Suspicious (On the Run)

by Rosett, Sara

  Zoe subsided a few inches further back into the darkness as she pulled out the phone. She wasted valuable seconds making sure the phone sounds were silenced and then flicked through the features until she found the camera. She inched forward and took several pictures.

  She thought they were arguing and wished she had the ability to record them, but the closed door muted their voices so much that they wouldn’t be distinguishable. Zoe could barely hear them. Zoe scuttled from the balustrade to the wall of the building and eased as close to the door as she dared. She couldn’t see Amy, but she could see a portion of the other bed. McKinley dropped onto it, wiggled the pillow into position behind his back, and crossed his ankles.

  Amy’s raised, angry voice carried through the door. “Where is it?”

  McKinley’s languid tones were harder to make out, but Zoe thought he said, “What do you mean, darling?”

  “Don’t ‘darling’ me. I’m not one of your star-struck fans. I’ve known you since we were five. You can’t charm or dazzle me. I can’t believe you convinced Terrance to send you the Rowen House stuff. That’s not how we agreed to do things.”

  McKinley shrugged. “If it works better, I don’t see why—”

  “So let’s try it again,” she said, her words cutting across his. “Since you’ve changed things up, where is my money from this new scheme?”

  McKinley extracted a cigarette, but didn’t light it. “It’s too soon to have anything.”

  Amy moved and came into view as she leaned forward. “Terence says you’ve completed the first part of the deal.”

  McKinley studied the tip of the cigarette. “Ganging up on me?”

  “No, protecting my interests, our interests.”

  “Our?” McKinley asked.

  “Mine and Terrance’s. Come on, hand it over, then.”

  McKinley exhaled again and pulled something out of his pocket. He tossed it to Amy, and, Zoe, forgetting for a moment she needed to stay hidden, shifted forward to see better. It was Harrington’s leather glove. Amy frowned at McKinley.

  “Go on. Look inside.” McKinley gestured, making a circular motion.

  Amy pulled out a thick stack of euros and fanned the edge. Her eyebrows wrinkled into a frown. “This is more…”

  “Than you expected? Yes. It’s a better way to do things,” McKinley said, “That’s a fraction of what we can get.”

  “No. No new ways. We go about it just as we agreed,” Amy said, but the slow, cadence of her speech was at odds with her words.

  “Now, why would you say that? There’s a better way than recutting the stones. We sell them to someone who wants them as is and is willing to pay a higher price than we could get the other way.”

  Zoe watched Amy, who seemed mesmerized by the money. She stared at it, running her thumb over the edge of the bills.

  McKinley swung his feet around so that he was facing her, knee to knee. He covered her hands with his. “This way, we don’t have to involve…others. Just us. That’s all we need. We do this last deal and get out of here. If the gems are anything like you’ve said, we’ll be set.”

  Amy looked up. “What about Terrance? We just…cut him out? Leave him?”

  “He was never the essential player in this scheme.”

  “But we agreed. We promised each other.”

  McKinley shrugged and stood. “Yes, you’re right. Can’t go back on our word.” McKinley turned toward the door. Zoe realized she’d leaned into his view. If he looked directly at the door, he’d see her face plastered to the glass. She wanted to jerk backward but couldn’t move a muscle.

  But he didn’t look her way, only swung around the end of the bed and paced to the corner of the room where he yanked out a chair from a desk and sat down. Once seated, he was out of Zoe’s view. Amy stared at McKinley, her eyes narrowed. While she focused on him, Zoe inched backward into the shadow.

  “You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” Amy asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Cut out Terrance.”

  McKinley chuckled. “Of course not. It was only a joke. Okay, so you’ve got your money, where are the new stones?”

  Amy watched him a moment before she said, “I’ll bring them to you tomorrow.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because I’m tired. And that would be breaking our agreement—always in public.”

  Zoe thought McKinley sounded reluctant as he said, “Always the agreement. I had no idea you were so rule bound. Okay, where?”

