“Lex—”
He turned the ignition. “You should have stayed in the damn SUV.”
He pulled into the street, incensed. It was dark now, wipers smearing rain across the windshield. He’d be a fool to believe a word of what the Lucky Lady had said about his mother. The woman was a charlatan, a fake, like the rest of this place and everyone else in it.
Hands tight on the wheel, Lex replayed the scene in his mind, thinking of when exactly he’d heard the chink of bells and sensed another presence in the store. “You heard everything, didn’t you? You heard me talk about my mother.” His words came out bitter. He didn’t want Jenna to know.
It was personal. Maybe a part of him felt humiliated by his past, the fact his mother had once been a hooker before she’d cleaned up her act and gone to dealers’ school. Maybe a part of him really wanted all the ugliness of Sara’s murder to stay buried, not associated with him. Hell knew. He’d never analyzed it.
“I already knew about your mother, Lex,” Jenna said softly as she opened the glove compartment. “I saw these.”
“Oh, you went snooping around my—”
“I didn’t want to get mugged wearing my emerald bracelet and diamond pendant, okay? So I took them off to stash in here.” She removed her bracelet from the glove compartment, clasping it back on while she spoke. “And I couldn’t help seeing these newspaper cuttings.”
“So you just read them.”
“Wouldn’t you?” she snapped.
He shot her a hard look. “Put them back.”
She stared at him in silence for a moment, then shoved the articles back into the glove compartment, slapped it closed. Lex noticed her hands were trembling.
They drove in tense silence, entering thickening traffic, water writhing little snakes over the windshield, refracting the brake lights ahead.
Then suddenly, in the dark, he felt her hand move onto his knee. Just a gentle touch. No pressure. Reassuring. Compassionate. As if to let him know she was there for him, that she understood.
Moisture burned suddenly into his eyes. His jaw tightened. He clenched his fists around the wheel. He needed to get her home, dump her outside her fancy mansion and get her the hell out of his life.
Because he was scared. He was starting to feel like leaning on her, sharing.
His deep down private stuff.
He didn’t want another relationship, marriage. He didn’t want to start falling for a woman—not in that way. Especially not Jenna Rothchild.
He remained silent as he drove sharply into her driveway. Waved on by the security guard, he drove right up to the portico, stopped, but did not kill the engine.
“I can let myself out.”
He nodded.
She reached for the door handle, hesitated. “That’s why you really came back to Vegas, isn’t it, Lex?” she said. “That’s why you put in for the transfer. You came to find your father. To learn who killed your mother.” Her voice was thick, full of emotion and compassion. Lex just wanted to stay on safe, uncommitted territory. He wanted to cruise in his emotionally neutral zone. He wanted her to get out. Leave him alone.
“Yeah,” he said, not looking at her. “That’s why I put in for the transfer.”
“Do you think that Mercedes Epstein bidding on you at the auction had anything to do with…with the past, with your mother’s job at the Frontline?”
“Why the hell should it?” Truth was, that question really unsettled him. “Mercedes showing up at your auction probably has more to do with the old business your father had with Frank Epstein, Jenna, than anything to do with me.”
She stared at him in silence, opened the door. The interior light flared on and droplets of rain blew inside. But she wavered again.
“Lex?”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For showing me something about myself that I’d forgotten today. It meant a lot to me, being with you. And those kids.”
Lex didn’t trust himself to speak right now, so he said nothing.
She leaned forward suddenly, kissed him fast and light on the mouth, and was gone, door slamming shut as she ducked through the rain and ran up the stairs. Clive swung open the door for her, and she was swallowed by her mansion as it closed.
Lex shut his eyes for a nanosecond, still tasting her on this mouth. He inhaled deep.
He was a cop.
He’d acted like an idiot.
Enough games.
He’d crossed too many lines, and now he had to pull back. But as he drove out of the Rothchild driveway in the pelting storm, he knew that he’d already gone too far.
Because deep, deep down, a part of him knew that he was falling for Jenna.
In spite of himself.
