The Friday Cage (Claire Chastain Book 1)

  The Friday Cage

  Andrew Diamond

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Lindsay Heider Diamond. Woman’s silhouette licensed from Stock Unlimited. Thunderbolt and fingerprint licensed from Deposit Photos.

  Copyright © 2020 Andrew Diamond

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-1734139228

  ISBN (e-book): 978-1734139211

  For Lindsay, who is every bit as hardheaded as Claire.

  1

  Am I paranoid to think someone is following me? And if they are following me, why would they be so obvious about it? A 1971 burgundy Lincoln Continental sticks out, even on a busy avenue in Washington, DC.

  She could see it in the rearview. The knocking engine and the blue smoke from the tailpipe—it was the same sound, the same acrid smell of burning oil she had noticed in front of her house that morning, and the morning before.

  As they waited for the light at Wisconsin and Calvert, Claire studied the driver’s reflection in her mirror. He was a big man, tall and fat, with light brown hair and enormously broad shoulders. Was that why he drove the old Lincoln? Because he wouldn’t fit into a smaller car?

  He was stuffing what looked like the last bite of a sandwich into his mouth, licking his fingers greedily, like a dog devouring its treasure before anyone could snatch it away. The pale January sun flashed in his blue eyes and lit the golden stubble on his fat cheeks. Eyes that close together, Claire thought, in a face as broad as his, made him look crude and thuggish, like an enforcer or a goon.

  The impatient honking of the cars behind told her that the light had changed. She hit the gas.

  Is he following me just for fun, she wondered. A stalker, or a perv? Or did someone hire him?

  She looked again in the rearview. He was tearing the Subway wrapper from a new sandwich, stuffing it into his mouth as fast as he could get the paper off.

  Peter wouldn’t hire anyone to follow her. If he wanted to know what she was up to, he would call, as he had done so many times in the weeks since she’d left. She didn’t answer, and she didn’t listen to the messages. The sound of his voice would cut too deep, and she would resent his wounded tone because she knew she had caused it. It was easier to delete the messages unheard than to acknowledge her guilt. After four weeks, the calls stopped. He’d given up.

  She turned her eyes back to the road just in time to avoid rear-ending a taxi.

  Maybe it was the cop, she thought. Maybe the cop assigned the goon to follow me. But wouldn’t a cop just send another cop? I mean, a professional? Someone who knows how to be discreet?

  Cops usually keep a low profile, don’t they? Unless they want to pressure you. When they think you’ve done something wrong, they want you to know they’re watching. But what have I done wrong?

  She glanced in the sideview and thought back to her interview with the police detective. He was neither professional nor discreet, showing up at her door, giving her the look, and then peppering her with questions about the circumstances of Gavin’s death without first telling her that her friend had died. She had to glean that bit of information from his questions, and when she did, it was a shock the detective did nothing to soften.

  The thought of that encounter still angered her, even now, six days later. First of all, a man doesn’t look at a woman that way when he’s coming to talk about her friend’s death. Though she did nothing to encourage it, she received that look from men old and young. The look that lingered a little too long, that took in the chestnut brown hair and eyes, the fair skin, the splash of pale freckles across the bridge of the nose, the look that approved of the face that was objectively pretty even as it coldly discouraged familiarity.

  The detective had shown up on the doorstep of her grandmother’s house on Oregon Avenue as she was getting ready for work. Backlit by the sun rising through the bare trees of Rock Creek Park, he was a dark silhouette in a cloud of steaming breath.

  “Can I help you?” Claire asked.

  She wore a simple grey pants suit, her bare feet washed in the flood of cold from the open door. Without shoes, she was five foot six, a deficiency she corrected with heels that brought her closer to eye-level with the men at work.

  The detective was a big man. Six two or six three. Over two hundred pounds, probably in his early thirties, with close-cropped reddish-blond hair, a red pock-marked face, and small ears that stuck out like clay pinched from the sides of a child’s sculpture. He wore civilian clothes, black sweater and slacks, with the black jacket of the Prince George’s County Police department. On his belt was a golden badge but no gun.

  He hesitated a second, giving her the familiar, unwelcome look that first registers attraction and then searches for a sign of reciprocated interest.

  “Miss Chastain?”

  “Mizz,” she corrected.

  “Did you receive a call from Gavin Corley last night?”

  “Excuse me,” she said coldly. “You are?”

  “Darrell Gatlin. PG County Police.” He peered over her shoulder into the living room strewn with packing boxes, books, papers, photos, and old vinyl LPs—remnants of the life she was dismantling now that she had moved her grandmother into assisted living.

  His curiosity was intrusive, a desire he was going to satisfy regardless of her wish for privacy. She pulled the door against her shoulder to prevent him looking in.

  “Did Gavin call you last night?” he asked.

  “What business is that of yours?”