  “On the mountain at Idalp. Meet me on the terrace of the outdoor café area at noon.”

  “Fine.” He stood and moved toward the door.

  Zoe scrambled backward, slammed into something solid. A hand clamped over her mouth.

  ***

  “So it’s not just Throckmorton and the Andrews couple,” Gemma said into the phone as she lifted her suitcase into the trunk of their rental car. “I think Amy Beck is in on it, too. She has to be. It would be too much of a coincidence for her to know Terrance Croftly and work for Harrington Throckmorton and be in Rome when the Flawless Set was stolen.”

  “Yes, that is a few too many connections for my taste,” Nigel replied. “So what are you doing now?”

  “I’m going to Austria. Alessi ran a check of Amy Beck’s credit cards—he didn’t want to. It’s late, but I convinced him to get his friend Gustav to do it. Amy Beck paid for a room at a ski resort about two hours from here. I don’t know if Alessi is coming. He wants to wait until the morning, but Amy has been there for two days. I want to be there, if she checks out in the morning. She could be our link to Throckmorton and the Andrews couple.”

  Gemma slid into the driver’s seat as Nigel said, “Well, I’ll give you a few hours tomorrow morning before I pass the news up the chain that you’re in Austria.”

  “Do the higher-ups know I’m in Germany?” The car had been idling and now that the heater was warm, she switched the fan to high and closed the car door. While her coat from London was adequate for any rain, drizzle, or even sleet, it wasn’t quite warm enough for the Alps.

  “It’s on the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting.”

  “Tricky,” Gemma said with a smile.

  “Just try not to go anywhere else, okay? You’re already three countries over the limit.”

  “I’ll do my best. Oh, it looks like Alessi is going to join me after all. I’ll call you from Austria.”

  The passenger door opened and Alessi, enveloped in his layers, dropped into the seat, mumbling, “Germany, Austria. These criminals, they are crazy. Why could they not go somewhere warm?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Zoe was so shocked that it took her a moment to respond. For a nanosecond, she thought it was Jack—he had said he’d find her—but she instantly realized it wasn’t him. The size of the man—somehow she knew it was a man—was wrong, and a faint smell of bubble gum mixed with cigarette odor had engulfed her before a gloved hand closed over her mouth. The thoughts raced through her mind in seconds, but he took advantage of her momentary hesitation. By the time she struggled, she had been lifted off her feet and pulled back around the corner to the portion of the balcony that ran along the back of the gästehaus.

  She kicked out, but her feet only thrashed against air. She twisted and writhed, but the hand remained firmly braced over her mouth. She clawed at the hand, her fingernails scraping across the fabric of the glove. That wasn’t going to work—the fabric was too slick. He continued to move backward, and they quickly passed two rooms. The lights glowing from within the rooms flickered over them, and then they plunged into the darkness between the rooms again.

  Zoe stopped kicking and went limp, a dead weight. She let her legs collapse and fold beneath her like a marionette dropped in a heap. He hadn’t expected that. He sucked in air as her shift in weight pulled him forward. Before he could regain his balance, she gathered herself and threw out her leg in a backward stomp. Her instep connected with his foot in a jarring impact that she felt all the
way up her hip.

  He yelped and grunted. She focused all the adrenaline zinging around her body into tearing herself away from him.

  Suddenly his hand fell away, and cool air hit her back.

  She whipped around. Jack had his hands under the guy’s shoulders as he lowered him to the ground. Her attacker was out cold, his head lolling against his shoulder. Breathing hard, she leaned against the wooden balcony and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

  As Jack checked the guy’s pulse, he looked up at her over the prone form. “You okay?” he asked in a whisper, his glance straying to the rooms beyond them where the lights glowed.

  “Other than scared out of my mind, yeah, I guess so.” Zoe heard the quiver in her voice even as she matched Jack’s quiet tones. “How did you get up here?”

