by Toby Neal
Sophie felt the heat of his touch, his need, all the way to her core.
She bent and kissed his head, filled with tenderness and arousal as Raveaux squeezed and caressed her, his arms powerful and his grip tight. She stroked his shoulder, tracing the hard round of his deltoid through the robe, caressing the line of his spine and over his abs.
He felt so good. It had been so long . . .
Raveaux made a sound, deep and half-swallowed, that expressed her feelings perfectly.
She needed this too.
The doorbell rang, a rude buzzing.
Sophie sprang up, dislodging Raveaux. “That must be room service. Let me go see.”
“Saved by the bell,” her friend Marcella’s voice said in her mind, as Sophie hurried across the room. She checked through the peephole and verified the room service delivery. Sophie admitted the waiter pushing the white-covered cart, loaded with domed plates. She signed the room number to the check and tugged the cart further inside, dismissing the waiter.
She turned back, pulling the cart into the room. Her cheeks and chest still felt flushed with what had almost happened. She glanced over at the bed.
Raveaux had not moved—he lay face down in the rumpled bedclothes, his arms open, encircling the place where she’d been sitting.
Sophie left the cart and hurried over, a surge of alarm making her dizzy. “Pierre?” She had never said his first name before.
Breath puffed gently between his parted lips. His eyelids fluttered.
He was deeply asleep.
Sophie pushed Raveaux over onto his back. She slid a pillow under his head and tugged the comforter up and over him, tucking him in. “Guess it’s not meant to be,” she whispered, kissing his cheek. “Sleep well.”
Sophie took her covered dish off the cart and sat down with it at the little table near the window. She ate, and she drank her wine, and she watched the man asleep in the bed.
Raveaux was getting to her.
It was a good thing she was going to see Connor on Phi Ni. She definitely needed to go; she needed to see the Ghost before things got any more complicated with her new partner.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Raveaux: Day Seven
Detective Fremont curled his large brown hands around a thick china mug of coffee. The young detective had seated himself in the booth across from Sophie and Raveaux, and he took a sip of black brew. “I took your statement down at the station. Now I just want to have more of a discussion about this case, where it’s going, and what you two plan to do next.”
Raveaux had woken that morning to his phone ringing insistently—Fremont summoning him and Sophie to a meeting at Pellman’s favorite coffee shop on the corner closest to their hotel. Getting up, he found himself clothed in a robe, wrapped in the comforter of his bed, with a single room service meal congealing on the cart and a used set of dishes left behind on the little table.
Sophie had been there, eaten, and left. He didn’t remember much about any of it, except an impression of her in his arms.
Had something happened between them? A man could dream . . . and now, Raveaux wished he wasn’t so conscious of the brush of Sophie’s elbow against his in the booth. He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear them of the last of the effects of the migraine.
“We’re happy to help any way we can,” Sophie said. “What happened was a tragedy.”
“Yes, it was. My partner’s dead.”
Raveaux looked up, and met Fremont’s deep brown eyes. Grief and anger hid in the tightness at the corners.
Sophie moved, inching away from touching Raveaux. Did she find him so repulsive? He dimly remembered dropping his boxers and getting into the shower in front of her . . . He’d been so lost in headache pain his nakedness hadn’t mattered . . . But upon waking up, he’d had the sense that some line had been crossed, and damn, he wished he could remember what exactly that line had been.
“I was working an angle yesterday that might or might not be related to the case,” Sophie said. “While you gentlemen were caught up in that shootout, I was visiting a suspect—Elisa Bell, Samson’s heir. Mel Samson, if you recall, is the woman who actually stole the gems from both Finewell’s sites that we investigated. What you walked in on was the fence aspect of things, and unfortunately, all of those perps are dead now and no longer able answer any questions.”
Fremont’s eyes kindled with anger. His words fired like bullets. “Do you think I wanted my partner to die for some insurance company’s useless rocks?” His hand was so large it engulfed his mug, his skin white at the knuckles with pressure as he squeezed. “Do you think Pellman would’ve walked into that mess if he’d had any idea what your partner was leading him into?”
