Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) Read Free

the Young case for two operatives. So Celeste Ogden is up to you.”
    “Lucky me.”
    Tamara’s phone rang and she retreated into her office to answer it. I opened the file folder again, thinking: So now I’m the mop-up guy. Weirdos and recalcitrants, my speciality. Yeah, lucky me.
    All right. Background investigation requested by Mrs. Celeste Ogden on one Brandon Mathias, who at the time, nearly four years ago, was engaged to marry her widowed older sister, Nancy Ring. Mrs. Ogden neither liked nor trusted Mathias; she considered him cold, ruthless, self-involved, pathologically ambitious, and several other unflattering things and was convinced he was marrying her sister for her money and the business Nancy Ring had inherited from her first husband. The business, RingTech, was a small but very profitable manufacturer of computer software for businesses, located in Palo Alto.
    I’d done what I considered to be a thorough check on Mathias, all the way back to his youth in northern Ohio, and I hadn’t found anything to support Celeste Ogden’s suspicions. He came from a well-to-do family; he’d graduated with honors from both high school and Ohio University, the latter with a degree in computer science; he’d landed a position with a Silicon Valley firm during the boom years, made all the right contacts and all the rightprofessional decisions, worked his way up to an executive position at an annual salary in excess of $200,000. No question that he was ambitious, maybe even to the point of ruthlessness, but so are a lot of men and women in this country. As far as his personal life went, there wasn’t so much as a smudge: no previous marriages, no questionable relationships, no brushes with the law, not even a hint of unethical business practices.
    I was satisfied, but Celeste Ogden wasn’t. If anyone was pathological, it was her. She was convinced that Mathias was some sort of Hyde in Jekyll guise. She insisted I dig deeper, keep digging until I found something. I don’t much like that kind of excavation; everybody has some unflattering secret buried in his past, and if it’s small enough and irrelevant enough, it should be allowed to remain buried. But in my business you don’t just blow off a client who has plenty of money—her husband was a well-regarded vascular surgeon—and no set time limit for results, even if you don’t particularly like her.
    So I dug and kept on digging, and I still didn’t find anything. Brandon Mathias wasn’t a saint, but neither was he much of a sinner. If he had any buried secrets, they were down so deep a team of detectives working round the clock couldn’t locate them. Obsessive-compulsive in his drive for success was about the harshest criticism you could apply to him. Maybe that was why he was marrying Nancy Ring, but even if so, it wasn’t a hanging offense. And he wouldn’t be fooling her, either. She was forty-three years old and had been married to a Silicon Valley mover and shaker fornearly twenty years; she had to be going into the marriage with her eyes wide open.
    I’d said all of this to Ogden, verbally and in my report, and in return I’d got a heaping of abuse. She was one of these moneyed types used to giving orders, having things her own way. She didn’t like it when her opinions went unvalidated, and when that happened she blamed the other party, not herself. She claimed I hadn’t done my job properly, hinted that I was incompetent—like that. I wouldn’t take it from her. I don’t take that kind of crap from anybody. As politely as I could under the circumstances, I defended my work ethic and the results of my investigation, suggested she take her suspicions to another agency, and terminated the relationship. I half-expected to have to take her to small-claims court to collect the balance of our fee, but she surprised me by paying the final invoice by return mail.
    That was the last I’d heard from or about her. Whether or not she’d hired another