Jenna crouched down in the hallway to ruffle Napoleon’s fur as he squiggled about her feet, happy to have her home. But as she petted her dog, she sensed a presence, someone watching from within the darkened interior of the adjacent living room.
She stilled, got slowly to her feet, walked into the dark room. “Hello?” she said, reaching for the switch of a lamp.
“Jenna.” Rebecca Lynn’s voice came from near the bar.
Jenna flicked on the lamp, saw her so-called stepmother sitting in a chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. From that window she’d have seen Lex’s SUV, possibly even Jenna kissing the agent, illuminated by the vehicle’s interior light because the door had been partially open at that point.
“Rebecca Lynn,” Jenna said coolly. “Why are you sitting in the dark? Is Ricky in bed already?”
Ricky was Harold’s newest child, his first with Rebecca Lynn, and his only son. Little Ricky was a spoiled kid, constantly being used as a bargaining chip in the relationship between Harold and his latest wife. A relationship that was going sour. Already.
“I was watching…the storm,” Rebecca Lynn said.
Jenna realized from the studied delivery of Rebecca Lynn’s words that her stepmother had already been drinking. Quite a bit.
“Was that the federal agent who dropped you off?” she asked. “The one on Candace’s case?”
“Why do ask?” Jenna said, recalling the movement in the drapes upstairs after she’d dashed out to Lex’s SUV yesterday.
She sighed dramatically. “Your father is hiding things from you, Jenna. Do you know that?”
Here we go again, trying to drive a wedge between me and my dad. “Look, I don’t have time for this, Rebecca—”
“Oh, I think you do.” She pushed herself up out of the chair, wobbled, smiled, then teetered over to the bar. She poured a heavy shot of gin, topped it with tonic and plopped a slice of lemon in, stirring it with her pinky. “I’d be surprised if that FBI agent doesn’t think you could have done it.”
“Done what?”
“Murdered Candace.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, are you insane? Or is that the gin talking again?”
“Hmm.” She sucked the moisture off her pinky. “I did happen to tell the FBI there was no love lost between you and Candace, you know? I told them that when they questioned me the first time around. And then—” she took a sip from her glass “—Agent Duncan came to see me at work this morning. He asked me again about your relationship with Candace. Did he tell you that, Jenna?”
A cold chill seeped through her. Lex hadn’t mentioned it.
“He didn’t, did he?”
The feeling deepened. “Why should he? It’s his case, he can’t talk about the details with me.”
“He’s using you, Jenna Jayne, to get inside the Rothchild cloak of secrecy.” She made a woo woo motion with her hands.
“Nonsense—I was the one who set him up at the auction remember?”
“At whose request, I wonder?”
“Well, that should prove a point, shouldn’t it? The Rothchilds are the ones using him, not vice versa.” Hell, why had she even said that? Rebecca Lynn was baiting her and fool that Jenna was, she’d tak
en the lure. Hook, line and sinker.
“I forgot to mention that fact to Agent Duncan this morning. Maybe,” Rebecca Lynn said slowly, her words slurring, “I’ll give him a call later and tell him that Harold requested you to go all out to seduce him for information on The Tears of the Quetzal.”
Anger began to mushroom inside Jenna. “Do what the hell you like, Rebecca! You’re drunk, and I’m going to change. I’m soaked.” She turned to leave.
“I also know that you went to visit Candace on the night she was killed,” she called out.
Jenna froze.
“Maybe, Jenna Jayne, if I was truly malicious, I might suggest the FBI try and match your DNA to the scene. Who knows what the feds could come up with.”
Her heart jackhammering, Jenna turned slowly to face her wicked little stepmother. “You don’t know what you’re saying—”
“Jenna, I know you were there.”
Jenna stared at Rebecca Lynn for several beats, feeling increasingly ill. Slowly, she sunk down into a chair, Napoleon at her feet. “How?” she whispered, scared now, wondering what Lex really knew about the night of the murder, wondering if this reviled stepmother of hers had already told Lex that she’d been at Candace’s apartment mere hours before her sister was killed.
