop International a force to be reckoned with in the financial world. When he didn’t speak again for several minutes, she knew she wasn’t going to get more on the “whys” of his son leaving. Even though she’d been working as a private investigator for less than a year, Lauren knew when she was hitting a concrete wall, when the client wasn’t about to disclose personal information.
She took a notebook and pen out of her purse and got to the point of the meeting. “What do you want from the Sutton Agency exactly, Mr. Bishop?”
“Find him.”
“That’s it?”
He turned back to her, studying her intently for several moments before he said, “No.”
“Then what else do you want us to do?”
“As an employee of Sutton, I want you to find my son, and I want him to come back here, willingly.”
“Okay,” she said.
He gripped the back of his chair, pressing his long fingers into the plush leather. “I’m going to offer you something that’s just between the two of us, and no one else. Agreed?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I can hardly agree to it.”
He let go of the chair and came around to where she was and sat on the edge of his desk. She had no doubt every move he made was well thought out for maximum effect on the person he was facing. She was tall for a woman at five-nine, but still shorter than he was by half a foot, and he outweighed her hundred and twenty-five pounds by a lot. Now he was looking down at her intently, and it was all she could do to stay seated and not stand to minimize his advantage.
“He’s a barracuda.” That’s what Vern Sutton, her boss at the Sutton Agency, had told her when she’d been assigned to this job. “The man is tough as nails and gets what he wants. He doesn’t care how he does it, either.” The agency had done a number of background checks for D. R. Bishop over the years, on employees, business associates and even personal acquaintances. But they had never handled a missing person’s case for them.
D.R. had personally called the agency this time, said he needed to locate a missing person, and he’d asked for her specifically to be on the case. He hadn’t given Vern a reason, and Vern hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t told Vern the missing person was his own son.
“Why don’t you just explain things to me, and then I can make a decision? No matter how this turns out, it will be kept confidential,” she finally said when she couldn’t stand the silence between them any longer. “But I can’t make any decision until I know what’s involved.”
“That sounds doable,” he said. “I want you to find Duncan. See where he’s gone, and what he’s doing. Meet him, interact with him and figure out a way to get him back here of his own accord. Then we’ll have a deal between the two of us, an incentive if you’d like.”
She wasn’t going to play a guessing game with him. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re talking about?”
He nodded faintly as if she’d passed some test. “If you can get my son to come back here willingly, I’ll of course pay the agency’s bill, but I’ll make another payment that will go directly to you. A bonus. From me, to you.”
“Just for getting him back here?”
“Yes,
