Rascal (Edgewater Agency Book 2)

by Kyanna Skye

  “Hey,” Jesse called from the kitchen. “What are you doing here so early?”

  Alec smiled. Jesse had been doing client calls all week, and he was again dressed up in a black suit and steel blue tie. The tie brought out the blue of his eyes, his light gold skin contrasting with both. Jesse was definitely a lady’s man, and though he’d be hard pressed to admit it Alec could see why. For all the kidding the guys gave him about being the pretty boy of their group, he more than held his own with the rest. Alec had seen Jesse take a bullet to save a child, ran through a swamp pulling an injured comrade over his shoulder. And with the ease of twisting a bottle cap, he’d watched Jesse snap someone’s neck.

  “Figured instead of thinking about work I might as well get to it,” Alec shrugged. “David’s not here?”

  “David left when I came in,” Jesse said. “He said something about a quick run to the computer store. Needed to purchase some components. Pretty sure he’s been here since yesterday.”

  One of the things about their “office” was that it was a converted house, and there were four bedrooms upstairs in case any of the men wanted to crash rather than getting up and going home. That said, David sometimes fell asleep in front of his computer monitors and then had to be cajoled to go upstairs and change.

  “By the way,” Jesse said. “He told me if you got here before he made it back to the office, he’s already got something on your case.

  “I wish we didn’t have to come back so soon,” Kiefer said.

  Kiefer and Shari were at his house. They were in the kitchen, Shari standing behind the counter, wearing one of his t-shirts which was pretty much a dress on her small form. He was shirtless in boxer shorts. He hadn’t even bothered to get anything to eat. Instead, he stood staring at his girlfriend. She had beautiful legs, shapely and firm like a dancer’s. Even though she had spent the night at his place, and a couple nights before that at a bed and breakfast on the coast, he never got tired of looking at her, especially when she was only half clothed. Her dark eyes and voluptuous mouth never failed to entice him. Kiefer was sure she didn’t really understand the effect her sex appeal had on him.

  “I know but we’ve got business,” Shari said, batting her eyelashes at him. “I’m surprised my boss wasn’t texting me the whole time we were gone.”

  Hal Kittredge, Shari’s domineering boss, was known to stalk her via email and text for the smallest things, regardless of how early or late the hour was. He was a combination of paranoid boss and father figure. While Shari could stand up for herself and had no problem telling him where to go when those kinds of talks were needed, she had a tendency to help him when it was for the benefit of a client. Kittredge knew her weakness for doing good and used it.

  Kiefer nodded and smiled. He had no intention of telling her he’d had a private man to man with Hal himself--- it was the only reason her boss hadn’t been a pest over the last few days.

  “How soon do you have to be to the office, honey?” Kiefer asked. He was already struggling against a familiar ache.

  Shari looked up, and she must have picked up on something in his expression because she blushed. “Um. Nine.”

  Kiefer stood up and rounded the island to pull her into his arms. “Okay, so, nine. I mean, that gives us some time, right?” he asked. Tipping her chin upwards, he leaned in and gave her a long, deep kiss. He stroked the small of her back. He caught the scent of her perfume. A small sigh escaped her throat.

  “I guess we do have a little time before I leave.”

  Kiefer grinned. “I can always drop you off myself. I’m sure you can be…just a few minutes late, since it’s your first day back in town at all,” he said, pressing his forehead against hers. “Blame the traffic,” he said, lavishing kisses upon her throat. “Or say you overslept,” his hand lingered over her breast, and he could swear he felt her heartbeat.

  “You make an excellent argument,” Shari sighed, biting her lip. “I think your skills at persuasion are solid.”

  “Solid?” he wrapped his arms around her. “Maybe not the only thing! Though I can tell you, if none of the other excuses work, just go ahead and blame me. I don’t mind. I’d like them all to know.”

  Pressing both his hands on her waist, and she swayed with him as if they were lost in a dance. They were so close that when she breathed out, he took in her breath. She smelled like mint and coffee, and when he kissed her lips they tasted like cream.

  “I guess I can be a little late,” Shari replied her hands on his shoulders. She reached up on tiptoe to kiss him.

  “I’m glad you’re here, dude,” David told Alec. “Have a seat.”

  Alec sat down in a black leather chair beside him. David’s desk was crowded with five different monitors. “Watch this one right here,” David pointed to the left. He typed a code furiously into his laptop, and all four of the other screens changed.

  “Alright. I have some new software that uses facial recognition,” David began. “It takes a while because though the markers of any one person’s face are unique, this searches so many different websites trying to find data. You were right about this being an art gallery. I made a search based on that. And here’s what I found.”

  David typed in another string of code. “Look at this,” he tapped the screen at the center. “See the tour guide? He’s holding a purple notebook. See the insignia? I found out this symbol is for a small gallery in West London.”

  “Okay.”

  “From there I narrowed my search down to art galleries in Europe,” David explained. “I started to get much quicker results. All these galleries have something in common. They’ve been hit. I mean, she’s careful about it. Apparently, she cases her sites more than once, and she doesn’t move right away. But sometime within the year of her visit to each museum, there are robberies. Usually of a few big ticket items. I’d say she prefers jewelry but there have been a few pieces of artwork which have gone missing too.”

