Mortal Faults Read Free

and Abby found herself speaking with the same crisp-voiced female who’d been first on the line. The assistant gave directions to an office building in Newport Beach, about twenty miles south of L.A.
    “You wouldn’t happen to know what this is about?” Abby asked Rebecca in hope of eliciting a little sisterly understanding.
    “I’m afraid I have no idea. Have a nice day.”
    Apparently sisterhood wasn’t powerful, after all.
    Abby pondered the situation. It didn’t make a lot of sense. She was in the security business. Members of Congress had all the security they needed. Reynolds ought to have had no use for her services. Unless he was arranging protection for someone else—or keeping secrets that even his bodyguards weren’t allowed to know.
    The phone rang again. Another politician? Maybe it was the president on the line.
    “Abby Sinclair,” she said.
    “I just saw the paper. Thank you.”
    It was that certain schoolteacher in Reseda, who’d been unlucky enough to catch Leon Trotman’s eye.
    “No problem,” Abby said.
    “You saved me. You saved my life.”
    “I’m not sure that’s true.” Actually, she was pretty certain it was.
    “He was after me. He would have killed me. And the police couldn’t do anything except talk about a restraining order. As if a restraining order would stop a man like him—”
    Abby had heard the same song from dozens of clients. She didn’t need a reprise. “He’s back where he belongs, so don’t sweat it. Just get ready to write me a big whopping check when my bill comes.”
    “It’s worth it. Whatever it costs—you’re a lifesaver, Abby. Literally, a lifesaver.”
    Abby accepted a few more compliments of a similar nature and managed a graceful exit from the conversation. She put the phone back into her purse.
    A lifesaver. Yes, that was what she was.
    Not a killer. Of course not.

 
     
     
    2
     
    Reynolds’ office was located on the sixth floor of a glass box high-rise a block inland from Pacific Coast Highway. Abby got there early but lingered outside till four o’clock. She didn’t want to seem too eager.
    At four, she took the stairs to the sixth floor, working up a slight burn in the adductor muscles. It always amazed her that people paid good money for health-club memberships and then rode the elevator.
    Rebecca, manning the reception desk, made her wait in the anteroom while her boss pretended to be busy inside. Apparently he didn’t want to seem too eager, either.
    The walls of the anteroom were covered with pictures of Reynolds with various celebrities and power brokers. Before heading over, Abby had visited the congressman’s Web site, which was cluttered with many of the same shots, along with endorsements from miscellaneous Orange County business and civic organizations.
    She’d read his biography online. He came from humble beginnings in the barrios of Santa Ana and never let you forget it. Photos accompanying the bio showed the rundown apartment building in which he’d been raised, and the canning factory—now closed—where his father had worked on the assembly line. No posh private school for Jack Reynolds—his high school class photograph showed a mixture of races and ethnicities, with young Jack, his face circled, one of a minority of Anglos. Prowess on the football field had won him a scholarship to the University of California at Chico, known colloquially as Chico State. It was hundreds of miles from home, in rural northern California. He’d worked part-time throughout college, earning money for textbooks and meals, a practice he’d continued while attending law school. Returning to Santa Ana, he rose to the position of D.A.—“crusading D.A.,” as the bio put it—before his first run for Congress.
    Everything about the man said that he was no pampered elitist. He’d come up the hard way, and he was proud of it.
    At four fifteen the intercom buzzed, Rebecca opened the door, and Abby was granted an audience with the