by Cara Summers
“Report,” Stanton ordered.
“A cream-colored Mercedes sedan with a license plate containing the three numbers we have on the partial is registered to a Ms. Eva Ware.”
For a moment there was dead silence in the room.
Stanton finally turned and said what they all were thinking. “That means that Eva may have been run down by her own car.”
Maddie dug into her tote for the ring of keys Jordan had given her. “I have the key. Jordan told me that Eva kept it in a garage on the block directly behind her apartment building.”
Stanton pulled the key off the ring when she handed it to him. Then he glanced through the one-way glass at Michelle Tan. “The question is whether Eva was as generous with her car keys as she was with the key to her apartment.”
SITTING cross-legged on the sunken floor of the suite’s living room, her back against one of the sofas, Maddie once more pored over the last weeks of Eva Ware’s life as they were minimally recorded in her calendar. After assigning two uniforms to check out the garage and see if the Mercedes was there, Dave Stanton had sent them home.
But the excitement she’d been feeling when they’d arrived at the Donatello and first opened the leather volume had steadily drained away.
Dino had dropped off some things at the desk for them while they’d been out. In addition to clothes for both of them, he’d left Jase’s laptop and a file of the financial information he’d been able to dig up so far on everyone either related to or employed by Eva Ware. Nothing had popped on any of them except for the hundred thousand dollars that had briefly resided in Michelle Tan’s bank account.
Eva had used a personal shorthand, mostly consisting of initials, but they were pretty easy to decipher. And there were very few appointments. On Monday mornings at nine there was an S.M., a staff meeting. Wednesday noon, lunch with J. Jordan. Maddie ran her finger over the initial. Had Eva been so focused on her business that she’d had to pencil Jordan in to spend time with her? She thought of the easy relationship she’d always had with her father, the constant companionship he’d offered. And she felt sorry that Jordan had missed out on that.
“Find something?”
Maddie met Jase’s eyes. He was seated on the floor across the coffee table from her, his long legs stretched out. “Just that Eva has Jordan penciled in for lunch every Wednesday.”
“That was your sister’s doing. They’d go out to lunch, and Jordan would either produce tickets for a matinee or she’d make your mother go shopping with her. She thought Eva spent too much time focused on her work and insisted that she take at least Wednesday afternoons off. Jordan had some theory that the time they spent visiting a museum or seeing a play would actually foster Eva’s creativity.”
“Jordan sounds just like my dad. He was always nagging me that I worked too much.”
“Was he right?”
“I didn’t think so at the time. I wonder if Eva’s focus on work was one of the reasons they broke up.”
“You may never find out the answer to that,” Jase said.
“But if I find enough pieces, maybe I can put the puzzle together by myself.”
He smiled at her then, slowly. “You’re absolutely right.”
She nodded and shifted her gaze determinedly to the appointment calendar. “For tonight, I have a big enough challenge with this particular puzzle.”
“Patience is a requirement if you want to find all the pieces.”
Maddie would have settled for just two pieces that would lock together. Every puzzle needed that first match.
The week after the robbery Eva had jotted J.C. in the five-o’clock Wednesday slot. Jase had confirmed that was the day she’d come to his office. The next day he’d left for South America.
Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, P.T. had been noted in the same time slot. Since Eva’s routine had been to visit the gym on her way home from work, Maddie guessed that P.T. stood for personal trainer. Except for lunch with J., none of the initials jotted in various time slots seemed to connect to anyone who worked at Eva Ware Designs or members of the Ware family who stood to profit from the will.
Scattered randomly on each page were doodles that Maddie suspected were the beginnings of design ideas. Some were elaborated upon in more detail on a later page. Others were abandoned or scratched out.
In Maddie’s mind, Eva had used the semi-empty pages of her appointment calendar to test out new ideas—or perhaps to help her think through problems. On a hunch, she flipped through the earlier months and noted that the doodling had increased after the date of the robbery.
And that meant exactly what? Hadn’t they already surmised that Eva suspected someone on the inside of pulling off the robbery? Maddie had been so hoping that the appointment calendar would provide them with a new clue.
Discouraged, she glanced again at Jase who was sorting through the clippings and sticky notes that Eva had stuffed inside the appointment calendar. On the dining table on the upper level, they’d dumped the contents of Eva’s tote bag and discovered nothing more than what had tumbled out when Michelle had dropped it—a wallet, a pack of matches and a sketch pad half-filled with embryonic designs.
Every so often Jase would pause and scribble something on a piece of hotel stationary. Maddie was doing the same on a message pad she’d located by one of the phones. His list was longer than hers. But then he was a trained investigator.
Jase glanced up at her, then at the pizza they’d smuggled into the Donatello. “Do you want another piece?”
“Go ahead.”
He reached for the last slice, folded it neatly in half with one hand, and took a bite. With his other hand, he continued to lift and examine the various pieces of paper Eva had stuffed into her calendar.
She glanced back down at the two pages that captured the last week of Eva’s life. It was the fourth time she’d gone over them. There had to be something she’d missed….