  “How come she’s not on Interpol’s radar?”

  “She might be,” David said, crossing his arms. “It’s not an easy crime to prove though. Even if they caught her on camera at each museum, they have to catch her actually doing something. She could be the point person, giving information to another thief while she takes a cut. She could say she’s an art lover and it’s just a coincidence. If they can’t actually tie her to the day the thefts took place, they couldn’t do anything but question her. The other part of it is that these galleries don’t like reporting thefts, but when they do, it’s not exactly the highest on the list of felonies the police are after. Unless you steal something from the Louvre, it’s not going to get an incredible amount of attention, and the authorities tend to move on quickly. It takes a lot of manpower and time to catch a jewel thief.”

  “Which some of these police agencies might not have,” Alec mused.

  “Exactly,” David said. “And here’s the other part of the problem; a lot of these galleries will not even report a theft. They beef up security and take the loss because they don’t like admitting to clients and potential investors that it was easy to breach their systems. Unless it’s an absolutely priceless object, the negative publicity is not worth the trouble.”

  “So we can assume for each one of these that we found, she’s done a few which were never mentioned in the news,” Alec said.

  “Yeah,” David said, and opened another file on the computer. “I started looking in North America. Didn’t find anything in the States, but there were a couple of questionable incidents in Quebec at places she cased.”

  “I wonder why she hasn’t worked in the U.S.?”

  “Could be she already has but is off the radar,” David said. “But it’s a question worth asking. My bet is she’s European and is just more comfortable in familiar digs. If she’s been a suspect over there she may have to switch up her location soon.”

  Alec scratched his chin. “Well damn. I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “Who are you telling?” David chuckl
ed. “Reinforces my theory about not trusting people. Like ever.”

  “I’ve got to think about this,” Alec said. “I’m not sure if that’s even something her brother is going to want to know, or if he will want to see her once he does. Hell, I don’t know I’d want someone to tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” Kiefer asked.

  Kiefer had a habit of appearing in doorways without making a sound. It was a skill from his old black ops days but even after years it never failed to creep his friends out. Knowing that neither of the men heard him, Kiefer grinned. “What can I help you with?”

  “You’re back,” Alec said. “Which is good because I want your advice.”

  Chapter 2

  “What’s this about?” Jesse asked. He sat in a chair in the conference room, looking at his partners with a smile. “We haven’t had a real meeting in a while now. I’m guessing I missed something while I was gone.”

  “You weren’t the only one,” Kiefer said.

  “A preliminary search brought up some… questions,” Alec began. “And I thought you all would want to hear about it. I know we have had some talks in the past about keeping ourselves just on this side of what’s lawful. I’m not sure exactly to proceed.”

  Alec related the information about Rick’s sister, Erika Hill, and the possibility that she was a thief, or was working as a lookout for one.

  “There’s a couple of things to consider here. This is a fairly simple case but people don’t come to us for pedestrian solutions,” Kiefer said. “Rick doesn’t know what his sister might be involved with and it’s not our decision to make the choice for him. If he knows about her situation ahead of time, he might change his mind. We’re only being contracted to find her.”

  “That said,” Alec interrupted. “He’s a friend. I don’t know how I feel about dumping this girl on his doorstep without some kind of explanation about what we found.”

  “It looks bad for her,” Jesse said. “But we’re not really sure, are we? I mean, one could say that it would appear she’s been involved with some unsolved thefts but we don’t have anything solid to say that’s true. I’m assuming if the authorities did she’d have been arrested by now. David, she doesn’t have a criminal record, does she?”

  “Not as Erika Hill,” David said. “I don’t know yet if she has any aliases but I have a search going. I might have more information about that later today.”

  “Alec, I think we find her first, and let her know her brother is looking for her,” Kiefer offered. “Don’t initiate any talk about her past. Just set up something for the two of them to connect, and let them work it out. If he asks about her past, give him a dossier. I’m betting he will at some point.”

  “Sounds fair,” David said. “Gives her a chance to tell her story if she wants to.”

  “Family business is complicated,” Alec sighed. “Well, how exactly are we going to find her?”

  “I’ve got this,” David grinned. “I’ll make sure she’s in touch soon. Kiefer. You might want to help me out with some names. I could use the contacts for a couple of Shari’s rich clients.”

  After their meeting, Alec headed out to the desert.

  He had a home there, a sort of getaway spot whenever he needed to be alone. Along with his motorcycles, he had dirt bikes, and he liked to go off roading. He’d grown up in a rural part of the state, and he missed the solitude he found out in the wilderness. Though his brothers and most of his life was in Los Angeles, he sometimes felt strangled by the rush and population of the city. Lately, he was feeling anxious. He knew it was the after effect of too many years living in war zones and fighting for his life. Missions always took their toll. Knowing this was the cause of his stress didn’t do much to help. Not a believer in therapy, he’d tried it during the worst times. There were some techniques he learned which helped him cope. The one which really worked best was going somewhere he didn’t have to talk to or see anyone until his anxiety passed.