  He jerked his head behind him. “Ladder. I found this place from your text and saw the footprints on the terrace. When I saw where they ended, I figured you were up here, even if I couldn’t see you—I know how much you love to climb.” Zoe couldn’t see his face very well in the darkness, but she could hear the smile in his voice. Instead of being annoyed, his teasing calmed her, brought her back to their normal world of light banter.

  Jack continued, “I was about to follow you up that way, when I saw someone poking around on the other side of the building.” Jack stood up, still looking at the guy sprawled across the balcony. “By the time I got around there, he’d found a ladder in a shed attached to the building and propped it up against the balcony. Once he was up, I came up behind him. He was so focused on you, he didn’t hear me. Come on, we should get out of here. As fights go, that was fairly quiet, but we don’t want to linger.”

  “No, we don’t,” Zoe said, thinking of the last glimpse she had of McKinley as he came toward the door to the balcony. Was he out on the balcony now? She looked over her shoulder, but the stretch of the balcony that ran along the back of the building was deserted. Either McKinley had discounted the noise, or he had gone directly from Amy’s room to his own and shut the door. She certainly wasn’t going back by the lighted rooms to check to see if he was tucked away in his room.

  She reached for Jack’s hand and stepped over the guy, then paused. “Wait. I saw him, earlier tonight, on this street.” The dark, thick-rimmed glasses were askew, tilted at an odd angle over his beaked nose. “He was putting a snowboard on a car rack as I walked by when I was following McKinley. Why would he attack me?”

  “No idea.” Jack patted the guy’s coat pockets, extracted a wallet. “Felix Wenzel.” The man stirred. Jack tossed the wallet on his chest. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to hit him with the wrench again. This way,” Jack said, continuing to the end of the balcony where a ladder was propped against the dead-end section of the balcony.

  “That sounds like something out of Clue,” Zoe said, a giddy feeling creeping over her. “Mr. Wenzel, on the balcony, with the wrench.”

  “Technically, it would be Mr. Andrews with the wrench, since I did the hitting,” Jack said. “I’ll go first and brace it for you to come down. It’s not all that steady.”

  Zoe blew out a breath. No need to get all panicky now that everything was over, she lectured herself, but her hands and legs continued to tremble.

  Jack’s dark figure reached the ground, and he softly called for her to start. She boosted herself up on the railing and twisted around. It was an aged wooden ladder—it seemed everything was made of wood in this heavily forested part of the world. The worn grain of the timber felt silky against her palms as her feet connected with the ladder. It creaked and lazily swayed an inch to the side.

  She gripped the balcony railing. Jack had climbed this? With his dislike of heights? He really did love her.

  The dark form on the balcony groaned and brought a hand to his head. Zoe swallowed and transferred her grip to the ladder. The old wood creaked and shifted as she flew down it, moving so quickly that Jack barely had time to step back before she reached the ground. “He’s coming to,” she said.

  “Okay. Let me just take care of this.” Now that they were actually on the snowy ground, which reflected the little light there was, Zoe could see that Jack had removed a silver adjustable wrench about twenty inches long from his pocket. He used the hem of his coat to rub it clean of fingerprints then dropped it on the ground outside the shed. He grabbed the ladder and pulled it away from the building. It teetered in the air for a second. A hand appeared at the edge of the balcony, grasping for the ladder.

  “I was trying to be quiet, but it doesn’t matter now,” Jack said, letting the ladder fall away from the building. It landed against a tree, snapping a branch with a loud crack that echoed along the street.

  A masculine voice came from above, shouting in German then called, “Halt! Stop!”

  Zoe turned toward the street, but Jack grabbed her hand. “No, this way. There’s cover.” He pulled her toward the forest. They ran across the parking area and plunged into the fragrant stand of pines, pausing only a few seconds for their vision to adjust to the deeper darkness.

  “There’s a road, farther up the hill,” Zoe said. “It probably goes back to the town.”

