Missing. Jasmine Cresswell
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was my place to shove my nose into my parents’ marriage by accusing Dad of having an affair. In the end, I made a special trip to Chicago, just to talk to him. He assured me the ‘affair’ was already over. That being caught by me at the fund-raiser had made him realize the risks he was running and how much he cherished his relationship with Mom. And so on and so on, through the laundry list of lies.”
“And you believed him?”
“At the time.” Liam’s smile was bitter. “You won’t be surprised to hear that Dad lied very convincingly. It was another two years before I found out that Avery was much more than a passing affair—that our father had actually gone through a formal marriage ceremony with her and that they had a daughter a few months younger than you.”
“How did you find out those important details?” Megan heard the shake in her own voice. She wasn’t sure if the tremor was caused by anger or something more complicated and even more painful.
“Again, by accident. I was sent unexpectedly to Chicago by my law firm. They needed me to take depositions for a criminal case we were working on. The witness I was sent to interview had offices in Oakbrook—“
“In Oakbrook?” Megan repeated. “That’s where the offices of Dad’s company are located.”
Liam gave a tight, angry smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. In fact, I was working only six or seven blocks away from where I believed R & R Investments was headquartered. So when I finished taking the depositions, I decided to drop in on Dad and invite him to dinner. We’d been estranged since the incident in Atlanta, and I figured it was time to get our relationship back on track.”
“I remember the offices,” Megan said. “Dad took us there the summer you graduated from high school. I was in fourth grade and I spent at least an hour making Xerox pictures of my hands on the copying machine. Then Mom and I went back for another visit years later when I was about to start college. Dad suggested that we might like to come to Chicago and do some shopping. He said it would be a good opportunity to meet his office staff and his partners.”
Liam laughed, the sound harsh. “You have to give the guy credit. He sure had outsized balls. And you met his staff, of course? And his partners?” Her brother’s questions were heavy with sarcasm.
“Well, yes, we did—”
“No, you didn’t,” Liam said, his fists clenching. “You met a bunch of actors. Both times. Both visits.”
“What?”
“I guarantee that every so-called employee you were introduced to during that visit with Mom was an out-of-work actor, hired for the day. Just like they were the time you went there with me. R & R Investment Partnership isn’t even the real name of Dad’s corporation.”
“What’s his company called?” Her dry, cracked lips had to be forced to shape the words.
“The company is called Raven Enterprises, and the head office isn’t in Oakbrook. It’s miles away, northwest of Chicago, in Schaumburg, near O’Hare airport.”
Megan shook her head, which did nothing to clear the fog of befuddlement. “Dad actually set up a fake company and a fake set of offices just to deceive us?” She sat down on the porch bench because her legs suddenly wouldn’t hold her up.
“He didn’t keep the fake company active on a permanent basis. Just long enough to convince us that we’d visited the headquarters of his company—the mythical R & R Investments.”
Megan rubbed her forehead although she’d given up hope of banishing her headache anytime soon. “But even if he hired actors to play his employees, how did he have access to office space?”
“That was easy. He owns the building in Oakbrook and leases it out. He invited us there when he was between tenants. He even had an automated phone service set up so that if Mom or any of us called there, we’d be greeted by a message supposedly from R & R Investments.”
A shiver crawled down Megan’s spine. She’d learned a lot that she didn’t like about her father over the past couple of days, most of it pretty major stuff. It was odd that these relatively trivial deceptions bothered her so much. “It makes his dealings with us seem so calculated. So petty and…cruel.”
Liam’s eyes glittered, dark with anger. “The extent of his lying takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? It was quite a shock for me when I arrived unannounced at the Oakbrook offices and discovered the employees of an import-export firm working at the address I thought was the headquarters of R & R Investments.”
“What in the world did you do? Did you assume there was some sort of honest mistake?”
“No. Not for an instant.” Liam shrugged. “I guess at some level I’d been suspicious of Dad for a while—”
“You suspected he was a bigamist?” Megan heard the incredulity in her voice.
“Not that, but I was pretty sure he was lying to us about something important. To be honest, I’d begun to worry that maybe his business wasn’t a legitimate legal enterprise.”
Megan drew in a quick, nervous breath. “Is it?”
“As far as I know, yes, and I’ve researched the whole setup with a fair degree of intensity. We don’t have to worry that Raven Enterprises is a front for organized crime. Which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a major plus.”
It was a measure of how far she’d traveled in her view of her father that Megan wasn’t entirely reassured. “I hope you’re right.”
“I have a lot of experience researching criminal business enterprises. I was a criminal lawyer, remember? Last time I ran a check, I can pretty much promise you that Dad’s business partnership was clean. He’s a shrewd, successful businessman.” Liam corrected himself. “He was a shrewd, successful businessman.”
Megan seized the hope that none of her father’s business dealings had taken place on the shady side of the law and clung to it. Given that Ron Raven had been murdered, it struck her as depressingly possible that he’d been involved in at least a few ventures that wouldn’t have passed muster with the Better Business Bureau. A criminal deal gone wrong struck her as one of the more likely causes for murder.
She drew in a shaky breath, reverting to their previous topic of conversation. “I don’t quite see how you made the leap from realizing that Dad had deceived us about his office address to the fact that he was a bigamist.”
“Obviously, from the moment I walked into the Oakbrook offices it became clear that Dad had been doing some heavy-duty lying. I decided not to approach him and ask for an explanation. I figured that was likely to trigger nothing but more lies. Instead I initiated a full-scale investigation, tackling the problem exactly as if he were a suspect in a criminal case.”
Megan grimaced. “Which he was, more or less.”
Liam nodded. “Yep, he was. Once I got serious, it was only a matter of hours before Dad’s entire web of deception started to unravel. For example, it took me two minutes with a Chicago phone book to discover that there was no company called R & R Investments listed, but that a company called Raven Enterprises was headquartered in Schaumburg. A phone call to Raven Enterprises was all it took to discover that Ronald Howatch Raven was the senior partner. Once I knew that, the rest of his lies began to disintegrate. Amazingly fast, in fact. Dad pulled off his twenty-five-year scam basically because none of us questioned him. A couple of inquires, though, and it was all over.”
“I guess he could never risk having us visit his real office because of his other wife and daughter. They probably dropped in all the time, given that they live right in Chicago.”
Liam nodded. “I’m sure that was one reason he needed to keep us away. The other is that Dad’s business partner, Paul Fairfax, is Avery’s older brother.”
“Oh, no. Oh my God.” Megan couldn’t say anything more. She gripped Belle’s