Chapter Three

“Ms. Burns.” Dallas tilted his head at her, his voice and eyes both warm. “You brought the pictures?”

“I did.” Leeza Burns set her cell phone on the conference room table with shaking hands. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t send them to you before now, Mr. Foreman. I just couldn’t… I don’t know. I wanted to show them to you in person, I guess.”

“I totally understand your thinking, and please call me Dallas.” He gave her his trademark charming grin, and then indicated at Griff. “And Mr. John Griffin here prefers to be called ‘Griff’.”

“Dallas and Griff,” she repeated. “Leeza.”

“Leeza,” Griff said. “What pictures are we talking about? Are these new ones? Ones that ain’t in the file?”

Leeza fidgeted a bit with her blouse button. “I – I took some cell pictures of Claire Worthington.”

Griff’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean here in Denver, right?”

“Yes.” She exhaled, hard. “Dallas says that you’ve read the reports, so you know that I saw her on the street. Just walking around Denver, like she was a normal person out for a coffee.”

“Yes, I know,” Griff said quietly. “I can’t imagine what a shock that must have been for you.”

She flashed him a look of surprise mingled with gratitude. “It really was a shock. It was like… like a face from my nightmares had just come to life and strolled on past me in a crowd of teenagers and moms pushing strollers. It was – surreal. She’s supposed to be far away in New York, in some swanky penthouse apartment, not here, wandering into my life as I go to the gym. You know?”

Dallas and Griff both nodded.

“Even though I’d spent months staring at her face on the news, I was thrown at first because of her hair and glasses,” Leeza continued. “They make her look totally different, so she was all the way past me and already walking into the store before I clicked. When the penny dropped, I just stopped dead in the middle of an intersection, then spun around and ran after her. Followed her around the store like a goddamn stalker, hiding behind racks of clothes and shelves, trying to see her without being seen. It was – it was utterly humiliating, in a weird way. One more humiliation inflicted by the Worthingtons, really, and not the worst… just the most recent of many.”

Griff nodded again; he knew that a woman as tall as Leeza Burns would have quite a job hiding herself without looking ridiculous, and he felt for her. In some ways, she was almost as enraged about having to slink and skulk around a clothing store as she was about the loss of her father’s pension and life savings – though her father’s suicide was and always would be the real source of her rage at Wilbur and Claire Worthington.

“Anyway.” She shook herself a bit and her dark eyes narrowed, refocused. “She was busy looking at t-shirts, so it was easy enough to snap a few pictures without her noticing.”

“Did you talk to her?” Dallas asked. He’d asked Leeza this more than once, and she’d always avoided directly answering. Today was about getting the whole damn story, though, so he was ready to push if he had to. “Make any contact at all? Even eye contact?”

“No.” Leeza shook her head. “I thought about it, believe me, but in the end I… I backed out.”

“Why?” Dallas said gently. “Why not confront her, maybe shout at her? Even bump into her accidentally, just to force her to acknowledge that you exist, even if she had no clue who you were?”

Leeza dropped her eyes. The men waited, knowing that whatever was going through her head was hard to say aloud. Finally she sighed, blurted out the truth:

“Because she looked happy.”

Dallas and Griff exchanged confused glances. Waited some more.

“I mean…” Leeza’s voice trailed off, and they actually saw her struggling to articulate her jumbled thoughts. “She looked so completely content and delighted with her life. She looked younger than she looked on the news, and she looked so much more – more beautiful.”

“OK,” Griff said slowly, carefully. “And so why did this make you decide to not talk to her?”

“Because I wouldn’t have talked to her.” Leeza’s voice was pure venom now, and both men started at the sudden and dramatic change in their client. “If I’d met her eyes, if I’d seen that joy up close and personal, I’d have punched that fucking bitch smack in her smug, gloating little face.”

Griff and Dallas blinked in shock. As always, Dallas recovered first, and moved in to soothe and settle things.

“OK,” Dallas said, keeping his voice low. “So you kept your wits about you enough to know to not approach her, right?”

“Yes.” Leeza sucked in a breath. “I just – I knew that I’d be the one up on assault charges, and I was suddenly scared to death about what I was thinking and feeling. I mean, I’ve never hit anyone in the whole of my life, but when I saw her deciding between the red t-shirt or the white one, and then she decided to just go on and buy both, I wanted to punch her until she was on the floor in pieces. That brought me up short, I suppose, and I just ran out of there like a crazy woman. Went home and shook for awhile, then I called you.” She looked at Dallas. “After helping my Dad, I haven’t got much left in terms of savings, but I have some… and I want to use them to get the whole story about Claire Worthington. The real story, not the one that her husband and his lawyers have thrown around in the press.”