Page 23

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

LONDON, ENGLAND

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2023

5:00 P.M.

After two and a half days of being locked in a hotel conference room doing back-to-back phone calls and meetings while taking all meals in the hotel’s dining room, Camille Lee was more than ready for a break. The weather was drippy, but this was London, after all. She had hoped she and Rachel would be able to go for a brief walk, but Rachel nixed that idea. With the failed kidnapping attempt in mind, she agreed they could go out to dinner—to one of the best curry places in all London, but only if they traveled to and from the restaurant in Wonder Woman’s faux cab.

Cami had changed out of her work attire and into something more comfortable when someone knocked on the door of her suite. It wasn’t the kind of discreet tap you’d expect from room service or housekeeping. No, this was far firmer than either of those.

Knowing Rachel was grabbing a shower, Cami went to the door in her bare feet and peered out the peephole. Three men clad in suits and ties stood in the corridor. One she recognized as the Portlandia’s assistant manager. The other two were most likely police officers, since one of them was holding up a badge.

“Who is it?” Cami asked.

“Detective Inspector Howard Wallace and Detective Sergeant Matthew Frost of the Essex Police,” the one with the badge answered. “Are you Camille Lee?”

Essex police? Cami wondered in dismay. What do they want with me?

“Yes, I am,” she replied aloud. “How can I help you?”

“We’re investigating a mysterious death, and we’d like to speak to you.”

“One moment, please,” she said. “Let me finish dressing.”

Back in the suite’s bedroom, she slipped on her shoes. She didn’t really need to be wearing shoes in order to speak to the detectives. What she really needed was a moment to gather her thoughts. She considered calling in Rachel for reinforcements but decided against it.

A mysterious death, s he wondered. Whose? And since the crime had obviously occurred somewhere in the UK, if not in London proper, what could it possibly have to do with me?

Back at the door, she took a deep breath and put on a welcoming smile before swinging it open. “Won’t you come in and have a seat?”

While the hotel manager melted into the background, the other two men entered and settled on the suite’s love seat, while Cami sat in the easy chair across from them. DI Wallace appeared to be somewhere in his early fifties. DS Frost was a good fifteen years Wallace’s junior. The younger man was carrying a satchel-like briefcase that he set down on the floor near his feet. Presumably Wallace was in charge, and Frost was there to fetch and carry.

“You mentioned a mysterious death,” Cami said, directing her statement in Wallace’s direction. “Who’s dead, and why is it any concern of mine?”

“Before we go into that,” he replied, “please tell us the nature of your relationship with Adrian Willoughby.”

Adrian Willoughby? That was a stunner, and Cami couldn’t have been more astonished. A few years earlier, Willoughby had been a supposedly up-and-coming tech blogger who presented himself to the world as an impartial observer. His supposedly unbiased media posts had often cast High Noon in a bad light. Eventually it had surfaced that, while writing those derogatory postings, Willoughby had been receiving under-the-table payments from one of High Noon’s major competitors.

Just prior to the pandemic, B. Simpson, Cami’s boss, had been scheduled to deliver a paper at a high-powered international cybersecurity meeting in London. When he was seriously injured in a car wreck shortly before his scheduled departure, Cami had been sent in B.’s place. That was where she had encountered Adrian Willoughby face-to-face.

On the last evening of the conference, a somewhat smarmy and already very tipsy Willoughby had approached Cami in the hotel bar. Over the course of several drinks, he had invited her up to his room. By then, however, Cami had already figured out he was working for High Noon’s competition, and she had decided to beat him at his own game.

By the time they left the bar, he’d been so drunk that he’d needed assistance walking. She had escorted him up to his room, where he promptly passed out face down on the bed. Left to her own devices, Cami had used the man’s own cell phone to blow up his life.

An examination of his recent text messages had revealed that, not only was he caught up in a contentious divorce proceeding, but he was also involved in serious relationships with at least two other women. One believed herself to be his fiancée and was pregnant with his child. Cami had gone through Willoughby’s phone, taking screenshots of any number of damning text exchanges with the other women in his life before sending them along to the attorney of Willoughby’s soon-to-be-former wife. After returning the phone to the unconscious man’s pants pocket, Cami had let herself out of his hotel room. The next day she had flown home to the U.S. Shortly thereafter, Willoughby’s cybersecurity blogging career had come to an abrupt end. But even though Cami and Willoughby weren’t on the best of terms, she certainly hadn’t wished him any harm.

