by Tessa Vidal
“She's targeting me. Why? Because she scammed me before when I was an inexperienced twenty-two-year-old? That doesn't seem like a good plan. I'm an FBI agent now. She's taking a hell of a chance.”
“True, but you have unusual access to a variety of priceless gems. And she might think she can use her beauty and her sexuality to get to you. You wouldn't be the first agent turned bad by love.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” I sighed. How could the electricity between us be so real when Clarissa or Malory or whoever the hell she was had faked everything? “What about Easton?”
“Testimony doesn't resume for three weeks. You'll have Stanton wrapped up in a bow by then.”
“Oh. You are clever.”
He batted his eyes. “What?”
“Innocence is not a good look on a man your age.”
“Ouch.” But he was smiling. “We may have fed Sims a big bite of red herring.”
“The exculpatory evidence he thinks he has is a fake that will fall apart ten minutes later. Got it.” Now I was smiling too.
“Easton's in the bag. You concentrate on cracking Stanton. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Her organization has been making fools of law enforcement for over a decade. And now she thinks she'll use you as a wedge to get even deeper into FBI operations.”
“Not gonna happen,” I said. “I won't be used like that. Not this time.”
Chapter Six
Clary
Late March was a fabulous time of year for a cross-country drive.
I'd given the staff a few weeks off and loaded my own bags in the capacious trunk of the Fleetwood. Yukon watched me with an anticipatory air that suggested he'd been road-tripping before.
Georgia Summers wouldn't release a dog his size merely to see him stuffed into the cargo hold of a commercial jet. There was only one way to get him on location in New Orleans. And that was fine by him.
As soon as Ronnie arrived, we'd be the road.
I scratched Yukon's ears as I reviewed my plan for the last time.
Her former boss, Johannes DeWitte, had vanished in Zurich years ago. Had she known that? She must. Were they both in on it? Probably. He paid for that close-in magician she trained with.
The Amazing Darrell. That was the name. He was so good people claimed he used actual witchcraft to magic rings off fingers and watches off wrists. It couldn't have been cheap to hire him to teach all his secrets to the likes of Veronica Rales. Not cheap in money, and not cheap in practice time either.
Most criminals didn't train and didn't study. If they wanted to do homework, they could make safer money in legit careers. The few who did, the smart ones, could get away with their bullshit for years, even decades.
No more. It stops here.
A significant chunk of my last movie's earnings had gone to a team of private investigators. They'd scoured not just Los Angeles but the world in their search for answers. Where was the DeWitte Red Beryl? It seemed to have vanished without a trace. Who set up Malory Maine? Notes smuggled out of LAPD told me the cops had never entertained another suspect. When the prosecutor dropped the case against me, the file ended up on an Open Unsolved shelf.
No leads to the stone. No leads to much of anything.
Ronnie's Spanish colonial in Los Feliz was something else. Great landscaping, complete with a pool that offered a view of the Hollywood sign. Several of her neighbors had famous names. Oh, I'd never been there. She brushed me off when I offered to pick her up at home. But the files told me everything.
The county records showed the property as belonging to one Bailey Flowers, a thirty-nine-year-old LAPD officer who was, surprise, surprise, also the girlfriend. Hell of a place for two people on law enforcement salaries.
My lead PI said Flowers explained it away as an inheritance from a much older cousin who supposedly owned a sports bar in Vegas. Nobody seemed able to figure out which sports bar. And the cousin's name never appeared on the history of the property's ownership.
A gray Ford Escape pulled up, and Ronnie got out. I studied the sway of her strong hips as she bent to pick up her traveler's backpack. The rideshare driver didn't help and soon took off.
My entire focus was on Ronnie's sculpted profile. She was one of those women who look better in her thirties than she did in her twenties.
Beautiful women can be so deceptive. They break hearts.
Fine. No problem. I could do that too.
Turnabout was fair play.
Patsee was nowhere near my favorite person, but nobody deserves to be railroaded for a crime she didn't commit.
Ronnie was dangerous. Especially if you never saw her coming.
This time, I'd be the one you never saw coming. This time, I'd have the upper hand. This time, I was going to use every movie-star wile at my disposal to blast open all those long years of lies stacked upon lies upon lies.
Odds were the DeWitte Red Beryl bought her beautiful house. But now Ronnie Rales might live to regret putting the property in the girlfriend's name. Flowers and Rales were splitting. Without the cash to buy it back, Ronnie might just lose the place. According to my team, she'd been living in a room at the Super 8 on Sunset Boulevard for at least the last three weeks.
Ouch. That had to be a harsh comedown.
Considering the price of Los Angeles real estate, even a much less fancy house was going to be a challenge to buy on a special agent's salary.
That was probably why she set up Patsee. But something had gone wrong. The FBI recovered the real stone, not the fake.
Not just any FBI either. Veronica Rales herself brought it in.
That fact gave me pause every time I considered it. Ronnie recognized the stone when no one else did, but she didn't try to get away with it.
Why? Was it a trap? Was somebody else from the FBI closing in?
Why would you abandon the scam at the very moment you had your hands on the stone?
All I knew was that something went wrong enough that Ronnie didn't take the Stroganov. Which meant Ronnie still needed cash.
