Prologue

Wednesday, September 1 | Murphy, Texas

My name is Samantha Walsh. You can call me Sam. I’m 34 years old, and I’m a private investigator with over a decade of experience. Call today and let’s see how I can help you!

I tapped the backspace button at a frenzied pace until the page was blank again. All of me wanted to abandon this task immediately and do anything, literally anything else. I Alt + Tabbed over to Facebook and confirmed my zero follower, zero review, zero post business page still existed and was having no impact on the world.

On impulse, I opened a new tab and navigated to the website of the private investigation firm for which I still technically worked. I read through their About Us section, hunting for ideas, but all I got was confirmation that I was wading into deep, murky water without so much as a pool noodle.

Who was it that told me to start with a website? You can’t build a client base without a website! This is the twenty-first century, after all. Bupkis.

I reviewed my to-do list, on which ‘website’ was patiently waiting to be crossed out. Once it was, I could move on to ‘business cards’ and ‘contract template.’

‘Register Walsh Investigations, LLC,’ ‘Open business checking account,’ ‘Get insurance,’ ‘Apply for business license,’ ‘Sign non-compete nullification’ with my former firm, and ‘Secure domain name’ were already crossed off, and I’d only been at this since Monday. That was a lot of things. What a go-getter I was!

I locked my computer and stood up, stretching my arms toward the ceiling and then bending over to touch my toes.

The rush of blood to my brain and limbs brought with it a spark of inspiration. I didn’t need a stupid website yet, I needed happy customers. I was legally ready to take on clients.

Thanks to the beneficence of my former boss, Gary Custer, and his non-compete nullification idea, I didn’t need to wait for my PI license to be officially upgraded to a business license before I started working. I could take clients under Gary’s license and keep all of them, provided I didn’t use contacts from my years working for him to find new clients.

The DFW metroplex, of which my home base in Murphy was but a mid-sized suburb, was plenty large enough to find clients without connections to Gary’s firm.

It was a novel arrangement, and it would only work if I maintained the goodwill I’d built up over the years by being a reliable, tenacious investigator. After I’d ghosted the firm and one of the firm’s clients, the parents of a high schooler with a shocking harassment accusation which turned out to be true, Gary wasn’t angry. He was too much the consummate professional for such unseemly reactions. But he was realistic, and he knew it was time for me to be the only one bearing the consequences of my newfound tendency to disappear for weeks without warning.

Before I could stop it, that thought led me right where I didn’t want to go: Westley Godwin.

So little time had passed since he came back into my life and then left it again. Had it really been less than three months since he found me at a night club in Dallas, kidnapped me at gunpoint, and dragged me to Miami to extort five million dollars from my dying grandfather?

Maybe I should put that on my website.

Except no one would believe it was true, and I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I was Sam Walsh, not Guinevere Martin, daughter of a murdered mob lawyer, would-be victim of wet-works Westley who decided to spare my eight-year-old life 25 years ago, caught up in an absolute clusterfuck of a situation that had been mostly resolved last month when my uncle, Marvin Agosti, had been killed in a shootout in Miami and Westley had been gently persuaded to fuck off by a certain Miami detective who didn’t want him messing up my life anymore.

Ah, the other place I didn’t want to go: Detective Ramón Hernandez of the Miami-Dade PD. Detective Grouchy-Ass Guapo, el cubano mas profesional himself, had recently been promoted to sergeant and was well on his way to lieutenant, thanks in part to his decision to send me back to Texas so I couldn’t mess up his life. A real control freak, that guy. It played well in the bedroom.

Okay, so, I didn’t want to think about Westley, I didn’t want to think about Ramón, and I didn’t want to make a website. What did that leave?

Gary once told me that in the early days of his career, he’d watch the news every morning and make a list of at least three people to try to track down. If he found them, he’d solicit his services. (You need someone to find that hit-and-run driver? The cops don’t care! I’m your guy! Etc.) He claimed it got him at least two clients a month. I’d always found the tactic a bit too ambulance-chaser-esque, but suddenly it seemed like a fine idea. It made watching TV feel like progress.

I ambled downstairs, where the TV was already tuned to a 24-hour news channel, and flipped over to a local channel. I grabbed a cup of coffee and plopped down on the couch to take in a cycle.

After a predictable rehashing of the most alarming national headlines, the MBC affiliate based in Plano moved on to the most depressing news right here at home. I had trouble focusing almost immediately, as my brain tried to tiptoe back upstairs to my office. Someone got robbed near the UT Dallas campus. Someone got murdered and dumped in Lake Lewisville. Someone found a racist epithet spray-painted on their neighbor’s garage door. What the hell was I supposed to do about any of that?

Annoyed, I flipped off the TV and decided Gary’s schtick was too old fashioned for my purposes. Marketing. That’s where I’d find a way to stand out. But I didn’t know shit about it.

My best friend and former roommate, Angie, had recently started talking to me again, so maybe it was time to enlist her help with this whole marketing plan nonsense. How had I not thought of Angie sooner? Her girlfriend, Meg, ran the social media accounts for two different bars in Dallas. Since I’d agreed to allow their angry, violent, poop-machine cat, Josh, into my home, they owed me one. I could get Meg to help me for free.

I picked up my latest cell phone and started composing a text to Angie, and something happened that you’ll find happens to me more often than is statistically likely: My phone rang mid-text.

“Hey, Gary,” I answered, slightly nervous. I wondered if there was a problem with the paperwork I’d just emailed to him, but his voice was rich with suppressed delight.

“Sam! You’re not going to believe this. I’ve got a client for you. She wants to meet at Bammi’s Bakery in Frisco in one hour. Think you can make the time?”

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