“Why not? She doesn’t care about anyone but herself.” Right or wrong, I didn’t care if she choked on her own vomit. She had the ability to put a halt to this mess and was too weak to act. I moved to the window and peered through the miniblinds, scanning the parking lot for anything out of place. No way I was going to end up like Paul. “We have to get out of here. She’s setting us up.”
“She’s upset.”
“She’s dangerous.”
Our argument was cut short by the sound of a gun firing.
Chapter 16
Wyatt kicked in the flimsy bathroom door, holding me back with one hand as he looked inside. But he wasn’t fast enough. I got an eyeful of blood and brain sliding down the white tile of the bathtub. Glenda’s body was crumpled half in, half out of the tub, the Beretta still in her lax hand. She’d definitely meant business.
Minutes later we were once again swimming in cops. Suspicions ran high when the homicide detectives figured out we’d been at The Watering Hole last night. They separated Wyatt and me—no doubt so we couldn’t coordinate our stories.
I flashed my P.I. badge at the detective and dropped the names of a couple of my contacts at the Nashua and Manchester P.D.s so he could check me out. That only cranked up the questions about Paul and Glenda and how Wyatt and I came to have the misfortune to witness both their deaths. That fact alone had moved us to the top of the suspect list.
“Paul was Glenda’s boss,” I repeated for what seemed like the hundredth time. “They were close.”
“Close how? Like lovers?” the detective asked.
His eyes were slightly crossed and it hurt to look at him directly. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She was going through a divorce.”
He scratched his chin. “So she’s pining away for her boss and she offs herself?”
“I don’t think it’s the one thing. It’s the divorce, losing custody of her kid, troubles at work.”
He stared at his notes, then screwed a confused look onto his face. “What’s an out-of-state P.I. doing mixed up in investigating crashing jets again?”
Biting back my temper, I stayed as close to the truth as I could—leaving out Sofia and the fact that I’d taken part in stealing the chip at the convention center. And because I didn’t have a choice, I told the detective about the HART and gave him the address Glenda had scribbled on the napkin—Castille Disposition Services.
Three hours later, like some one-star movie, the detective closed his notebook and said, “Don’t leave town. We may need to follow up.”
Not that I was planning to leave town until I nailed down the last few pieces of this puzzle.
“This is a mess,” Wyatt said, half an hour later as he turned into the ranch driveway. “I’ve got to go see Jack. Try to explain what happened to Glenda.”
“Just don’t expect her ex-husband to be too welcoming. He might think you’re trying to blame him.”
Wyatt nodded, his mouth a straight line on the grim landscape of his face.
With a pang of guilt, I realized I’d already screwed up Wyatt’s quiet life too much by allowing him into this investigation. Time to do what I did best and work the rest on my own.
“You’re going to be okay while I’m gone?” he asked.
“No sweat.” I didn’t exactly deal with dead bodies on a daily basis, but I’d learned early how to compartmentalize my feelings and get on with what needed to be done. While Wyatt paid his condolences to Glenda’s ex-husband, I planned to change and gather some information. I’d sweet-talk Lorraine into letting me use one of the ranch vehicles.
Wyatt idled my rental in front of his mother’s house. “I’ll see you later, then.”
I forced a smile, giving him the smart-ass response he expected. “I’ll count the minutes.”
His gaze pinned me. “Stay put.”
As I studied the layout of Castille Disposition Services, color completely drained from the sky. No moon. No stars. Just a thick layer of black clouds heavy with foreboding and rain, waiting to swallow me.
Castille Disposition Services—IT Division—consisted of a huge warehouselike building in Burleson off 35W. Like the company trucks, the building was painted white with a wide blue swash on the side. I lay flat on my stomach—too close to dirt for comfort—on the edge of the property, surveying the building through binoculars.
Sofia’s father recycled Allied Defense’s computers. Even if she didn’t want to believe he could betray his country, what if he’d come across something by accident? What if he’d blackmailed Glenda because her mistake cost Sofia her life?
Sofia’s energy spiked like frying bacon through my muscles, making them twitch.
Glenda had known she was going to take her life. She wouldn’t have wasted her last effort on nothing. There was only one way to find out. I stood and traced my steps back to the ranch car.
I dumped the binoculars in the backseat, retrieved a black cap and added a jeans jacket over my navy T-shirt. Keeping a keen eye out for anything that moved, I made my way to the chainlink fence that surrounded the property and found the hole I’d spotted through the binoculars.
The guard in the gatehouse was busy reading the newspaper and didn’t notice me slinking to the building. I reached the back of the building and the loading dock.
Getting in was a lot easier than it should be for a place that dealt with sensitive information. I hopped onto a loading dock and went through the open door, sidling by two workers shooting the breeze over sodas, cigarettes and a forklift.
The warehouse part looked, well, like a warehouse. Nothing pretty—bare floors, bare walls, bare ceilings. Shrink-wrapped piles of equipment waited on pallets to be processed. The fluorescent lighting was stark and left many nooks and crannies in shadows. Good for me as I hopscotched my way farther into the building.
The processing section was a bit cleaner with painted walls and assembly-line-type stations where the equipment was inventoried and sanitized.