“How do you know?”
Rebecca Lynn started sashaying theatrically out of the room.
“Rebecca Lynn!”
She stopped in the doorway, smiling crookedly.
“Did you have me followed that night?”
“No, I went to visit Candace myself that night, Jenna. When I got there, I saw your car was already parked outside. So I just sat in my vehicle for a while, waiting for you to come out. Watching.”
“What on earth were you doing there?”
“I needed to talk to Candace, alone. About…an issue between us. But then I saw you two up in front of the big lighted window, arguing. I saw Candace throw the vase at you, and you ducked. You began to pick up the broken pieces. It looked, Jenna, like you might have cut your finger, because you sucked it quickly. Do you think you might have left blood on one of those vase pieces? Your DNA, perhaps?”
Jenna swallowed against the thickness ballooning in her throat. She should have told the cops right away that she’d gone to try and talk Candace into a rehab program. But there was such a media circus around the murder she didn’t want to smear her dead sister’s name further into the mire. As much as she and Candace had squabbled, Candace was still her blood. Her sister. And there were her boys to think about. Jenna had been raised to close ranks at times of family trouble.
Besides, she knew she hadn’t killed her sister, so what difference did it make, truly, that she’d been there a few hours earlier? Except now Lex would see it as a lie by omission. Another reason not to trust her.
God, he might even think she’d done it.
“Are you going to tell Agent Duncan?” she whispered.
“Don’t think I need to. Your sexy bachelor agent probably already knows that you’re a lying little bitch. It’s probably why he’s escorting you around town, plying you for information so he can nail you.” She snorted derisively at Jenna’s expression. “What? You thought he actually fancied you?”
Nausea slicked through Jenna’s stomach.
If what Rebecca Lynn said was true—and Lex had been playing her—it meant the fragile bond she’d felt dawning between her and Lex today had been a complete farce. And that hurt more than anything.
Rebecca Lynn had just stomped her stiletto into Jenna’s fragile burgeoning emotions, grinding them right into the dirt. And Jenna hated her more than ever. “You know I didn’t hurt Candace,” she said quietly. “If you were watching, you’d have seen me leave, while she was still alive. You’re a witness to my innocence.”
“Hmm,” Rebecca Lynn said, putting the glass to her mouth, wetting her lips with gin. “Not sure I can recall those little details.”
Jenna launched to her feet. “For all I know you did it! You’ve just told me you were there. After I was.”
“I never went into her apartment. It would’ve been pointless to try and talk to Candace when she was in a drunken rage, so I drove home.”
Jenna glowered at Rebecca Lynn, all sorts of dark suspicions suddenly growing in her mind.
Rebecca Lynn sighed theatrically, as if suddenly bored out of her skull. “I didn’t hurt Candace, my dear, as much as I would’ve liked to,” she said. “And I certainly didn’t send all those threatening notes.”
“There was only one note. A typed one, left in Dad’s mailbox.”
“Oh, really?” Rebecca Lynn glanced pointedly at Harold’s study door. Jenna followed her gaze and noticed that the door was ajar. It was never open. Harold always kept that door shut. And through the open door Jenna could see the top drawer of his desk was partially open. Harold was meticulous about such things. He’d never have left it like that.
Had Rebecca Lynn been in there? Jenna shot a hard look at her inebriated stepmother. Rebecca grinned lopsidedly, held up her glass in cheers and sauntered out into the hallway, listing like a drunken sailor.
Whatever had possessed her father to marry that 34-year-old witch was beyond Jenna. She waited until she heard Rebecca Lynn’s heels on the marble stairs, then Jenna went to her dad’s office.
She clicked on the tiny desk light, worried that if her father returned, he’d see a brighter light from the bottom of the driveway.
She pulled the top drawer open wider. Wind lashed outside suddenly, drumming rain against the window in waves. The palm trees swished eerily against glass panes and the curtain billowed. Jenna tensed, her heart racing.
She was feeling spooked, guilty for being in here at all.
