“Maybe he’s in the saddle,” she retorted.
“Hell of an idea. Why don’t you come over here and—”
The intercom in Dana’s office buzzed, cutting him off. Her assistant’s voice floated from a speaker. “Factoid is here.”
“Tell him to—“ began Niall.
“Come in,” Dana finished. Then, quickly, to Niall, “Put a sock in it, boyo. Remember the Gretchen Incident.”
“What incident? She never saw us under that conference table.”
“If she had come in sooner, she would have found us on top of it.”
“Later, too.” Niall smiled, remembering.
“Rain check?” Dana asked.
“Do I get one, too?”
“As many as you want, whenever you want them. Except now!” she said, laughing and evading a lazy swipe of his big hand.
When McCoy came in, Dana was at her desk and Niall was looking out one of the windows. L.A. was the same, but the fit of his pants had undergone some interesting changes. He wasn’t planning on turning around until everything was back in its accustomed place.
“Erik needs a new pager,” McCoy said.
“Why?” Dana asked.
“The old one doesn’t deliver electric shocks.”
“Ignoring you, is he?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t feel bad. He’s ignoring me, too.”
“I admire his TQ,” McCoy said under his breath.
From past exposure, Dana knew that TQ was shorthand for testosterone quotient. She ignored McCoy’s comment. It was easier than trying to deal with his elliptical sense of humor. “If it’s urgent, I have a fallback position.”
Niall gave her a hooded look that said, Would that be under the table, luv?
She ignored him, too. There were times when she thought her life consisted of ignoring the men in it. “Is it urgent?”
McCoy started to say that it was, had a rare attack of common sense, and sighed. “No, but it’s interesting.”
“We’re listening,” Niall said.
McCoy straightened his stringbean body and began talking. “The grandmother—”
“Whose?” Niall and Dana said instantly. “We’re not mind readers,” she added gently, if a bit tartly.
“Yeah. I forgot. It’s the pages thing.”
Blank looks from both his bosses.
“You know, the old pages,” he said.
“Which client, boyo?” Niall asked.
McCoy’s eyes unfocused and his right hand began to twitch as he played his palm widget like a five-fingered master pianist.
“Bloody hell,” Niall muttered, but he didn’t say it loud enough to disturb Factoid. “He’s gone again.”
“Patience.”
“I’d rather unplug him.”
“Then he wouldn’t be much good to anyone, would he? Least of all himself.”
“Someday I’m going to find out.”
“Give me a head start,” Dana said, unwrapping a tiny mint from a dish on her desk. “Factoid unplugged won’t be a pretty sight.”
His hand kept twitching.
“Has anyone ever told the boy that he’s a rude bastard?” Niall asked easily.
“You have. Many times.”
“Not often enough or hard enough to— Wait, he’s back.”
“Sorry,” McCoy said defensively. He knew Niall simply didn’t understand the plugged-in, fully wired generation. “That was C. D. She needed to know if there’s any proof that bugs have sex for fun rather than for making little bugs.”
“Don’t ask,” Dana said swiftly to Niall.
“I can’t help it. Is there?”
“Some Brazilian did a study of Amazonian riverboat cockroaches that—”
“No.” Dana’s voice, like her face, said she meant it. “About the grandmother?”
“Grandmother . . . grandmother . . .” McCoy frowned and twitched, but his computer didn’t have a record of the previous conversation. His brain, however, did. Sometimes there just wasn’t any substitute for old-fashioned hardwiring. “Warrick.”
“Ah, Serena Charters. The manuscript pages,” Dana said. “Continue.”
“According to every computer source I have access to, the old lady didn’t exist before November 8, 1949. That’s when she bought five acres of the government’s biggest sandlot real cheap with the promise of improving it within a year. She did. November 8, 1950, she became the owner of said five acres free and clear.”
“No sign of her before that?” Niall asked, frowning.