In a janitorial closet, I appropriated a pair of cover-alls and a cleaning cart. I stuffed my hair into the black cap and shuffled my way to the offices at the front end of the building as if I was bored out of my skull.
The offices were dark and empty. A small cube farm, housing secretaries’ and salespeople’s pods, took up the center of the space. The managerial offices lined the outside circumference.
Interestingly enough, Antonio’s office—big and bold, smack in the corner with two windows—seemed unused. The leather on his chair hadn’t molded to his shape. The blotter wasn’t scuffed with marks. No piles of work filled the in-or out-baskets. Did Antonio not run his own company?
I remembered how well the recliner in his living room fit him. Would a man pretending to run a legitimate business risk tainting it with the proof of his spying? Not likely. He’d keep things close at hand.
I pawed through files that seemed rather thin on substance. Parked in Antonio’s chair, I turned on his computer and took a tour of his desktop. Just as I’d expected, it was clean. Much too clean. I wouldn’t find anything there.
The sudden stink of sandalwood filling the office registered a second too late.
“Didn’t I warn you, chica, that the next time I saw you I couldn’t protect you?”
“Rey. Fancy running into you here.” He wore navy pants and white shirt with a gold shield-shaped patch that said Security. That would explain all his free daytime to harass me at the show. The gun at his belt looked real enough. Did he have the guts to actually use it?
“What is it you expect to find in a respectable businessman’s files?” Rey’s hand rested on the butt of his gun, finger twitching as if he was dying to squeeze the trigger.
I leaned back in Antonio’s chair as if I didn’t have a care in the world. With my bum ankle, I couldn’t outrun him—or a bullet. “It’s one of those I’ll know it when I see it type things.”
“Ah.”
I cocked my head at Rey. He had a knack of showing up in the wrong places at
the right time. “You know, there’s something about you that bothers me.”
He shot me a crooked grin. “My good looks? My winning smile?” He hiked up his gun belt and thrust his hips in my direction. “Or is it something else you would like to try? I have never had any complaints.”
“It’d be kind of incestuous, don’t you think, with Sofia’s heart keeping my body alive? With you being her cousin and all.”
He shrugged. “The heart is just a pump.”
I lifted a brow. “And the body just a body? Do you have to get your dates drunk to get past first base?”
He rolled the toothpick in his mouth with a twist of his tongue. “You are not a trusting woman. It is too bad that Sofia’s gentler qualities did not follow her heart.”
“I’d say it’s a good thing, considering she was murdered.”
He tipped his head toward the computer. “You will not find your answers here.”
“Then where will I find them?” Every bristling hair on the back of my neck said he had the answers I was looking for. Would he kill me to keep them quiet?
He snuffed the genial mood as easily as he’d turned it on. “I have already told you that it is better if you leave this business to those who are able to give the situation the attention it deserves. If you keep sniffing, you may find a fish, but what good is a fish if the shark is still in the sea.”
“Okay, so what are you? FBI? DEA? Homeland Security?” I was getting a definite cop vibe from him. It wasn’t just the uniform, either.
Rey turned his palms up. “I am just a poor worker trying to eke out a living.”
“Right, and if I believe that, you’ve got some land east of Florida to sell me.”
His dark eyes turned to flint. “I must insist you leave, or I will be forced to sound the alarm.”
“Fine.” I wasn’t going to find what I needed here anyway.
Gun pointed at my back, he nudged me out of the office and toward the side door.
“So tell me,” I asked as our footsteps echoed on the industrial tile, “how was Sofia involved in all of this?”
“Sofia? I don’t know what you mean.”
“How did Sofia’s work come to be compromised by her father?”
“Sofia is just an innocent bystander.”
If she wasn’t, she was an even better actor than Rey. “But she was used.”
“Her good nature, her desire to please unfortunately made her easy to exploit.”
“By you?”
“By everyone.”
“Antonio used his own daughter for industrial espionage?” I asked.
“You have quite an imagination.”
At the side door—the employees’ entrance, not the client’s primped area—I turned and faced him. “Come on, Rey. Poor working shlub to poor working shlub. Give me a little if you want me to leave it alone. If you don’t sate my curiosity a little, I won’t be able to keep myself from looking. It’s a disease with me.”
“One that could kill you.” The toothpick rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. “Weakness. That’s where you start. You take people, put them in your debt, and they repay you with loyalty.”
The piece of the puzzle that connected Allied Defense to Antonio fell into place. Under the guise of charity, Antonio had helped the poor, wretched people who’d arrived here with nothing. He’d found them homes. He’d offered them jobs. He’d given them hope. And with that he’d bought their loyalty. “The Open Hand and Heart Program at the church.”
“Leave now before you endanger yourself,” Rey said, his voice cold and commanding.
It all made sense. Janitors, maids, gardeners. The people nobody noticed. How clever of Antonio to place them with companies from which he could steal valuable information to resell. I remembered reading an article on disk sanitization in the last couple of days, how the theft of proprietary information caused the greatest financial loss in many sectors of business.