“Our relationship wasn’t exactly cordial,” Cami admitted aloud after a thoughtful pause. “On the final night of an international cybersecurity conference, he approached me in the bar, plied me with booze, and invited me up to his room. I’m sure he had delusions of grandeur about getting lucky. Unfortunately for him, by the time we left the bar, Willoughby was too smashed to walk on his own. I escorted him to his room. The last time I saw him he was dead drunk and lying fully dressed on the bed.”

“When was that?” DI Wallace asked.

“Back in January of 2020,” Cami answered, “prior to the pandemic.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No.”

“Or corresponded with him?”

“No, not at all,” Cami replied. “But you said you were investigating a mysterious death. Is Adrian the victim?”

DI Wallace nodded.

“When did he die?”

“In the early morning hours of Saturday, March 18,” Wallace replied.

“I was still in the States,” Cami objected. “I didn’t land in the UK until Tuesday morning, so why are you questioning me?”

Rather than answer her question, DI Wallace turned to his partner. “The folder, please, DS Frost.”

The younger cop opened his satchel and extracted a file folder, which he handed over to his superior. Wallace opened the file and removed a sheaf of photos that he passed along to Cami. As she sorted through them, cold chills sped through her body, and there was no disguising her dismay.

Cami herself was the subject of each of the photos, all of which had been taken from a considerable distance, probably by someone using a high-powered telephoto lens. What took her breath away was what she glimpsed in the background, which included the exteriors of several of the buildings she had visited the previous week. There were numerous shots of her in her vehicle entering or leaving the Lancaster Hotel’s parking garage. She also recognized the clothing she’d been wearing. No doubt her growing distress manifested itself on her face.

“Is there a problem, Ms. Lee?” DI Wallace asked.

“I was in L.A. on business last week. The whole time I was there I had an eerie feeling I was being followed, but at the time I had no way of proving it,” she said. “It’s clear from these photos that I was.”

“Did you report this suspected stalking situation to law enforcement?”

“I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

Cami shrugged and tried to sound more unconcerned than she felt. “It didn’t seem all that serious at the time, and I didn’t think the cops would believe me.”

That was more or less true, but by the time she had fled the fitness center and headed for the hotel kitchen, she had known good and well it was serious. The problem was, she hadn’t called the cops in then, either.

“Where did all these photos come from?” she asked. “And how did you get them?”

“We were able to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Willoughby’s computer and downloaded the images from his text file. The sender was listed as unknown, but Willoughby’s response was interesting.”

“What kind of response?”

“A single word—GO. That was it. No idea what he meant.”

Cami felt as though a bucket of ice water had just splashed over her body. She knew exactly what GO meant. With that one word, most likely to Bogdan Petrov, Adrian Willoughby had set the plot in motion, one designed to take Cami out permanently. She quickly ran the two timelines through her head. Early morning in the UK on Thursday, would still have been Wednesday night in Los Angeles. The Dozo dinner had been Thursday night, and the fitness center incident had occurred on Friday.

When Cami managed to refocus on DI Wallace, he was in mid-sentence. “… but the presence of this collection of photos in Mr. Willoughby’s text file suggests that his interest in you goes far beyond a simple one-night stand gone bad.”

At that point, Cami realized she had to come clean not only about Willoughby but probably about Bogdan Petrov, too.

“That night at the conference, when Adrian tried to put the make on me, I blew up his life,” she admitted.

“You blew up his life?” a puzzled Wallace repeated. “How?”

“Adrian was a jerk. After he passed out, I checked his phone. Turns out he was going through an ugly divorce while carrying on affairs with a couple of other women. So I took screenshots of some of the texts and sent them along to his wife’s divorce attorney in hopes it might help with her divorce negotiations.”

“We noticed,” Sergeant Frost said, speaking up for the first time. “According to correspondence we found in the desk in his office, he was way behind on his child support payments—to two separate women.”

Wallace shot his junior partner a withering look before turning back to Cami. “You’re saying that was the totality of your interaction with him?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mr. Willoughby know that you were the one who had been in contact with his estranged wife’s attorney?”

“I certainly didn’t tell him, but he may have figured it out.”

“And maybe became obsessed with you?”

“Possibly,” Cami replied. “But you said you were investigating a mysterious death, not a homicide. How did he die?”

