Helen Washington stretched in the passenger seat of her deliberately nondescript old Ford, wincing a little at the tension that had built up in her neck. Stakeouts always had her feeling claustrophobic and bound up in her own body — and it wasn’t as though she could get out of the car and walk up and down the street to stretch her legs. Not if she wanted to avoid drawing attention to herself... and on the fifth day of a stakeout, that was absolutely essential.
It was late afternoon, and pretty warm out — she wasn’t wearing much beyond a T-shirt and her comfiest jeans, and even then the sun beating down on the roof of her car was causing sweat to bead on her forehead and dampen the underarms of her clothing. She pushed her shoulder-length brown hair out of her face and stretched her jaw, trying to chase the tension out of her body before it could turn into another migraine. That was the last thing she needed. This guy was a tricky customer — he seemed to have a sixth sense for when his ex-wife’s house was being watched, and though Helen had been working on this case for months, he’d always managed to elude her. If it wasn’t for the photos her client had snapped of the guy lurking in her backyard, Helen would have begun to suspect that the woman was imagining things.
But Sarah wasn’t. She was a high-profile lawyer, and her rather messy divorce hadn’t gone especially well with her or her husband. From the information Helen had (she’d spent a lot of the morning rereading the files out of sheer boredom) it seemed like Paul didn’t have a lot going on with his life outside of his marriage — so it made sense that after their divorce had been finalized, he’d taken to creeping around his ex-wife’s new house late at night, spying on her and leaving threatening messages on her answering machine whenever he saw anyone (especially men) going in or out of the place.
Helen had to admit, she understood his jealousy. It was a beautiful house that Sarah lived in, perched as it was on top of a sizable hill with a gorgeous view — and fair enough, too, with the amount of money she was making as an attorney. Most of her clients were reasonably well off. You didn’t hire a private investigator with Helen Washington’s pedigree unless money was no object… or you were pretty scared. And Sarah seemed scared. She was tough as nails in the courtroom, but when it came to her ex-husband — a bruiser of a man who was a full foot taller than her — she was less confident. Completely understandable. Sarah and Helen had their height and stature in common — both slim women, rather short (five foot two — though Sarah compensated with high heels) but athletic. For Sarah, it was five yoga classes a week that kept her fit — and sane, so she explained with a merry little laugh. It was a wonder she fit the classes in around her eighty-hour work week.
For Helen, it was self-defense classes that kept her in shape. A little less peaceful and Zen, perhaps… but a lot more useful in her line of work.
But in West Virginia, she knew better than to rely on her physical prowess to defend herself. You could be a black belt in every martial art on the planet — but it wouldn’t do you any good if you came up against a man with a gun. And in West Virginia, where gun laws were some of the least prohibitive in the country, it was reasonable to assume that any unsavory types were probably packing a weapon. That was a big part of what worried Sarah about the behavior of her ex-husband — not only was he behaving erratically, but she knew from their marriage that he was a gun aficionado. They’d had multiple gun safes in their old house, and his collection had numbered in the double digits… there was every chance that if he got angry or unhinged enough, that he could be coming after his ex-wife with a deadly weapon.
That was why she’d hired Helen Washington. Helen wasn’t your average private investigator. Most PI’s had their license and not much else… it wasn’t the most glamorous career on the planet, that was for sure. A lot of guys she’d met did it because they didn’t make the cut