boss bill me and that’s that.”
She paused. “Sir, one more thing?”
“Of course.”
“He ran away, like some teenager. I don’t get it.”
“He didn’t. He left. He cut off everything, and he left. He told me he’d never be back, and I won’t accept that. This is where he belongs. He’s my only heir, the person who takes over when I’m gone. I need him back here.”
She had the feeling that his last sentence was his most truthful. He needed his son back with him. Not only for professional reasons but because he missed him. “Okay, Mr. Bishop,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”
She carried the box down to the parking garage level and got into her car, an unmemorable blue compact. She put the box on the passenger seat, opened it and reached for the papers on top—newspaper clippings, a copy of a birth certificate, several photos.
Duncan Bishop was the spitting image of his father, only younger. He had the intense dark eyes. Every photo of the man had him looking right into the camera, as if he met the world head on and didn’t flinch. His features weren’t perfect, but the strong jaw and high cheekbones combined to make the man “interesting.” His hair was short enough, styled back from his face, a dark brown shot with gold highlights, and every photo had him in a business suit or tuxedo. In one picture she found the Barr woman with him, his arm around her, the woman smiling at someone nearby, the man looking at the camera, appearing faintly bored.
She sorted through, got to the newspaper clippings and wasn’t surprised to see they were all about the business, all about the father and son making a deadly team. All about the victories of the Bishops. She put them back in the box, then looked at the birth certificate. Duncan Ross Bishop. Son of Ellen Gayle O’Hara and Duncan Ross Bishop. His birthday was a month away, two weeks before Christmas. She glanced at the birthplace. Silver Creek, Nevada. She’d heard of the place, but only because of a posh ski resort located there, a very expensive, very in-demand and very private place. A place a Bishop could afford, and, coincidentally, Duncan Bishop’s home.
A lot of people went home when they “disappeared,” and she wondered if Duncan Bishop was that predictable. Would she find him at the fancy resort there, The Inn at Silver Creek? Maybe he was there partying. Or hiding.
Whatever the case, she’d find him. Her future depended on it.
Chapter Two
Lauren found Duncan Bishop in one week, and if there hadn’t been a weekend plunked down in there, she would have found him faster. She looked for hits on his credit cards, his social security card and bank withdrawals. The hits had been all over the country on a personal credit card that wasn’t associated with the company. She’d followed the pattern, and that pattern had ended up where she’d first thought to look—Silver Creek, Nevada. It had been almost too easy.
One week after she’d met with D. R. Bishop, she was picking up a rental car in Las Vegas, carrying no luggage and with a return flight to Los Angeles that night at ten o’clock. She drove north through the expansive desert, and finally climbed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, heading up into rugged country. The one thing she hadn’t discovered was where in Silver Creek he was. He wasn’t at The Inn at Silver Creek north of the town. He wasn’t holed up in an obscenely expensive grouping of cottages that the rich and sometimes famous rented. He wasn’t sitting around a roaring fire in the evenings sipping cognac and rubbing shoulders with people like him. But he was in Silver Creek.
She’d found one place where the credit charges repeated themselves, a place called Rusty’s Diner. She found out that the diner was in the oldest section of town, the part that had survived from the early days when Silver Creek had been part of the huge silver-mining industry in the area. Rusty’s was owned by Dwayne Altman, sixty-five, with a bank balance that showed the diner did okay, but wasn’t in the same league as the trendy restaurants and cafés in the newer section of town.
She had no idea what Duncan Bishop was doing at Rusty’s, but when she had called the place and asked for him, the woman who answered had said, “He’s not in right now. Want to leave a message?” Lauren had hung up. She hadn’t been able to find anything in the records of the town with Duncan’s name on it, so she had to assume that he was either a customer who came in so regularly that they took calls for him there, or he worked there. Neither made sense to her. So she headed to Silver Creek to find Duncan Bishop, figure out what he was doing there and form a plan of action.
By the middle of the afternoon, she’d made it to Silver Creek, found Rusty’s Diner and was sitting across from it at a coffee shop with benches and tables outside on the wooden walkway that lined both sides of the street. She held an untouched cup of coffee, and waited. The diner across the street was rustic, but not in a fake way. It really was old, the wooden siding on it worn from time and weather, and the sign looked as if it had been there since the silver-mining days.
She glanced around at an area that was typical of any old mining town. It fanned out from the main street, a narrow two-lane thoroughfare, lined by brick and wooden buildings, its growth limited by the soaring mountains on either side of the pass. She could see skiing shops, antique stores, a museum to the north, a few bars, even some houses squeezed in here and there. Rusty’s sat between an art gallery that advertised “Silver Creek Primitive Art,” and a postal shipping center.
She glanced back at the coffee shop where she sat, and saw a brass plaque by the door declaring it had once been “the assay office for this whole territory.” Now it was a place that served “over 100 specialty coffees.” She sipped some of her own coffee, glanced across the street and saw the front door to the diner open. A large man in rough outdoor clothes—from a heavy navy jacket to worn Levi’s, heavy boots and a dark watch cap pulled low—stepped outside.
He was the right size, but she couldn’t get a good look at his face. So she watched him cross the wooden walkway, go to his right, and for a minute she was sure he was heading down the street. If he’d taken off, she would have followed, just in case she’d found Duncan Bishop.
Then luck was with her. He stopped at a large, new SUV, with Nevada dealer plates still on it. As he reached for the handle on the back cargo door, he paused and looked up, almost looking right at her. But his gaze swept past her, down the walkway to her right. He watched as a group of rowdy kids in expensive ski clothes came down the walkway. They stopped at a souvenir shop two doors down from where she sat, then the man went back to opening the door.
She sighed with relief because he hadn’t been looking at her, and because, with one glimpse of his face in the late afternoon sun, she knew she’d found Duncan Bishop. But he wasn’t the Duncan Bishop she’d seen in the pictures and clippings. This man looked like a rugged, blue-collar worker. He moved quickly, took two heavy boxes out of the new SUV, closed the door and headed back to the diner. She stayed where she was, waiting, but Duncan Bishop didn’t come back out.
She sipped a bit more of her now tepid coffee, then stood, tossing the paper coffee cup in a trash can by the table, then pushed her hands in the pockets of her plain navy jacket. Nothing about her stood out, except maybe her hair color and she hadn’t had time to do anything about that. So she opted for a knit ski cap she’d found in a supply store near where she’d parked the rental car. She had tugged it as low as she could to cover as much of her hair as possible.
Lauren hunched her shoulders into the cold, biting wind that seemed to have come from nowhere as she stepped down off the walkway and onto the parking shoulder. She waited for a car to pass, then she hurried across to Rusty’s. She pushed