The only unusual thing was that on the day before Eva had been run down, she’d scratched out P.T. and replaced it with another doodle. This one looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was a revision of an earlier sketch.
Frustrated, Maddie tapped her pencil on the notepad. “I’m getting nowhere. If Eva confronted either Michelle or Cho at work with her suspicions, she wouldn’t have had to write it down. All she records are standing appointments. Other than that, she used her calendar to sketch design ideas.”
Jase swallowed a last mouthful of pizza. “It’s the same with the papers she slipped into the book.” He held up an advertisement torn from a glossy magazine. In the margin was what Maddie guessed to be an earring in the shape of a spiderweb.
Eyes narrowing, she reached for it.
“What?”
“The design.” The moment Jase handed it to her Maddie placed it carefully next to the page she’d been studying. “It’s the same one she drew in the five o’clock time slot the night before she was run down.”
Rising, Jase stepped over the coffee table and knelt down next to her so that he could study the drawing too.
“I don’t think it’s a design,” he said. “It’s the logo for the club that’s being advertised—the Golden Spider.”
Quickly, Maddie scanned the ad. There were quotes from newspapers and magazines extolling the virtues of the Golden Spider club as one of Manhattan’s premier night spots—“the latest place to be seen in the Big Apple.” The in place to be. Then she saw it. The text was layered over a faint drawing that matched what Eva had doodled in her appointment calendar and again in the corner of the ad.
Frowning, she flipped back through the pages to the night of the robbery. Then using one finger she began to skim down each page until she found what she was looking for. A week after the robbery, on the day she’d visited Jase at his office, Eva’d sketched the same spiderweb. “Here it is again. I assumed it was an idea for a piece of jewelry, but maybe not.”
Jase strode to the dining table on the level above them. “Something’s
tugging at the back of my mind. I’ve seen it before someplace.”
Maddie studied him. The energy that he always seemed to keep tightly leashed was much closer to the surface. “You think it means something?”
“Maybe.” First he leafed through the sketch book. “Nothing here.” Then he picked up something from the table. “Well, hello.” He tossed it to her.
Maddie caught the matchbook, and her heart skipped a beat when she got a close look. “The Golden Spider.” She glanced up at Jase.
“I’d say we have a clue.” He descended the two steps and began to pace. “I’m still thinking that I saw that design before. Some place besides the matchbook. I saw a lot of jewelry sketches pinned to the wall while we were in the workroom at Eva Ware Designs. Would your mother have seen a logo like that one and purposely sketched it with the idea of turning it into a piece of jewelry?”
“I…don’t know. We’ll have to ask Jordan.”
“No.” Moving forward, Jase dropped to his knees beside her and grabbed her shoulders. “I’m asking you. You’re more like your mother than you realize.”
A skip of panic moved through her. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re both designers. Your brains are hard-wired in a certain way.”
“That doesn’t mean I know her.”
“Fine.” But he disagreed with her. Maddie was coming to know her mother more and more. The problem was she wasn’t quite comfortable with that knowledge. Releasing her, he picked up the message pad she’d been taking notes on and held it for her to see.
Maddie studied the doodles she’d made in the margins. She hadn’t even been fully aware of drawing them. A few were designs she’d been experimenting with for quite a while.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out. “I sometimes do that when I’m worried or thinking through a problem.”
“Yeah. From the looks of it, your mother had the same habit. So now I want you to take your best guess. Would your mother have seen something like the spider design and ‘borrowed’ it as the basis for a piece of jewelry?”
“No,” Maddie said firmly.
Jase nodded. “Then she had to have some other reason for her doodles. My theory is that your mother came across it in the ad or on the matchbox, or some other place. Either way she started thinking about it or worrying about it. I can’t imagine that she was doodling this because she was a regular visitor at the Golden Spider. You with me so far?”
Maddie thought of the desk in Eva’s apartment, piled high with sketch books, littered with drawings. It had been a potent testimonial to what Eva had done when she got home from the gym or the store every night, and it argued forcefully against her mother having had any nightlife. Come to think of it, Maddie herself didn’t have a nightlife either. How many evenings did she return to her studio to work? There was a sudden tightness around her heart that had her rubbing her fist against it.
“In the morning, I’ll have Dino see what he can dig up on this club. And I want to get to Eva Ware Designs before anyone else does, including the police. I’m still thinking that I saw the spider logo somewhere when we were there today. I’ll also fill Stanton in. He’s going to be questioning everyone at the store tomorrow. He might as well ask if any of them have been to the Golden Spider.” Jase smiled slowly. “That may just stir something up.”
Maddie narrowed her eyes. “You want to stir something up, don’t you?”
Jase’s smile faded. “You bet I do.”
He pressed down hard on the anger that had been simmering inside him ever since he’d seen that car in his peripheral vision. “I want to get my hands on the bastard who nearly ran us down and who killed your mother.”
Just saying the words had an image he’d been battling against for hours running through his head—Maddie lying in that street, bleeding. Lifeless.
Ruthlessly he blanked it out, but beneath his rage something else—determination—iced.
“Me too. Got any ideas?”