“Excusez-moi.” Raveaux lifted his hands in a surrender gesture. “I didn’t mean to lead anyone anywhere. I was doing my own reconnaissance with my own confidential informant. I didn’t even tell Sophie who I was with or where I was going, and that was because I didn’t want anyone to be in danger besides myself. I was confident of my CI, Kim Hoo. We’d been in many a tough spot before, and he was a good talker.” Raveaux shook his head. “But once I got a look at Kramer and his thugs, saw that the meet could easily go sideways, all I was focused on was getting evidence that those diamonds were from the heist, and getting out of there alive.” Raveaux blew out a breath, remembering the feel of the gun muzzle at the back of his neck. “Pellman chose to plant a GPS on me and follow me to the meet after I carelessly let slip that I had a contact that might be able to track the diamonds’ fence. That’s on him.”
The three were staring at each other in a strange sort of standoff when the waitress returned with her notepad—the same waitress that had waited on them the other morning, with Pellman. Her penciled brows rose. “Hey, Fremont. Where’s Deke?”
Pellman’s first name. Raveaux’s gut hollowed as Fremont shook his head. “He’s no longer with us, Alice.”
The woman’s doughy face drained of color, and she covered her mouth with a hand. “I need a minute,” she whispered, and her shoes squeaked as she walked rapidly away.
Raveaux met Fremont’s eyes squarely. “Detective Fremont, however the debacle came about, we are both very sorry about what happened to Pellman. He was a good man.”
Fremont tipped his head, as if assessing the sincerity of Raveaux’s words. “He was. I’ve had a little time to think about it since yesterday, and truthfully, it’s how he would’ve wanted to go.”
Raveaux glanced at Sophie, and she nodded. He seemed to remember talking about it with her . . . They must have discussed that last night.
Fremont looked down into his coffee cup. “What’s done is done, but I need some direction to move forward with on this case. I’d like to solve it in his memory. Pellman was a bird-dog that way; he hated to give up on anything. I knew about that diamond heist at Finewell’s, but Pellman never brought me in on it. Frankly, we had more serious fish to fry, and the loss had been covered by insurance. I was as surprised as anyone when he told me he had a fresh lead and that we were going after a possible fence.”
“We intend to wrap up this case,” Sophie said, leaning forward. “I have an angle that I mentioned to Pellman yesterday. As I told you, we’d identified Mel Samson, an assessor and curator for Finewell’s, as the actual jewel thief. She died last week of an apparent suicide. I couldn’t find a connection between Samson and Elisa Bell, but on my visit yesterday, Bell admitted that she was Samson’s daughter, given up for adoption. She said she had sought out and found her mother seven years ago and they’d been in touch ever since.”
Raveaux shot Sophie a glance—she hadn’t told him any of this!
Sophie met Raveaux’s narrowed gaze with earnest brown eyes. “Pierre, I didn’t have time to catch you up with what I was doing while you were getting shot at, and then you were pretty out of it when I picked you up at the station, what with that migraine coming on.”
She’d used his first name. Raveaux gave a brief nod—he remembered her
picking him up, and that he’d been too far gone for further information to register.
Sophie turned back to address Fremont. “Elisa Bell claims to know little about her birth mother, though they were in touch monthly. She says she only met Samson in person once. That part of her story doesn’t add up, because she was spying on Samson.” Sophie took a sip of her tea, and continued. “I discovered Bell’s existence and the Lambert Building in the first place, because she had a keylogger spyware program deployed on Sampson’s computer, and was monitoring every keystroke that Samson made.”
Fremont’s brows rose in surprise. “Why?”
“We don’t know that yet,” Sophie said.
Raveaux picked up the thread. “Samson had claimed she worked with an unknown partner. She received instructions from this master thief. Someone told her what gems to steal, how to pull off the theft, and where to leave the stones for the fence to pick up. That same person also doctored the video surveillance to hide Samson’s activities.”