“Nothing. No birth certificate, no Social Security, no marriage, no death, no passport, no visa, no driver’s license, no immigration papers, not one entry. Ellis Weaver appeared one day like she’d been beamed down from a passing spaceship. She hasn’t been here much since then, either. Her lawyer pays her property taxes once a year. That’s it. No credit cards, no checks, no utility bills, no Social Security, no Medicare, no MediCal, no health insurance, no life insurance, no driver’s license, no vehicle registration in her own name. Nada, zip, zilch, zero. The woman was like a terminal-stage Yogi living on air and pure thoughts.”
“Keep after it,” Niall said.
Dana said, “I assume you searched under the name Charters as well.”
McCoy gave her a wounded look. “No Ellis Charters listed at all. I’m tracing every other female of her generation with the name Charters, but it’s slow going. Ancient history just ain’t computerized.”
“Ancient history is older than 1949, boyo.”
“Really? I didn’t think you were that old,” Dana said.
Niall’s smile was more like a promise of retribution. “The harder the information is to find, the more useful it’s likely to be. People don’t bury clean secrets, only dirty ones.”
“Can’t you put a print researcher on it?” McCoy asked in a tone that was real close to a whine. Then light dawned: Gretchen was a flash at brick-and-board research. “Never mind. Thanks. I’m gone.”
And he was.
Niall blinked. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the boy move that fast.”
“He just remembered that Gretchen is keen on print research.”
“And he’s keen on Gretchen.”
Dana smiled like an amused cat. “It’s all your fault, my little cabbage. You put him on the trail.”
“He was born on Gretchen’s trail and I’m not your little cabbage.”
“My big one, then.”
“My ass.”
“That, too.”
Niall started to leap in with both big feet, but a single look at her told him that Dana’s heart wasn’t really yanking on his chain; her fingers were doing the flute thing again. He sat back and waited to receive whatever revelation her complex, brilliant, and pragmatic mind had to offer.
Chapter 24
PALM DESERT
THURSDAY EVENING
Cleary Warrick Montclair paced the living room of her personal area of the West Coast Warrick house. The wing with its ten rooms had been set aside for her use when she divorced and moved back home with her very young son. Some days she didn’t know whether her father had rewarded or cursed her with his generosity. She did know that he had a hold on her that no other man could equal; she just didn’t know why.
Unlike Norman Warrick, Cleary preferred modern furnishings, or at least more modern than Louis XV. There was no massive “brown furniture” filling her rooms. Textured rugs and geometric furniture covered by fabrics in shades of beige and cream and white gave an airy spaciousness to the main room. The art on the walls and tables was generic avant, which was to say quite expensive to buyers willing to put themselves in the hands of a contemporary-art expert. As the House of Warrick overflowed with such experts to advise the ill-advised and newly rich, Cleary had made it her duty to showcase twenty-first-century art in her home as a balance to her father’s decidedly antique tastes.
The true passion in her life wasn’t art or antiques, it was business: the House of Warric
k. How she decorated her home and office was irrelevant to her, except in as much as it contributed to the Warrick reputation as a cultural taste-maker, and thus to the House of Warrick’s bottom line.
Despite her otherwise practical turn of mind, Cleary had spent most of her lifetime trying to please her father by replacing the older brother who had tanked up on vodka and married his Maserati to a concrete wall. Even though she knew intellectually that both being the replacement and pleasing her father were impossible, she kept believing deep in her soul that if she just did the right thing, and did it often enough, Daddy would finally approve of his little girl.
No matter how much or how often the woman’s mind wrestled with the child inside, the child Cleary was stubborn and the woman Cleary was compelled to keep on trying to do the impossible.
Even after Cleary had divorced the husband her father didn’t approve of and brought her son home, she had been rewarded by the rough side of her father’s tongue more often than not. Regardless, she had spent years trying to convince him that she was at least as capable of sharing the responsibility of running the House of Warrick as her older brother had been.
She hadn’t succeeded. Every day, several times a day, her father let her know that he was going to live long enough to train his grandson to take up the reins, not her. Until then, Paul Carson had a shrewd head for business as well as for guarding people and information.