Quickly, she removed an unmarked yellow file folder from the drawer, opened it and stared in shock.
The folder contained five more notes—death threats—against the entire Rothchild family.
Notes her father had not given to the police.
These were not typed, either, like the first threat. They’d been created from letters cut from magazines and newspapers. Jenna was careful not to touch them as she read the words, horrified.
Whoever had crafted and sent these was threatening to systematically kill off Rothchild “trash,” eliminating family members one by one after Candace. Each of the notes was dated, and every one alluded to the infamous Tears of the Quetzal, in increasing detail. And all five spoke of an old deed that needed to be avenged.
The last one was even signed, The Avenger.
A shudder washed over her as the rain lashed against the windows again, and fronds swished against the panes.
Why was her dad hiding these?
Had he kept these notes even from Natalie, her LVMPD sister and Candace’s twin? Just as Jenna herself hadn’t told anyone, including Nat, that she’d been to visit her sister the night of the murder?
Jenna was really afraid now. She needed to come clean, tell Lex everything that had happened the night of Candace’s death.
And she needed to inform him about the existence of these notes.
But that would mean betraying her father. Maybe Harold had good reason to have withheld these from the cops. Maybe these notes weren’t even from the killer—they were a completely different style to the first one.
She needed to speak to her dad, find a way to broach the subject of the death threats, and she’d make her decision from there. But as Jenna closed the file the headlights of a car swept up the driveway, and she heard the distinct crackle of tires approaching on wet driveway. She glanced up. She had to get out of here, fast. Quickly shoving the file back into the drawer, she closed it and flipped off the light.
Jenna couldn’t face her father now…she needed to think.
Rebecca Lynn had set her up to find these. Why? And how had Rebecca Lynn known about them in the first place? Had Harold told Rebecca Lynn himself? And, if so, why not tell the rest of the family? Her stepmother had succeeded in her goal tonight—
she’d driven a needle of mistrust into Jenna. Mistrust of her own father.
Carefully shutting his office door, she made her way quickly through the living room and up the marble stairs. She reached the landing just as the front door opened.
Heart thudding, Jenna peered down over the banister, saw her dad’s distinguished silver head. And with a sick feeling, Jenna knew. She just knew that she was going to be forced right up against the fence, and she was going to have to pick a side.
The side of her family, a place of murky allegiances and mixed-up love, a place she’d always felt secure, the only place she’d ever really known.
Or the side of law—Lex’s side.
Chapter 7
It was late Sunday afternoon, and both Lex and Rita Perez were still in the FBI office. Perez was meticulously combing through public records of Rothchild real estate dealings, putting together a detailed timeline of transactions. She was looking, in particular, for links between Harold and Frank Epstein’s old cartel. Lex, on the other hand, was focusing on Frank Epstein himself.
The two families seemed to be intersecting in relation to himself and to this case, and Lex didn’t believe in coincidence.
He was finding it tough to accept Mercedes Epstein had shown up at Jenna’s auction, uninvited, and started a bidding war on him purely by chance. Or was he just trying to read too much into it all because Mercedes had worked at the Frontline at the same time as his mother? And because Frank Epstein had been the one to both hire—and fire—Sara Duncan.
Lex rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was also troubled by the fortune-teller’s allusion to his mother being connected to the old Vegas underworld. Or was he also giving too much weight to the Lucky Lady’s strange words?
There was no doubt in most minds that Frank Epstein did once have ties to the Chicago mob and subsequently to organized crime in Las Vegas. Epstein, now in his seventies, would have been in his late twenties in the late 1950s—a time when gangsters still owned and ran all the big Vegas joints. Epstein was reputed to have had a sharp eye for a deal, even at a very young age, and he’d made connections and climbed fast, eventually forming a powerful business cartel that had bought the old Frontline Casino. It was a mob-owned, Chicago-based union pension fund that had enabled Epstein to finance the razing of the Frontline and the subsequent construction of his massive Desert Lion—the sheer scope of his new casino unprecedented at the time.
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