Fremont’s gaze seemed to sharpen. “And you think this Bell woman is the master thief?”
“I wish it were that easy,” Sophie said. “So far, I’ve found no evidence of that. I’ve studied Bell’s background thoroughly, and nothing in her history indicates those types of skills. But she was, for some reason, monitoring Samson. We also have an email address that Samson supposedly used to communicate with the architect of the thefts, even though a tracker I planted on an email led us to Samson’s address and her body. Because of that, we initially considered that Samson was operating alone, that the email address was something to slow us down or throw us off. And maybe that’s all it was. But when I dug deeper into Samson’s computer, I found the keylogger program. That led us to the Lambert building, and Samson’s will led us to Bell. And Bell had a lot to gain by Samson’s death.”
“Sounds like we should pay Bell a visit,” Fremont rumbled. “If we can ever get some breakfast.” He looked around. “The waitress was a friend of Deke’s. She seems to have abandoned us.”
Sophie was obviously still thinking as she rubbed the scar on her cheek thoughtfully, gazing into the distance. “I left Bell with Detective Pellman’s card,” she said. “I told her someone from the SFPD needed to speak with her. She will be expecting some sort of visit.”
“Just to play devil’s advocate here, it’s still possible that Samson stole the gems on her own,” Raveaux said. “We uncovered motive for the thefts. Samson needed money for her cancer treatments, and the thefts began right around the time of her diagnosis.”
Sophie nodded. “Bell denied knowing she was Samson’s heir, but perhaps she did know something, and was monitoring Samson for her own reasons.”
“Let’s go pay Elisa Bell a visit,” Fremont repeated. “I want to get eyes on this girl.”.
A different waitress appeared, holding her notepad and pen ready. “Alice needed to take a break. I’m here to take your order. What can I get you?”
Fremont looked across at Raveaux first, then Sophie. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost my appetite.”
Sophie nodded. “I’m not hungry.”
Raveaux took a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to the waitress. “For your trouble and our use of the table. We have to be somewhere else.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sophie: Day Seven
Sophie had tried the phone number Fremont had located for Bell to no avail. Now she stood in front of the door to the woman’s apartment in the Lambert Building with Raveaux to her left, and Fremont to her right. She raised her hand and knocked.
No answer.
She knocked again.
Still no answer.
“She didn’t answer the door when I was here last, either,” Sophie said.
Raveaux shot her a look from under dark brows. “Then how did you end up meeting with her?”
Sophie was saved from having to answer by Fremont pounding on the door. Fremont’s deep voice boomed in the hallway along with the thud of his fist. “Elisa Bell! Open up! This is Detective Fremont from the San Francisco Police!”
Still no response.
Fremont cupped his ear in an exaggerated way. “I think I hear someone calling for help from inside. We need to go in and render assistance.” He stepped back and cocked his leg to kick the door in, but Sophie held up a hand.
“Let’s not add insult to injury by ruining her door.” Sophie dug in her waist pack and lifted out her lockpicks. “She’s probably hiding inside, like yesterday.”
Raveaux’s lips tightened in that almost-smile. “Ah, now we know how you two ended up meeting.”
Sophie soon had the door open. She gave it a gentle push.
The entry area looked just as before: the lamp was lit next to the ruby-red couch. The door to the bathroom was ajar, and the light was on inside. Sophie stepped through the doorway, the men behind her. “Elisa? It’s Sophie Smithson. From the insurance company. You met with me yesterday. We thought we heard you call out for help.”
No answer.
Sophie turned to look over her shoulder at Raveaux. “Close the door. She has a cat.”
Raveaux did so. Fremont passed Sophie, prowling the room. “Total chick apartment.”
“Since Bell’s not here, we can just take a look around and leave,” Sophie said. “And you can pretend you didn’t see me make a copy of her computer’s hard drive, which I’m going to do. I guess I don’t need to tell you both not to touch anything.”
