The Hero Next Time: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 4)

Chapter Fifty-Six: Sunny, Sunday

"If I survive tonight," Sunny said, "I'm going to have to do a lot of groveling to my wife."

Naira looked over at him and said, "Yes, I think you are. She's a fiery one, and you've just left your house with another woman and without her."

He glanced at her quickly before turning his eyes back to the road in front of him. They were on the Queensborough Bridge, heading back to the house he'd visited only a little more than a week ago, having a nice dinner with what he'd thought had been an ordinary South Asian family. He shook his head at his own stupidity; he'd thought Birinder had something to do with the disappearance of the very woman sitting in the passenger seat of his Prius, when all along she was seeing him on the side, while Birinder's second wife might be involved with the very organization that was after her. 

He wasn't alone in his error, though, and at least he hadn't paid for it; Jordan had approached him because he'd been looking for Naira, and now Jordan was dead, murdered because Naira knew too much about the organization and what they wanted to do with the technology they helped create, while the man he thought had been the cause of Naira's disappearance was also in the hands of the people that murdered Jordan. He felt he owed it to Jordan, and to the cosmos, to help Birinder and stop any more people from dying.

"I don't think I had any other choice," he replied. "Do you?"

Naira shrugged and said, "Probably not, unless you were willing to loan me your car. I do appreciate you coming with me, though, even if it's just to have another set of eyes looking out for me."

It was funny, but he'd never considered letting her go alone, with his car or without. "She'll kill you if anything happens to me," he said. "I just thought you should know."

"Duly noted."

"What do you think is going to happen tonight?" he asked.

"I'm going to talk to her."

"Do you think she'll talk to you?"

Naira patted her purse. "I have ways of persuading her."

"You know if we go to the house, your ex in-laws will be there, right? Do you want them to see you threatening their current daughter-in-law with a gun?"

Naira sighed in frustration. "Your calm logic is really starting to get on my nerves, you know that?"

"What if I talked to her first?"

Naira looked at him and said, "What?"

"I knock on the door, you stay out of sight but ready to act. She answers, or the in-laws answer, and I ask for Birinder. I read Naira's reaction--"

"Don't call her that. She has to have an alias now, something from that previous life of hers, like your friend told you." Before they'd left, he'd told her what Rachel had told him.

"I read Mrs. Sandhu's reaction," he corrected. "She'll have no choice but to say he's not there. I'll ask her when the last time she saw him was, and she'll have to say it was sometime today, because I talked to him earlier and she knows it. I'll express concern, ask where he went; maybe I'll tell her we'd discussed the police's interest in him, and that I'd asked him to speak with his lawyer again, and he should have been back by now. She'll either have to reassure me she's not worried, that she's sure he'll be back soon, or she'll show that she's worried, and then I'll suggest she call the police and file a missing persons report, which is probably the last thing she wants to do. Then she'll either call the police, or she'll come clean about what's really going on."

Naira was silent a moment before saying, "I'm not as confident in your sequence of events as you are. She could just keep lying and say he called her and said he had to go somewhere else. She seems to be quite an accomplished liar, if what your friend says is true; she's been playing a part for Birinder for at least a year. Her primary goal is going to be sending you away as quickly as possible, because she doesn't want Birinder's parents to know you're there and making noise about their son's whereabouts. I may need to spring out with gun drawn just as she's trying to close the door in your face."