Ghost Mortem (Ghost Detective #1) - Jane Hinchey Page 0,53

No. It’s a private investigator firm."

"Investigating what?"

"All sorts of things."

"Such as?"

"Background checks, missing persons, cheating spouses, lost pets." I rattled off cases I knew Ben had worked on in the past, watching her for any reaction. She blinked, her thick lashes brushing her cheeks. They were long and luscious and I wondered if they were fake.

"Oh." A light bulb went off. "Like a detective. I get it now." She smiled brightly, then turned her attention back to her phone. So. No reaction to me or my occupation.

"I have a rather delicate question to ask you."

She glanced up. "Oh?"

"Are you aware that Steven Armstrong is married?" Not exactly betraying a client’s confidence, but I was skirting the boundaries. Ben had drummed it into me that I couldn't tell her about her dad hiring him to investigate her boyfriend. Or that Steven's wife hired him to prove he was having an affair.

Her lips flattened into a straight line and her eyes narrowed as she looked me up and down again. "Yeah well, that doesn't matter. We're in love." She sniffed. "He's leaving that deadbeat wife of his."

"Does your dad know?"

"Ha." She snorted. "He thinks I'm going out with that doped out of his skull loser, Logan Crane."

"You're not? Going out with Logan?" My gaze darted to Ben, who was peering over Sophie's shoulder, trying to get a look at her phone.

"As if. I just said that to get up Dad’s nose. Looks like it worked." She eyeballed me again, then shivered, rubbed her arm where Ben had brushed against her.

He stepped back. "Nothing on her phone except pictures of herself," he told me.

"I'm guessing Dad hired you to get dirt on Logan and instead you caught me with Steven?" she asked, not at all surprised that her dad would do such a thing.

"Has he done that before? Hired a PI?" I asked, curious about the relationship between father and daughter. What had he said? That she'd been lying? Sneaking out? But she lived on campus, she didn't need to sneak out, she could come and go as she pleased.

She startled me by laughing, an honest to God belly laugh. I waited while she got herself under control. "Dad has had someone spying on me my entire life!" she declared. "Why do you think I'm living here? I knew it wouldn't stop him, but I figured giving him Logan would throw him off the scent and give me some peace for a while."

I glanced at Ben. As far as I knew this was the first time he'd done a job for Philip Drake. "It must be...annoying...having your dad do that." Annoying enough to kill the PI your dad had hired?

She shrugged. "Sure. Sometimes. To be honest, I thought it had stopped. The guy Dad had been using eventually refused to take on any more jobs. I don't know, maybe he got a guilty conscience? Or maybe it had something to do with me filing a stalking complaint?" She shrugged, but the look that she shot me was sly. She may like to look like a blonde airhead, but something told me Sophie Drake had plenty of street smarts.

"Interesting." I pulled out my phone and made myself a note to find out who that investigator had been. As far as I was aware, Ben was the only PI in Firefly Bay, but a city the size of Portland probably had a dozen PI's, if not more.

"What?" Sophie frowned and then peered at my phone, as if she could read what I was writing through the cracked screen. I held it against my chest, just in case. She seemed agitated now and that had me curious.

"I'm investigating the murder of my friend. Private Investigator Ben Delaney."

The color drained from her face, leaving her a pasty white. "What? I didn't kill anyone!"

My eyebrows rose. "I didn't say you had," I pointed out calmly. "But from what you just told me you're not above taking things into your own hands if you discovered your dad had hired another PI."

"I didn't know if he had or not," she blustered, the color returning to her cheeks in a rush of pink. "But I assumed he would—at some point."

"Hence the lie about Logan. Give your dad something to chew on while you carried on an affair with a married man." My words were intentionally blunt. I didn't condone this young woman's actions in the slightest. "Quite the age gap too," I continued. "You know he's thirty-five? That's fifteen years older