Which meant she'd have to try again. Sooner, rather than later.
I couldn't resist the chance to dangle the ultimate temptation in front of her. The Ademar Emerald was ninety carats of water-clear Colombian perfection set in a glittering rope of perfectly matched white diamonds. My director had arranged to borrow it for our next caper film.
And I'd arranged for light-fingered Ronnie to be on the scene as the FBI consultant.
She'd go for it. She had to.
And this time I'd catch her making the switch. Maybe she'd witched the DeWitte off my neck, but she wouldn't get away with it twice. This time, I'd be on guard.
“Road trip, baby.” I dug both hands into Yukon's fluff before I buried my face in the back of his warm neck. He was such a softie. “Are you ready?” When I twisted my head to bat my green eyes at Ronnie, I was well aware of what my tumble of red hair looked like against his pale gold fur.
Perversely, she wasn't looking. Instead, she chose to glare at the freshly washed lines of my baby blue Cadillac. “You've got to be kidding me.”
“You knew what my car looked like before you agreed to go.” I opened the wide back door where Yukon's snug, well-padded crate awaited. “And you're going to be so surprised at the mileage. She's a classic on the outside and the future on the inside.”
Ronnie continued to look everywhere but at me. “And where's the well-dressed driver?”
Yukon wagged his tail. I smiled a smile that grew wider as she finally looked me in the eyes.
“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.”
“You sure say no a lot. You ever think about taking one of those courses on PMA?”
She squinted.
“Positive mental attitude,” I said. “Oh, never mind. You wouldn't have heard of it.”
“I'm positive this is going to be a real adventure.”
“Getting in and out of his crate for a ride around is one of Yukon's favorite things to do. And he's too polite to show i
t, but I can tell he's twitching to be on the road.”
In fact, he was already snuggled into his crate. I wondered about the size of the niches where these dogs concealed themselves while standing guard in mountain temples in the long ago. He had an instinct for fitting happily into small places that you didn't expect from an animal that size.
“Why did I agree to this?” Ronnie stowed her backpack in the open trunk. “They have nonstop flights departing for New Orleans every hour, and Georgia would be happy to keep Yukon at the shelter.”
“This is a critical bonding period in our new relationship. It's no time to leave him behind. Besides, he's going to love working on location. I can already tell.”
“Uh huh.”
The gloomier she acted, the happier I felt. She was playing me or thought she was. She wanted me to think she was reluctant. That I'd gone over her head to get her assigned to this job. Well, I had, but let's not let the little technicalities get in the way. She'd built a career pinning big frauds on pretty girls who couldn't defend themselves.
She wouldn't be able to resist trying it on little Clary Stanton.
She thought she was setting a trap for me.
But the trap was all mine.
And, this time, I'd be ready to snap it shut at the perfect moment.
Chapter Seven
Ronnie
We had eighteen hundred miles to go and all week to get there. Clarissa seemed to be in no hurry. She made regular stops to let Yukon stretch his legs.
It seemed perverse, being chauffeured around by a movie star. Celebrities were rarely famous for good driving skills. “I could take a turn,” I said.
“Maybe later. I'm enjoying myself.” It didn't seem to be a lie, although I-10 East hardly seemed like the most inspiring drive.
“Music?” I asked.
“We could talk.”
Perfect. And it was her idea. “So. Tell me about yourself. Where does a movie star grow up?”
Matt's files told me Malory Maine's parents claimed they hadn't seen their daughter in years. They got a card in a wine basket delivered every year on Christmas Eve to let them know she was still alive. I suspected good old Mom and Dad knew more than they were telling. LAPD didn't have the budget to surveil the Maine abode in an out-of-the-way Gold Country town called Angels Camp. Clarissa née Malory could easily keep her visits home on the down-low.
“I don't really talk about my family,” Clarissa said. “It isn't fair to them, dragging them into the limelight. People don't think about that, what a hassle it is for everybody else in the family if one person gets really huge.” It was a dodge, one she'd used many times before with entertainment reporters.
“Some people think about it. Some people's families figure they can build on a star's career to borrow money or sell stories to the tabloids or maybe get a reality TV gig.”
“Yeah. Well. My folks wanted a doctor. Or maybe a college professor.”
I studied her beautiful profile. “I guess a dad finds it tough to watch his kid go into a career like show business.”
“Seriously, enough about me.” She kept her eyes on the road. “Talking about me is too much like work. I'll be doing a bunch of publicity for the film, and it gets old.”
Impressive. Most people would at least admit to having been born and raised someplace at some time. She wasn't giving me a goddamn inch.
“You're an evasive interview,” I said. “You never talk about yourself. You have a way of shifting the conversation to your causes. The shelter is only one of them.”
“Talking about my causes is talking about me. What's in my head and in my heart is about me.”
“Touché.”
She was evasive and smart. But I already knew that.
“Tell me about FBI Special Agent Veronica Rales.” Her tone was light, and her long hands were relaxed on the leather steering wheel.
“I'm not any huge fan of talking about myself either.”
“But that's what my director is paying you for. So you're going to have to bear with me as I do a deep dive into your character.”