  The expression she wore in this encounter was one she had cultivated during her years in the corporate office in New York, when she was often the only woman in the room, usually the youngest, and always the least powerful. Her business face showed an unmistakable edge of hardness that quietly told the men who needed to be told exactly where her boundary was, and that they would always be on the other side of it. After so many years of putting on that face, she had become the person it projected.

  Still, there were some, like this one, who just wouldn’t get it. They kept searching for a way in, for an indication of interest or some weakness to exploit.

  “You’re the last person he called before he died,” the detective said.

  Died?

  He didn’t register her shock because he wasn’t looking at her face. His eyes went first to her hand, checking for a ring, then to her thighs, which no longer filled out the pants she had bought just last fall. Stress and anxiety had prevented her from eating in the six weeks since she’d left New York. At her normal weight of one-thirty-five, Peter could still see in those pants the curve of her muscle. If this cop saw something he liked in the slacks that now hung loosely on her, it was a projection of his own desire.

  Three weeks ago, when her weight dropped to one-eighteen, she stopped weighing herself. She was several pounds below that now. What kind of man is attracted to a woman who isn’t well? Fixers, she thought. Caretakers who want to heal you. And stalkers. Creeps looking for someone they think they can dominate.

  She took him for the latter.

  “I’m sorry, did you say Gavin is dead?” Dismay and anger stirred in her voice.

  “You didn’t know?” He sounded almost annoyed, as if death were a technicality, a distraction from some more important point.

  What kind of response was that, Claire wondered. What kind of detective starts hurling questions without first informing you... without offering condolences... Her eyes were already narrowing. The crease between them was
beginning to show, the one her friends knew to look out for.

  “He passed away last night. In an accident.”

  Passed away? Is that the term police departments train their detectives to use?

  She glared at him as her heart sped. Her blood pressure was rising quickly.

  “This is how you tell me? This is how you tell me my friend is dead? Who are you? How did you even find me? This is my grandmother’s house. How did you know I’d be here?”

  “Miss Chastain.” The conciliatory tone meant to soothe her sounded condescending.

  “Mizz.”

  “What did Gavin say to you?”

  “Fuck off.” She shut the door in his face.

  She read about the crash later that day on the Washington Post website. One Dead in Single Car Accident. Gavin’s Chevy Equinox had run off a wooded road in Prince George’s County, flipping down an embankment before coming to rest upside down. An early-morning commuter had spotted the car around 5 a.m.

  At work that afternoon, she rehearsed in her mind how she would have described the detective to Peter, if Peter were still around to talk to. First was the issue of professionalism, or lack thereof. Can a police detective show basic courtesy? Or is it beneath them to try?

  Second, how could that cop have expected her to know at 7:30 a.m. that Gavin was dead when he’d only been found two hours earlier?

  And third... Third...

  This was what chilled her now as she approached the entrance to the garage on 18th Street. A quick glance in the sideview showed that after two miles and half a dozen turns, the fat goon in the old Lincoln was still behind her.

  Third, how did the cop know Gavin had called her? Even if he had Gavin’s phone, he couldn’t have unlocked it to look at the call history because Gavin, the ultraparanoid computer security expert, used a six-digit passcode.

  The Lincoln didn’t follow her into the underground lot. She checked her mirrors as she descended to the second level, checked them again as she pulled into her spot. She cut the engine and sat quietly for a moment, listening for the knocking of the old Continental. When she was satisfied there was no one else around, she got out.

  On the solitary walk from her parking spot to the elevators, a chilling image flashed in her mind—that rude cop pressing Gavin’s dead finger against the phone, scrolling through the call history, finding her name.

  She pressed four inside the elevator, watched the doors slide shut, and wondered again what had led the detective to look for the owner of a New York phone number, area code 646, in a house on Oregon Avenue.

  If they know he called, she wondered, do they also know what he said? And if they know what he said, why haven’t they been back to follow up?

  She had deleted the message, but she remembered it verbatim. His last words to her:

  “I’m pretty sure I screwed this up, so I’m passing the torch to you. If worse comes to worst, I know you’ll see this through. Love ya, babe. Sorry for the trouble.”

  2

  Her boss was standing at the reception desk when she left the elevator on four. He tried to look like he wasn’t waiting for her, a ruse she had bought last Friday.

  “Claire!”

  “Good morning, Anoop.”

  She brushed past him without breaking stride, and he followed her into the carpeted hall. Long-limbed and thin, with a black mustache and an easy manner, he struggled to keep up.

  “Li tells me you’re almost done.”

  Almost done with a month-long assignment, certifying the year-end financials of a generic pharmaceutical manufacturer.

  “I’ll have it to you tomorrow,” Claire said.

  “It’s not due till the end of the month.” He held his coffee high as he dashed along behind her, as if an extra foot of altitude would prevent a spill.

