The Hunt For Hawke's Daughter
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“Looking good, Karen. I guess I forgot how good.”
She might have returned the compliment. His jaw was as square as ever, his thick hair as black. Only the grooves on either side of his mouth seemed more pronounced than she remembered. Not surprising that they should have deepened. He must be—what? Somewhere in his mid-thirties by now.
But she didn’t compliment him. It wasn’t safe. All she gave him was a pleasant, innocuous, “It’s nice to see you again, Devlin. Uh, sit down, please.”
She looked around for a chair for him. All of them were too dainty. She chose what was most likely to accommodate him, a gilded French fauteuil, and he settled on it. His hard, long-limbed body was too big for it, but he didn’t complain. She seated herself at the side of the desk facing him.
There was a moment of strained silence while those disturbing blue eyes of his captured her gaze and held it. She caught her breath and fought the memory of the incredible six weeks they had once shared.
He leaned toward her suddenly, his expression rigid. “I’m not going to waste words, Karen. This isn’t a social call. I’m here on business. Serious business.”
Here it comes, she thought, tensing to face the blow he was about to deliver.
He surprised her when he reached inside the breast pocket of his suit jacket and withdrew a photograph, which he placed on the corner of the desk with a brusque, “Will you identify this man for me, please?”
She stared at Devlin. This wasn’t the accusation she’d been expecting. What on earth—
“The photograph,” he reminded her.
She turned her head and lowered her gaze, her bewilderment deepening as she looked at the photograph. It was an informal shot of her husband, Michael Ramey. Not a very good one because the camera must have caught him when he was unaware of it. Like many people, Michael objected to having his picture taken, though he had no reason to mind. His features were good ones, if unremarkable, and he kept his body in trim condition.
“It’s your husband, Michael Ramey, isn’t it?” Devlin prompted her.
Then he already knew about her marriage to Michael. How had he learned of it? More importantly, why? “I think so,” she said cautiously.
“You’re not certain?”
Actually she was, though afraid to admit it. There was something wrong here, something she sensed she didn’t want to hear. “I’ve never seen this photograph before. If it is Michael, it was taken several years ago before I met him. He’s different here, a little more weight maybe and wearing the mustache. Where did you get this picture?”
“From my client, a woman back in Denver who hired me to find the guy you’re looking at. The man who calls himself your husband.”
She lifted startled eyes to Devlin’s face. “He is my husband.”
“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t idle while I waited for you to get back from wherever it is you went. I checked the records here in the city and learned Karen Howard married Michael Ramey two and a half years ago. It wasn’t what I wanted to discover.”
“I have to tell you,” she said slowly, “that you are beginning to scare me.”
“I wish I didn’t have to do this to you, Karen, believe me. But there’s no way around it. Michael Ramey, who was known as Kenneth Daniels back in Denver, was married to my client. Trouble is, he never bothered to divorce her when he walked out on her and disappeared three years ago.”
Jolted, Karen resisted his shocking allegation. “This is preposterous! You’ve got the wrong man! A—a look-alike!”
“Do you have a recent photo of Michael Ramey in your wallet, Karen? We could compare pictures.”
She shook her head. No, she had no pictures of Michael. The several that had existed, mostly from their wedding, had been destroyed. It happened when Michael cleaned out the closet in his study. By mistake, along with the other rubbish, he had carted the box of their photos stored there out to the trash. Karen had the uneasy feeling now that this accident, about which Michael had been so contrite at the time, might not have been an accident at all.
“But we really don’t need to compare photographs, do we, Karen?” Devlin pressed her solemnly. “Because there is no mistake. Kenneth Daniels and Michael Ramey are the same man.”
“Do you know what you’re telling me?” she whispered.
“Yeah, I know, and I’m sorry about it. But there’s no avoiding it. The man you thought you were legally married to is guilty of bigamy.”
Karen felt as if the floor under her chair was no longer solid, as if it had been rocked off its foundations. Bigamy was the kind of thing you saw in tabloid headlines. It always involved strangers in other places, never anyone you knew. So how could it be happening to her?
“Why?” she appealed to Devlin. “Why would Michael do such a thing?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea.”
She hadn’t really expected him to know, any more than she understood it herself. Michael Ramey, the man to whom she had been a loyal wife for two and a half years, was suddenly a complete stranger.
But she needed to understand what was happening to her. Questions swarmed into her mind. “This woman back in Denver, this—this other wife, has she been looking for him all this time?”
“No, it was only last week that she hired me to find him. Actually, she’d been granted a divorce from him almost two years ago on the grounds of desertion. But it still makes him a bigamist, since he married you before that divorce.”