Cleary told herself that her father’s lack of faith didn’t matter; what was important was family continuity. On good days she even believed it.
Today wasn’t one of those days.
“Why won’t he let me take care of it?” Cleary said loudly. “God damn it, you’d think I was still sucking my thumb!”
Paul stretched out his long legs, admired the expensive, dark gleam of his loafers against the white carpet, and let Cleary’s words roll over him. He had heard it all before. He would hear it all again. It was just part of his job as Warrick’s chief of security and right-hand man, and Cleary’s discreet lover.
“When I asked if he had made any progress in finding the girl, he told me to mind my own business,” Cleary said in a rising voice. “As if his business isn’t mine! Who settles all the staff complaints? Who makes sure taxes are paid and people are hired? Who sucks up to all the crabby old widows with money? Who is on the road three hundred days a year pressing the flesh and reminding people of the House of Warrick? Who—”
Paul flicked a brief sideways glance at his watch. Thin, gold, expensive, it was a foolish luxury because it did nothing but keep track of seconds, minutes, and hours. It didn’t receive faxes or voice mail or E-mail, it didn’t send them, it didn’t do sums or play games or remember addresses and birthdays. It did one thing superbly and well: it told time.
In that single-purpose reliability, the watch was rather like a gun. No nonsense. No confusion about function. No doubt as to what happened next. Just aim and fire.
Biting back a yawn, Paul eased his long body into a more comfortable position in the low chair whose creamy oval shape and yellow feet reminded him of a duck. He wished he could close his eyes and doze for a few minutes. He and Cleary had torn up the sheets like teenagers last night. Or rather, he had. Cleary wasn’t a sensual woman. On the other hand, she was willing, eager to please, and had learned to go down on him with gratifying skill and every appearance of enthusiasm.
In all, he had nothing to complain about and a lot to be grateful for. So he would keep his mouth shut and listen to his lover’s unvarying complaints about the prick who was her father.
Not that Paul disagreed with her. Norman Warrick was a real prick. No doubt about it. But once that was said, nothing changed, certainly not blood relationship or the much more tenuous relationship of employer and employee.
Or of lovers, for that matter.
“—even makes sure each of his three houses is staffed, supplied, polished, and ready to have him at a moment’s notice,” Cleary continued. She compressed her lips, caught as always between fury at her father for his callousness and at herself for still giving a damn. Today biting her lips didn’t work. Neither did tilting back her head. Tears gathered, hot as a little girl’s anger. “Oh, shit!”
Paul almost sighed. Once again she had worked herself into a froth over something that wouldn’t change. Couldn’t change. He understood Warrick’s problem; it was one he had himself. The ecstasies and agonies of human emotions simply passed him by. He knew they were real, just as he knew he would never feel them. Nor would Warrick. The only difference between the two men was that Warrick had been born to a family that was comfortable enough financially so that he didn’t have to learn to mimic emotions to be accepted.
Paul hadn’t been so lucky. His family had been hardworking, fertile, and barely able to claw its way from poverty into the lower class.
Being a bright boy, Paul had soon figured out that when it came to emotions, he was different from the people around him. The next thing he had learned was that people who were different were outcasts. The final revelation had been that outcasts didn’t get ahead no matter how smart or ruthless they were.
Paul had decided he wouldn’t be an outcast. He studied people until he learned how to read their needs. Then, if it was worth the effort, he gave them what they needed.
Leaning forward, he grabbed one of Cleary’s hands and gathered her into his lap. “Come here, sweet thing. Come have a good cry on me. I understand how valuable you are.”
She resisted for a moment before she gave in and relaxed into Paul’s familiar embrace. A few tears came, then a few more, then a swift flood that was gone almost before it could dampen his shirt.
The speed of her emotional shifts fascinated him. It was like a peephole into a world he could never enter, a world that held the secret to success.