  Jack nodded, and they set out at a quick pace, picking their way through the trees, their knees dropping down through the snow. It was easy to figure out which way to go—up. As they worked their way up the incline, some patches of snow were deeper than others, and it wasn’t long before Zoe’s jeans were caked up to her knees with snow. After the first few seconds of a frantic, high-stepping sprint, they slowed. The dark figure didn’t pursue them; probably because exterior lights came on and several people came out to investigate the fallen ladder.

  “Amy’s there. She’s in one room. McKinley is next door. He went to her room, and I was able to get some pictures on the camera phone of them together.”

  “Ah,” Jack said. “That explains your impromptu climbing. I think you’ve invented a new sport, urban mountaineering.”

  They reached the road, a strip of gray that cut through the trees. They turned in the direction of town, and Zoe told Jack about the conversation she overheard.

  “How does that guy on the balcony fit in?” Jack asked. “If we hadn’t seen his identification, I’d think it might have been Terrance.”

  “They didn’t mention a Felix at all,” she said slowly. “Do you suppose the ID was fake, and it was Terrance? Or maybe Terrance is a nickname?”

  “Odd sort of nickname,” Jack said.

  “Yeah. And the way they talked about Terrance…it didn’t seem like he was here with them.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s here, and they don’t know it. But if it was Terrance on the balcony, why attack me? Shouldn’t he go after McKinley? He’s the one who wanted to cut out Terrance.”

  Jack dipped his head in acknowledgement of Zoe’s point. “In short, he’s an unknown variable, and I don’t like that. We’ve already got too many of those.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye out for him. See if he shows up again.”

  “Not the way I like to operate, but I suppose it’s the only option we have. So neither one of them actually mentioned the Flawless Set?” Jack asked as they trudged along.

  Zoe hadn’t thought she could get any colder, but the wet fabric on her legs added a whole new dimension to her misery. She burrowed her hands into her pockets and picked up the pace. “Come on. If we don’t get back to the hostel soon, I’m going to turn into an ice sculpture. No, they didn’t use the word ‘Flawless,’ but what else could they be talking about? McKinley mentioned recutting stones, so they were definitely talking about gemstones.”

  “Tomorrow at noon,” Jack said. “That doesn’t give us much time.” The road emerged from the trees and dropped down to a street with several widely spaced houses.

  “I know. And Idalp. That complicates things even more.”

  They crossed the river and were back in the village where the nightlife was still going strong. They passed the foggy windows of a pa
cked bar where strains of oompah music spilled out into the night along with a few revelers. “What’s Idalp?” Jack asked.

  “It’s up the mountain, sort of the hub where most of the gondolas meet, a jumping off point to catch other lifts to the rest of the mountain. I read about it when I was looking for information about the ski tournament. You can even ski over to Switzerland.”

  “Great. I thought you were going to say it was a restaurant or store.”

  “Afraid not. It’s more like the Grand Central Station of this ski area.”

  “Looks like we’re renting skis. Do you ski?”

  “Of course. It’s been a while, but I’m sure it’s like riding a bike. You never forget, right?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  She returned from her mildly warm shower to find Harrington seated on one of the lower bunks, his phone pressed to his ear while Jack leaned against the wall, still in his wet jeans.

  “Your turn,” Zoe said. Harrington covered his other ear.

  Zoe hung her wet clothes over the wall radiator while watching Harrington out of the corner of her eye.

  Harrington bobbed his head as he spoke into the phone. “I see. Yes, I’ll wait. It is urgent. Very…um, importante.”

  Jack whispered in her ear. “I brought him up to speed.”

  “Who is he—” she broke off as Harrington’s voice rang out.

  “Ah, good of you to speak to me, Colonel.”

  Zoe swiveled to Jack. “He’s calling Alessi?” she hissed. “After all we’ve gone through to make sure the police don’t find us, he’s gone and called them?”

  “It’s our only play, Zoe.”