  Alec became accustomed to the nightmares which plagued his sleeping hours. Flashes of gunfire, the smell of swamp water, the feeling of his body smeared in mud and sweat. Disjointed pieces of memory melded together, different missions. He remembered being in a field hospital in a foreign country, with doctors and nurses who tended his care but didn’t speak a word of English. He remembered his brothers coming, each in turn taking their place at his bedside. And then he would see himself back in the zone, running, with a fallen comrade on his back.

  When he first came back home from the war zone, he’d had difficulty adjusting. There were the dreams when he did sleep, but at that time he suffered from insomnia. A dangerous cocktail of prescription drugs chased with whiskey had been his favorite remedy. It was Kiefer who insisted he get help. And it worked. There were choices he had made in black ops which he simply couldn’t take back, things he had seen which would always haunt him. He would never feel normal again, not in the way he had been before he was recruited. He sometimes wondered if he would have taken the offer to join if he’d understood the true repercussions.

  Even though the dreams shook him those were easier to deal with than his anxiety. The feelings of unease and tension were more difficult to handle because he often felt they came without any reason. He never knew exactly how long it would last. Lately, felt like if he was grappling a sense of peace within his spirit which he couldn’t find.

  It took him a couple hours to drive up to the house, a ranch style home on ten acres of land. On this particular day, he didn’t even take out his bike. He sat in the darkness of his den and smoked a cigarette. With the heavy black drapes pulled across the windows, he was in darkness despite the afternoon sunshine. Stripped down to nothing but his boxers, he sat and let the quiet wash over him.

  At some point, he got up and had a drink. Rum was his favorite. He loved the smoothness of it on his tongue and the burn in his belly. Sitting there in the darkness, he drifted to sleep in his recliner. When he woke some hours later, it was from a peaceful, dreamless sleep. He stood and stretched. His phone was sitting on the coffee table, vibrating.

  He picked it up and scrolled through his text messages, and found a new one from David, which had come in only an hour before:

  Somebody’s been a real bad woman. Check your email.

  Alec grinned. He went to his desk and opened his laptop. Sure enough, there was an email with the initials E. H in the subject line, no comments, and several attachments he had to download from a virtual server.

  The first file he opened were images of identification cards.

  All the same woman, in an array of different clothes and hairstyles. They were different enough that he wouldn’t have guessed the woman was the same person. Her hair had been in every conceivable color and several different haircuts. Being a master of disguise had to come in handy for a thief. All told, Erika Hill appeared to have at least fifteen different aliases.

  The cards were mostly driver licenses and passports, along with immigration identification and even a couple of college student id cards. Several were from European countries, but there were also ones from Canada and the United States, including driver licenses for California, New York, Arizona, and Massachusetts. There was nothing under her real name. Erika Hill was a non-entity.

  “So she has been in the States recently,” Alec muttered to himself.

  Clicking on the next document, he found a criminal record for a woman named Tara Stephens.

  Apparently, she’d discontinued use of this particular alias after she served a brief stint in jail. It was for pickpocketing and was in a juvenile record. She was only seventeen at the time, and apparently already a budding delinquent. She’d been caught stealing in a shopping district in Prague. Quite the start for a young American girl living abroad. The file stated she was sentenced to three months; an “unnamed person” posted bond for her and she was let out of jail in three days. Someone with money, other than either of her parents? The authorities would have noted if one of them bonded her out. It
smelled like payola to him. Alec had heard stories about teenagers getting bailed out by drug dealers, who would use them as mules to ship the product back in forth. He had no proof of that but as a working theory, it was plausible. He wondered how far she had moved in her criminal career since then. Was she still working for someone else, or was she strictly a freelancer?

  Apparently, she hadn’t been in any trouble after that, under this particular alias or any of the others which David had been able to document.

  Alec stared at the picture. She had beautiful dark eyes, but there was something flat about their effect, cold. In the mugging photo, she seemed to be holding her mouth as if she bit down on the inside of her lip. She held a sign with her inmate number. At that age, and her first time being in trouble, he imagined she must have been terrified. None of the other photos caught that raw vulnerability, but he found small glimpses of it here and there.

  This woman was tough, but there was something else there. A longing, some pain, and a trace of emotion she tried hard to disguise. No matter how she changed herself, it was there in the dark pools of her eyes. She was the perfect chameleon. She was singularly beautiful but her general description: brown hair, brown eyes, medium height and medium olive complexion would help her escape detection. And with the right disguise in place, she could blend into a crowd.

  He took a while to read the rest of the file. Sometimes Alec wished he knew exactly how David found all the information he did. Other times he reminded himself it was probably best if he didn’t. His hacking abilities had gotten him in trouble with the government before. That was basically how David wound up in black ops in the first place.

  There was a list of associates. It was brief, but seeing as she hadn’t been caught lately, he expected that. The lengthier a person’s criminal record was the more jackass friends of similar thuggery they knew. A real professional kept associations brief and clean as possible. More people meant a higher possibility of things going wrong, or worse yet, a better chance of getting ratted out to the police when things got messy.