His quick, narrow hands smoothed over her tumbled hair and down her thin back and fashionably meager hips. He preferred women with meat on them but didn’t bother telling Cleary that. She desperately wanted to look like a little girl, the better to win Daddy’s approval, no doubt. If that meant eating one lettuce leaf and one carrot shred per meal, then that was what she would eat.
Besides, the parts of her that really interested him were still soft, still wet. If the wrapping lacked sex appeal, he could close his eyes and get past it.
“Let me talk to him,” Paul said. “Sometimes I can get through to him.”
She breathed out air that could have been born in a sigh or a sob. “What if he gets mad and dies?”
If that happened Paul would get up and dance a jig, because Cleary would inherit a buttload of money, but he knew she didn’t want to hear about that. “He won’t. Not today.”
Which was probably, unfortunately, true.
“He can’t die.” Her voice was tense, desperate.
Not for the first time, Paul wondered how in hell an otherwise smart woman nearing her fiftieth birthday could be so dumb about an elemental fact of life: People died. All the time. For every reason. For no reason at all. Every day. All day. Night, too.
But the one time he had pointed that out, Cleary had exploded and called him a cold monster. It had taken him a week to coax her back into speaking to him, and it was another two weeks before she went down on him.
Paul learned from his mistakes.
He kissed Cleary’s forehead and stroked her back and hips. “That tough old man will live to blow out a hundred birthday candles.”
She sighed and snuggled closer. “I know. I just worry about him. I don’t want him to die before . . .” Her voice faded. Before he realizes what a good daughter I am.
“Before what?” Paul asked.
Her shoulders jerked. She didn’t like admitting her needs to herself. She did her best to hide them from everyone else, even the man she loved as much as she could love any man after her father.
“I don’t know.” Her voice was petulant, like a little girl.
But the tongue licking his neck was all woman. So were th
e hands reaching for his fly.
Paul smiled and shifted to make it easier for her. The nice thing about giving people what they wanted was that the smart ones gave it back to you.
Cleary was smart.
“Promise you’ll get those pages?” she said. “We’ve got to keep a lid on this or we’ll lose out on the merger with smaller Internet houses. Then we’ll get swallowed up by Christie’s or Sotheby’s or even—Christ forbid—Auction Coalition.”
He felt her mouth burrow into the opening of his fly and groaned.
“Promise me,” she said, licking him.
His hips jerked. “I promise.”
She smiled and felt better. She couldn’t control her father, but she could certainly hold his right-hand man’s attention.
It was as easy as sucking on candy.
Chapter 25
The call came after midnight. Only one person heard the cell phone ring.
He had been waiting.
“I’m listening,” he said in a low voice.
“She went into her own house the same way she left North’s—empty-handed.”
Shit! Had she left the stuff in a safe-deposit box in Palm Springs?
“Stay with her.”
“You want me to toss the house?”
He had already considered and rejected the idea. If Serena hadn’t carried anything into the house, then the pages weren’t there. “No. This is legal all the way.”
A lie, but a useful one.
If it came to another murder, he didn’t want anyone to know but Serena, because she wouldn’t tell anyone. Ever.
That was the really nice thing about dead people. Their mouths were sewed shut.
Chapter 26
PALM SPRINGS
FRIDAY DAWN
Okay, Shel. Let me see if I have this right,” Erik said into the phone. He scrolled through the list of pages Rarities was researching for him. For the sake of simplicity he had numbered them one through eleven. “So far, most of the provenance trails go back only as far as the seventies, no matter how many owners.”
“Right.” At the other end of the conversation, Shel didn’t bother to conceal a jaw-cracking yawn. He was used to working long shifts, but this one had gone beyond caffeine’s ability to speed him up. His only consolation was that Factoid was at this moment cursing up and down the hallway at the slow—for God’s sake it’s fucking Stone Age microfilm—pace of searching through some of the mustier archives of the U.S. government. “We’re contacting the last-listed private individuals or dealers on the East Coast right now. Midwest next. Mountain time next. Should know more by noon. Evening, latest.”
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