“Not yet.” That was the hell of it. “I’m drawing a blank. Not even the spiderweb makes sense—yet. But it will. Investigative work is a matter of gathering pieces that don’t seem to fit and then finally seeing the whole picture.”
His cell phone rang and he fished it out of his pocket. The caller ID told him it was Stanton; he tilted the phone so that Maddie could hear too. “Yeah?”
“Mixed news. I’ve gotten nowhere with Michelle Tan, and Cho Li has yet to appear at his apartment.”
“Could something have happened to him?” Maddie asked.
“I doubt it. One of the uniforms watching the building chatted up the doorman. The guy claims Cho stays out all night two or three times a week.”
“Maybe he has a lady friend,” Jase said.
“That’s my first guess. I’ll have my men bring him in as soon as he shows up. We’re having better luck with Eva Ware’s car. It was parked in her garage. The dent on the hood and the fabric we found on the undercarriage suggest that it was used to run her down. I hope to have lab results confirming that tomorrow. There’s no garage attendant on duty. The gate can only be opened with an electronic key card. You find anything like that in her effects?”
“No. No spare car keys either,” Jase said.
“So someone close to her could have seized an opportunity to lift both,” Stanton mused. “There’s a surveillance camera that takes pictures of anyone leaving or entering the garage. I’m hoping to have the tapes early tomorrow, and we may get lucky. Anything new on your end?”
“Have you ever heard of a night club called the Golden Spider?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Eva referred to it a few times in her appointment calendar, and I’m going to have Dino check it out in the morning.”
“I’ve got a friend over in Vice. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Jase repocketed his cell, then turned to Maddie. “My gut instinct tells me that things are going to start to move quickly tomorrow. That’s one of the reasons I want to arrive at Eva Ware Designs before anyone else does. I always found when going into an op, it paid to get there early.”
“How can I help?”
“Depending on how the morning goes, we may have to improvise on the spot.” He thought of what she’d done with Michelle, playing the sympathetic cop. “Think you can follow my lead?”
She met his eyes, lifted her chin. “You haven’t lost me yet, have you?”
“No.” He leaned down and kissed her mouth softly. He meant to keep it short, sweet, but he couldn’t resist lingering, luring. I nearly lost her. When he felt himself sinking, he reluctantly drew away.
“Let’s try a different tack.” He pushed aside the notes he’d jotted down and handed her a blank piece of hotel stationary. “How good are you at sketching faces?”
She stared at him. “Sketching faces?”
“Yeah. I want you to draw likenesses of the people who may have had access to the security codes at Eva Ware Designs.”
Maddie began with a quick drawing of her cousin Adam. Jase passed her a second sheet and she attacked Cho.
As he watched her pen fly across the page, he marveled at how good she was. She was biting down on her lower lip, concentrating hard. He’d seen Jordan do the same thing sitting at her computer.
“I have photos of everyone in the files that Jordan prepared for me.”
“That would spoil the experiment. You’re like your mother. You think while you draw.”
“Oh.”
Her hand paused for a moment, then continued to fly across page after page. The sketches were clever and insightful caricatures. She managed to accurately capture Adam’s ego, Arnold Bartlett’s pomposity, Cho’s serenity and Michelle’s eagerness and seeming innocence.
“Where did you learn to do this?” he asked.
She glanced at him. “In high school, I worked on the school newspaper.”
“Try Carleton and Dorothy.”
At her raised eyebrow, he elaborated, “
If Adam had access to the security codes, theoretically so did they.”
When she’d finished, he lined the sketches up in two lines. “If Michelle, Cho, or Arnold robbed the store and Eva suspected one of them, their jobs would be at stake and there would have been a scandal that would have made the front pages of the newspapers.”
“But if family was behind it—” Maddie lined up Adam, Dorothy and Carleton next to the others “—then the scandal would go even deeper. Eva might have been afraid that the store or the business would have been hurt.”
For a few moments, silence stretched between them as they studied the two columns they’d fashioned out of the drawings.
“It all comes back to the same old suspects—someone in the family or someone employed by Eva Ware Designs.”
“The question is, who has the most at stake?” Jase said.
“And if Eva’s murder is related to the robbery, who stood to gain from both?”
Jase gave her shoulders a squeeze, then gathered up her sketches and stacked them into a pile. “Enough for tonight. Sometimes I find the best way to shine new light on a problem is to sleep on it.” He rose, drawing her to her feet with him. “Let’s go to bed.”
14
TAKING her hand, Jase drew Maddie with him into the bedroom. When they reached the bed, he said, “I haven’t let you sleep much.”
Maddie smiled at him. “I think that I made my contribution to the no-sleep agenda.”
When she reached for him, he took her hands and raised them to his lips. “Something’s happening between us, Maddie. Something I don’t quite understand.” But he thought he did understand. He was very much afraid that he was falling in love with Maddie Farrell. And it had him feeling jittery.
It gave him some satisfaction when he saw the change in her eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one feeling a bit out of his depth.
“You feel it too,” he said.
“Yes. A little. I’ve given it some thought, and I think it would be wrong to make too much of it. We’ve been on a roller-coaster ride, emotionally, physically.”