“I’m afraid that was something of a misstatement,” Wallace admitted. “His death has been ruled a homicide. According to Mr. Willoughby’s Apple Watch, he passed away at 9:46 p.m. on Saturday night. He had purportedly been out of town on a business trip to Edinburgh and was due to return on Sunday evening. When he didn’t turn up, his wife reported him as missing on Monday morning. His body was found floating face down in one of the lakes in the Chafford Gorges Nature Park earlier today. There was some blunt trauma to his head, but the coroner has ruled his cause of death as drowning. He was likely alive but unconscious when he was placed in the water. Our subsequent investigation has revealed signs of a struggle at Mr. Willoughby’s office in Grays. We believe the office is where the initial attack occurred, while the nature park was the dump site.”

Cami had never heard of the Chafford Gorges Nature Park and had no idea where that was or where Grays was, either, for that matter. Just then a text message came in on DI Wallace’s phone. He pulled the device out of his pocket and glanced at the screen before saying, “The coroner has just completed the next-of-kin notifications and has now released the victim’s name to the public.”

He studied Cami for a long moment before adding, “The afternoon prior to his death, Adrian Willoughby booked a single one-way ticket from Heathrow to Malé-Velana International Airport in the Maldives. His current wife knew nothing about that scheduled departure. His flight was due to depart Heathrow on Sunday evening. Would you have any idea why he might be traveling to the Maldives?”

“None whatsoever,” Cami replied. “But there’s one thing more you should know.”

“What’s that?”

The whole time they’d been talking about Adrian Willoughby, Cami’s thoughts had been in turmoil. Thanks to Frigg, she knew exactly who had sent those telltale photos, and this was now a homicide investigation. From where she sat it seemed likely that revealing that information at this point would be better than concealing it.

“I believe I know the name of the man who sent those photos to Adrian Willoughby.”

Wallace seemed surprised. “You do?”

“As I told you, the whole time I was in L.A. I felt as though I was being followed, but I couldn’t catch anyone in the act. On Friday night, while I was in the dining room, a man walked past me. When he gave me the once-over, it caught my attention. When he was seated, I realized he was carrying a concealed weapon under his suit coat. That set my alarm bells ringing, so when he showed up again later in the fitness room, I managed to grab a photo of him as he walked past my treadmill. After that I made a run for it, leaving the hotel without even returning to my room.”

“You felt you were in imminent danger?”

“Absolutely,” Cami answered. “I asked an associate of mine to run the fitness center photo through facial rec. It came back as someone named Bogdan Petrov, a Bulgarian, I believe, but I had no idea who he was or why he would be coming for me.”

“And you still didn’t report the incident to the police?”

“I didn’t. I had my suspicions that he’d been following me but no actual proof.”

There was a knock on the connecting door between Cami’s room and the one next door. Moments later, Rachel poked her head inside.

“Sorry,” she said quickly when she spotted the two detectives. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

“This is my friend Rachel Bloom,” Cami explained. “We have dinner reservations. This is Detective Inspector Wallace and Detective Sergeant Frost with the Essex Police.”

Both men rose as one. “We were just going,” DI Wallace said quickly. “When are you planning on returning to the U.S.?”

“I’m due to fly home on Saturday.”

“You might want to consider delaying your departure a day or two, just to give us a chance to finish up with our inquiries, because we may wish to interview you again.” DI Wallace handed over a business card. “And if you happen to remember anything else, please be sure to give me a call.”

Cami simply nodded before ushering the two men out of the room and into the corridor.

“Were those homicide detectives?” Rachel demanded as soon as the door closed behind them.

Cami nodded.

“What have you gotten yourself into while my back was turned?”

“It’s a long story,” Cami answered, grabbing her jacket. “I’ll tell you while we’re at dinner. Now, let’s go have some of that curry.”

“We’re not going anywhere, and we’re not having curry, either,” Rachel told her. “You’re going to have to settle for room service.”

“Why?”

“Because I just had a call from Sonja. A farmworker in Southern California found a dead body in an irrigation ditch yesterday morning. That body has just been identified as that of Bogdan Petrov. The victim was shot in the back of the head execution style, and the death has been ruled as a homicide. With Petrov out of the picture, in terms of threat assessment, I have no idea who or what I should be looking for in order to protect you. In other words, it looks to me as though we’re stuck at the Portlandia for the duration.”