  “Then we’re ahead of schedule.” She turned left into her office, sliding her shoulder bag down her left arm as she entered.

  “You’re ahead of schedule,” Anoop said. “After tomorrow, you take a few days off.”

  “I didn’t ask for time off, and I don’t want it.” She dropped her bag on the desk and pulled off her coat.

  “You’ve worked twenty-eight days in a row.”

  She pushed the door halfway shut, forcing him to step back into the hall, so she could hang her coat on the hook. It was an act of simple efficiency. Her coat was off and she had to put it somewhere, and if he happened to be in the way of what she had already decided to do, that was just bad timing on his part. If her action had the added benefit of keeping him outside the office, where she wanted him, he was too good natured to suspect it, and too polite to call her out on it.

  “And you’re complaining?” she asked impatiently. “That I get things done?”

  “You worked on Christmas day. In the office.”

  Because I didn’t want to spend the whole day alone with Leona, Claire thought. You would have done the same thing if you had a grandmother like her.

  “This is how people burn out.” Anoop pushed the door open.

  He would have stepped in if she hadn’t stood in his way with that look of impatience that made him feel he was wasting her time. It was a useful look that almost always had the intended effect.

  “I’ve worked a lot harder than this.”

  Anoop understood that when he interviewed her for the job. He knew she was overqualified, that she belonged a rung or two above him on the ladder, that someday he might be reporting to her. He had hired her because she was the kind of person he would want to report to—sharp, competent, to the point. The only thing that bothered him was why a woman as intelligent and ambitious as Claire Chastain would take a step down from the complexities of corporate valuations and due diligence to certifying numbers in a revenue report.

  “You have degrees in business and accounting?” he asked in the interview.

  “It’s all there on my résumé.”

  “This is more like the work you did early in your career. Straight numbers. You OK with that?”

  “I read the job description.”

  When he asked her why she left New York, she told him she needed to care for her grandmother. That was partially true. She needed to move Leona into a facility before Leona assaulted another grocery clerk, tore up another month’s bills, smashed up another car. Beyond the move and the visits to help her grandmother make the transition, there would be no caretaking. Leona wouldn’t let anyone help her, and Claire was not a caretaker.

  The answer had satisfied Anoop. She started the job nine days after moving to DC, a week before Christmas, and hit the ground running.

  “After tomorrow,” Anoop insisted now from his place in the doorway, “you’ll take the rest of the week off.”

  She looked him in the eye and shook her head. No.

  Anoop hadn’t known her long enough to be able to read her. Peter would have understood the anxiety that underlay her defiance. He would have known that with a few gentle pushes, given at the right time, in the right way, she would relent. The report that she had already completed, that she was reluctant to turn over, represented the end of an assignment into which her troubled mind had retreated from the spiraling chaos of an unraveling life. The thought of time off, of days during which her mind would have no external focus, no deadlines, no objectively measurable goals, worried her.

  Peter would have seen the worry, would have recognized it as the root cause of her refusal. He would have addressed it directly.

  “There comes a time when you have to slow down,” he would tell her. “You have to look at the questions that don’t have easy answers.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Her face hid every emotion but anger and annoyance, the two that were most useful in getting people to back off. If there was more to her inner life than that—and there was—she would choose whom to show, and how much they could see.

  When people can’t read you, can’t understand what you’
re feeling, Claire thought, they can only guess what’s going on inside. And from their guesses, you can figure out who they are, how they think, because they fill in the blanks by projecting what they would feel if they were in your shoes.

  Anoop, she knew, was a fundamentally decent person. So was Peter. Anoop was easier to get along with because they had a simpler arrangement: do good work, do it on time, and all is well. Anoop was also intimidated by her just enough to accept the boundaries exactly as she defined them. She could see him calculate now and then the cost (high) and the potential benefit (uncertain) of trying to develop a more personal relationship.

  Peter, on the other hand, was more difficult. Sharing a bed entitled a person to more intimate access. She was willing to accept that. But she often found him looking into her, and she felt the person he saw was not the one she wanted to project. The thoughtful looks that had once flattered her as signs of his infatuation had, over time, come to feel intrusive. He was prying behind the façade, trying to gain some insight into her, some understanding of who she was, and that, to her, amounted to taking something without her consent.

  Worse yet, her anger didn’t intimidate him.

  “Listen,” Claire told Anoop, softening her tone and posture. “I know you think you’re doing me a favor, but I need the work.”

  “You need rest,” Anoop said. “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

  Wrong response, she thought. When a woman is struggling, you don’t ask her how she feels about her looks.

  She had stopped looking at her reflection during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when her ribs had begun to show. Now when she got out of the shower, she left the steam on the mirror.

  “I understand you’re concerned for my health,” she said. “But I need something to do. I can help Li with whatever she’s working on.”

  “Li’s working on entry-level stuff. She doesn’t need your help.”