Some of the biggest companies around had fallen prey to such scavenging—Morgan Stanley, the state of Kentucky, the Bank of Montreal. And Antonio’s companies gave him access to both electronic information and the often mismanaged discarding of paper. Defense industry. Lawyers. Banks. All the bits of data a man could amass from one company and sell to its competitor for a price. Dumpster diving took on a whole new meaning.
As Rey started to open the door, I blocked the opening with my body. “When?”
His dark gaze stared at me for a long time and this time he didn’t bother pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Soon. All must be in its proper place.”
“People are dying.”
“Which is why it must be done right. Go home. Forget everything you know. Let the professionals handle it.”
“Glenda McCall killed herself this morning.”
His gaze remained steady. “I do not know who she is.”
“She’s the woman you were following at the cutting horse show.”
He showed me a wide span of white teeth that reminded me of fangs. “I was there for you, chica.”
“And the warning from Inez the day I arrived, it wasn’t really from her, was it?”
He cocked his head. “I was trying to protect you, just as I tried to protect Sofia. You must believe that if nothing else.”
“Somehow, that’s not very comforting.”
“This is no game, chica. Your life is at stake. I have been kind to you because of Sofia. Now it must end.” Before I could read his intention, he grasped one of my wrists and slapped handcuffs on, looping them through the door’s handle. Watching me from a safe distance, he dialed his cell phone. “Wyatt? This is Reynaldo. Your girlfriend is about to be arrested for breaking and entering. Come and get her before I am forced to call the authorities.”
Chapter 17
Wyatt picked me up from Castille Disposition Services and drove me back to the ranch in silence. He bypassed his mother’s house.
I wasn’t ready for more one-on-one time with him in his small house with pictures of his dead wife to remind me I didn’t belong. “Where are you going?”
“Where I can keep an eye on you and keep you out of trouble.”
The way we’d spent last night flashed before my eyes, and a roll of fear somersaulted in my stomach. Caring about him was a problem for me. “You can’t lock me up.”
He narrowed his gaze at me, all business. “Try me.”
“You can help me or you can hinder me, but either way, you can’t stop me.”
“You almost got blown up yesterday. You almost got shot at tonight. Enough is enough. We gave the cops all the information. Let them handle it.”
I could see it all now—the bureaucracy, the paperwork, the legal shackles. “They’re not going to put it together in time. Think of your sister. What if Tracy’s flying the next jet to go down? Could you forgive yourself for not doing everything you could to stop her useless death?”
His jaw flinched. “What exactly are you planning to do?”
“Keep looking for evidence. Someone was blackmailing Glenda. She pointed the finger at Antonio. He had the means and opportunity to find something incriminating on her. If he’s not hiding his trail at work, then it has to be somewhere.”
“Just where are you planning to break and enter this time?”
“The church where Sofia ran her volunteer program.”
He shook his head, hands gripped hard against the steering wheel. “That’s crossing the line.”
“With or without you, Wyatt. I’m going.”
St. Alban’s Church slumbered, dark and quiet. The leaves and blossoms of azaleas were muted to the color of dried blood in the dearth of light. This preternatural quiet left my senses alert and bare.
“This is a bad idea,” Wyatt whispered even though we were still inside the car on a side street and nobody could possibly hear us.
“That’s what makes it such a good cover,” I whispered back. “Who would suspect a church?”
“Let Re
y handle it.”
“I thought you didn’t like Rey.”
“I don’t, but I’d rather see his hide behind bars than mine—or even yours.”
“That’s so sweet. But I’m not sure exactly which side of the fence Rey is playing. If he’s one of the bad guys, then Sofia’s problem doesn’t get fixed. If he’s one of the good guys, then we’re just helping him out.”
He joined me on the sidewalk, mirroring my scan of the area. “Somehow I doubt Rey will see it that way.”
“That’s his problem.” I picked out the darkest path to the front of the church, whose doors, according to Sofia, were left open until eleven each night. “Sofia is mine.”
Breath shallow, I pushed in the heavy door. No creaks—just a whisper like a warning as the thick wood glided over the cold marble floor of the vestibule. The only light came from the tiers of votive candles, emitting an eerie red glow that made me think of a carnival haunted house. I half expected something or someone to pop out from behind a column, yelling, “Boo!”
I probed the nave for desperate worshipers, a genuflecting priest or a custodian seeking to lock up early.
Churches all smelled the same. I didn’t know if it was the years of incense, wine and candles that accumulated and tainted the air with that unique odor or if it was one of those sense memories brought back by so many Sunday mornings spent polishing a pew with my restlessness as a child.
“Where’s the Open Hand and Heart Program held?” I asked.
“In the school. They have a classroom.” Wyatt jerked his chin toward the transept at the far end of the church, and we made our way up the side aisle. Darkened stained-glass windows depicting the Stations of the Cross marked our progress and made me feel as if a crowd of eyes were following me.
Wyatt reached for the brass knob on the door linking the church with the school, through a corridor on the right hand side of the cross-shaped building. “The door’s locked.”
“No problem.” I handed him the maglite from my pocket. “Hold the light steady.” I took out a set of lock picks and had the dead bolt open in less than a minute.
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