“I don't know where to begin.”
“Well, I'll start, and you stop me when I go wrong. You've been at the FBI for nine years. Before that, you worked several years for DeWitte Limited. And you got a fancy degree with a double minor from the Colorado School of Mines. Considering you're not that old, you must have got off to an early start.”
“You've been checking me out.”
She lifted a shoulder, a tacit half-shrug.
A lipstick red Toyota Tacoma pulled up on the right. Clarissa sped up, and the truck did too. That close, we could see somebody taking an iPhone video over the driver's shoulder.
“Rude,” I said.
“Everybody's a videographer these days.” Her smile was unworried. Perspective and her dark sunglasses concealed her identity. All the truck saw was a well-maintained antique ready to be bagged, tagged, and uploaded to Instagram.
The next time Clarissa sped up, they let us get away.
“Ninety,” she said. “Want to go for a hundred?”
“I was happy with eighty.”
She laughed and touched the brakes. The road unspooled in silence all the way to Quartzite, where she pulled off. Somehow, the personal conversation had been effectively derailed. Digging into the cooler, she pulled out a cold can of Fanta Orange. “Drink. It's a dry heat.”
I popped it open.
“My favorite form of hydration,” she said.
“Funny. It's my favorite too.”
“Huh. Must be fate.”
Yeah, right. Those investigators of hers weren't half-bad for private guys.
I thought we might spend the night in one of those fancy five-star resorts complete with snooty spa in Phoenix, but she kept on going. After a time, she got off the interstate, and I assumed we were headed for one of the frou-frou resorts in the Catalina Foothills.
And still she kept climbing.
“It'll be cooler at higher elevation,” she said. “Better for our evening walk.”
She was a good driver. You thought of old fossils like this as land yachts that were hard to maneuver around tight curves, but she handled the car with ease. The GPS― another aftermarket installation― began to talk us through a series of turns. Eventually, we found ourselves going up a curving driveway that led us into an old-fashioned open carport.
“Where is everybody?” There were three spaces, but no vehicles besides our own.
“I have a code.” Yukon sniffed an interesting tree trunk, and Clarissa touched the top of his fluffy head. “We can't just drive up to any random motel with a dog this size.”
She was right, of course.
“My people found this place and made the reservations for me.” Squinting at something on her phone, she punched a series of numbers into an alarm box.
A soft buzz sounded, and then something clunked. The door unlocking itself.
The house was small but comfortable. The décor was standard bed and breakfast kitsch― depression glass on display in a tall bookshelf, paintings of sunsets and western wildflowers, the wood a little too dark and heavy for modern tastes. There was a climate-controlled empty back room which led out into a fenced dog run, making it obvious where their canine guests were meant to stay.
Clarissa unpacked Yukon's stuff first― setting out bowls and fluffing his doggy bed. He walked around snuffling, obviously intrigued by the interesting scents left behind by previous visitors.
“This is nice.” I hadn't known I was going to say that until the words were out.
After we brought in our bags, she headed off to walk Yukon on a nearby trail. I wouldn't have minded a walk myself, but I needed some time alone. Clarissa seemed so fucking normal. So decent. Kind to animals. A careful but efficient driver. It was hard to hate her, even though I knew she was the bad guy in this movie.
Don't let her get to you. Let her think she's charming you, but you've got to keep your head.
&
nbsp; Yeah, right. That was all well and good in theory.
I wanted to text Matt with an update, but my phone had no signal. Huh. The place hadn't seemed that remote. Well, it wasn't like I'd learned anything yet. We were still in the getting-to-know-you phase.
What was Bailey doing?
Didn't matter.
Bailey and I were over. Done and dusted. I couldn't let myself think about Bailey.
Clarissa had taken the smaller of the two bedrooms, rolling in her suitcase before I could offer. Smart sociopaths could learn to be polite in little ways, the better to stick the knife in. But she didn't seem to be your standard sociopath. She seemed to be genuinely nice. Of course, nice people committed crimes for money the same as anybody else, but they usually needed a stronger motive. A sick child or spouse. Or a parent.
I thought about Malory Maine's parents again. According to the background material on Matt's thumb drive, they weren't experiencing any unusual financial pressure. Besides, Clarissa was now a top star paid millions for every movie. She could provide for her folks through legal means.
Her bedroom door was open. Her blood-red polycarbonate Rimowa rolling suitcase was unlocked.
I needed to hurry. Large dogs shouldn't be over-exercised when they were young. Clarissa and Yukon wouldn't be out of the way forever.
Opening the case, I carefully lifted out the contents piece by piece. Expensive but mostly casual clothes suitable for road-tripping. One little black dress, one matching pair of black stilettos. A bag of expensive cosmetics. No computer, and the phone was undoubtedly in her cross-body handbag.
No jewelry.
I felt along the side panels, but they didn't seem to be stuffed with bundles of cash or bags of uncut diamonds. What had I really expected to find? She was too smart to make it that easy.
This felt creepy. Yes, I was on assignment. Yes, my SAC expected me to check her out from every angle. Yes, I had a basic duty to make sure she wasn't carrying a concealed weapon or some other kind of dangerous contraband, but...