Sophie walked into the bedroom, and stopped with a little gasp. “Gentlemen? I think she’s on the run.”
The closet door hung open, a light on inside shining down on empty hangers dangling awry. A pile of discarded clothing and books lay on the floor. A dresser drawer hung open like an empty mouth, an abandoned pink nightgown hanging out like a tongue.
Fremont’s brow creased. “Why would she run? Maybe she’s just visiting a relative or something.”
Sophie put her hands on her hips. “Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. She fled because she had something to hide.”
“But she just learned her mother died. Perhaps she went to visit someone . . .” Raveaux swiveled, looking into the bathroom. “She emptied her cabinet here, too.”
“Does this look like what you do when you go for a short jaunt?” Sophie gestured to the piles of clothes, the emptied desk. “This looks to me like what you do when you activate your go bag.”
“Go bag?” Raveaux’s brow knit.
“Means you grab your fake passport and pre-packed essentials, and head for the hills,” Fremont said.
“Something about your visit definitely spooked her,” Raveaux said.
“Or, she’s grief stricken and grabbed a few things to go visit a friend, or a villa in Cancun,” Fremont insisted. “I’m not sold on this woman as anything but a bystander.”
Sophie bit her lip on any further arguments. “My instinct is saying different, but let’s just try to find her first. If she had a laptop, look for it. If she had an extra phone, or a safe, let me know. I’m going to milk this computer she left behind for anything it’s got.” Sophie hooked up her write blocker and enabled it as the two men prowled through the apartment, paper towels on their hands to avoid leaving fingerprints.
“No sign of an extra phone or laptop, and the wall safe, located behind the painting in the living room, was left open. It’s empty,” Raveaux reported, a few minutes later.
“She didn’t try to hide that she left in a hurry,” Fremont said. “I want a list of all her known contacts. Friends, relatives, colleagues from work . . .”
“We are not your deputies,” Raveaux said. “We have a client we answer to. Finewell’s may, or may not, be interested in Bell and where she went. We have to call them and let them know that we have confirmation that the diamonds were fenced, and that some of them are now in evidence as part of a murder case. It might well be enough for them that the breach to their firm has been blocked, with t
he death of Samson.”
Sophie looked up from the data extraction she had underway, catching Fremont’s eye. “I already did a lot of legwork on Bell’s background. I’m happy to share that information with you, limited as it is. I will send it over on email. I had already noticed that Bell appeared to have lived a very isolated life, so I’m not sure how helpful it will be. In fact . . . I suspect if we dig far enough, we might find that Bell isn’t her real name.”
Both men turned to stare at her.
Sophie shrugged. “I would have told you if I had found anything more definitive than a suspicion. I have not. Bell’s identity held up to the closer inspection I already gave it. But like I said, there’s a good chance this isn’t her only identity. If she is the master thief, then she may have more than one.” An idea bloomed in Sophie’s mind. “Perhaps I can lure her out.”
Fremont closed the drawer he’d been peeking into. “Why don’t we go our separate ways. You go back to your hotel and round up that information, send me that email, and I’ll call in a BOLO for Bell, get her picture circulating at all the public transpo, including airports. And if you find a way to flush her out, give me a call.”
Sophie settled into a chair at the desk, sipping from her tea flask as she got down to business with Bell’s copied hard drive. She had dismissed Raveaux to find them some takeaway food; she wanted to dig into that computer immediately and see what she could find.
An attempt had been made to erase the drive; some kind of random fragmentation program had been run on the machine. Sophie reeled back the clock on the drive, downloading a program that could rescue a previous version. Sure enough, an earlier backup had been saved only a week ago, and Bell hadn’t taken time to make sure that all of her backups had been deleted.
Sophie shunted the older drive into DAVID and ran a search on Bell’s name and all the business and personal keywords she’d already uncovered, including her birthday, first jobs and hobbies, and school graduations. As the information began to scroll down, filling one of DAVID’s “caches,” Sophie gasped.