Trouble with Nathan

by Anna J. Stewart

  His father.

  Whatever was going on in this town—the crown, the thefts, Nemesis himself—Jackson Tremayne was dead center of it all. Laurel nibbled her lip. Alastair’s sudden shift of focus, or maybe it wasn’t so sudden, made her curious about the crown and Alastair’s possible connection to it. She’d done as instructed and kept her ears and eyes open at work. The crown being stolen had been the in she’d been waiting for when it came to being sent to Lantano Valley. The last investigator had run into a dead end, both with the Nemesis case and the crown. It wasn’t often TransUnited called surrender, but when they did, the powers that be tended to turn to Laurel. All the better to strengthen her position with Alastair. And find something she could use against him.

  She stabbed a piece of sweet and sour chicken. First things first, she needed to find that crown.

  She already knew the crown was owned by the SylEctus Group, some mega-conglomerate think tank out of San Francisco whose inner workings and membership roster remained somewhat of a mystery. She’d start with the Los Angeles office of TransUnited and dig deeper.

  In the meantime, she’d make Nathan’s usefulness and connections work for her. Sure she’d read up on the previous investigators’ findings on the Nemesis case, but given Nathan Tremayne’s profession, she’d bet he had some ideas about the thefts. If their outing to the park was any indication, it wouldn’t take more than another couple of well-placed feminine nudges to slither her way into the Tremayne circle and come up with something to keep Alastair happy. If she played things right, she’d get him what he wanted and get her life back, if she couldn’t find some leverage against him of her own.

  Piece of cake. Laurel frowned and dropped her egg roll into the discarded steamed rice. Right?

  Chapter Six

  “So by confessing to being Nemesis, you hoped to throw the cops off the fact you actually are Nemesis.” Malcolm couldn’t have looked more dubious if his father-in-law had just told him he’d purchased property on the moon. “You wanted the police looking at you, but not too hard.”

  “I gambled on the hope that being tailed by the police would throw whoever is behind this off,” Jackson said.

  “Given this conversation, it clearly didn’t pay off. What about you, Nathan?” Malcolm asked. “Did you have something to do with this?”

  “Until a few days ago, I was as much in the dark as you,” Nathan told him and bit back his own frustration. “I’ve been assured there’s an explanation. Right, Dad?” Clearly now was the appropriate time to come clean.

  “I’m well aware how difficult I’ve made things.” Jackson crossed his legs as he sat in the high-backed chair situated between matching cream-colored love seats in the Tremayne sitting room. There wasn’t much else not crated or boxed up, making the entire house feel more like a museum in flux than a living area. “Not only on the business, but on you three. But yes, Malcolm. Your analysis of the situation is spot-on. When Nemesis, or rather you, Sheila, and Nathan, stole those paintings at the art gallery last month, I was caught on video across the street at the museum. It’s the perfect alibi.”

  “It’s the perfect alibi to clear you of being Nemesis,” Sheila clarified. “Except they found your prints on the display case that displayed the crown.” Sheila rested her chin on her hand, the perfect picture of calm. “Even though you didn’t steal it.”

  “It’s a good frame, even with the doubt about the print,” Jackson said. “Trust me when I say it’s no coincidence the Crown of Serpia is dead center of this mess. Now those two have me in their sights.” He gestured to the late-model sedan housing two detectives parked outside the house. “Which means I’m out. Nathan’s going to have to take point. Just be careful. I’m betting Evan suspects something’s not right.”

  “He said as much,” Nathan confirmed, wishing his father had talked to him about putting all of them in the D.A.’s, not to mention Laurel’s, crosshairs. “The sooner we find the crown and return it to the authorities, the sooner this will all get cleared up.” The sooner Nathan could get back to his own plans for the future. Plans he had yet to share with the rest of his family. It wasn’t that he didn’t think they’d understand. He just hated the idea of letting anyone down, especially his father and sisters.

  “Wait a minute.” Sheila rubbed her fingers into her temples as her calm dissipated. “What does this crown have to do with Nemesis? Who would want to frame you for something like this? Did we make some new enemy I’m not aware of? Could Chadwick be pulling some strings we didn’t know about?”

  “My father might be many things,” Malcolm said. “But even he isn’t clever enough to realize we’re the ones who sent him to prison. This feels personal. Calculated. Planned. Jackson?”

  “You’re two for two,” Jackson admitted, looking into his disappearing wine. “This situation is very personal. I did what I could to keep you all out of this after that arrived at the office about a month ago.” He jerked his chin toward the padded envelope on the coffee table. “A calculated error on my part. Go ahead,” he urged Nathan. “There’s nothing more I can do with it. I reached my technological limit opening the envelope.”

  Nathan squeezed the packet and dumped out its contents. “Looks like a burner phone. One you can pick up at any convenience or drug store.”

  “I received a call on that from an old acquaintance a couple of days before we stole Chadwick’s paintings. A former acquaintance who wouldn’t want anything to do with law enforcement, believe me. We arranged to meet in the alley next to the museum, but when he didn’t show on time and all hell broke loose at the art gallery, I realized I’d walked into some kind of setup. The only solution seemed to be to get myself on camera and play out whatever happened.”

  “Yeah, well, that solution opened up a whole new can of worms,” Nathan muttered.

  “My mistake was thinking a conversation with him would put a stop to this vendetta he has against me. And by extension, all of you. He’s not going to stop, which means we have to figure out his endgame.”

  As far as Nathan was concerned, his father had made other mistakes, like not confiding in the children who could have helped him from the beginning, but Nathan bit back that retort as he flipped the cheap device over in his hand and popped open the back. “I should be able to track the SIM card . . . well, shit.”

  “Let’s see?” Malcolm leaned forward and held out his hand. “Huh. Tricky. The number’s been eradicated. Takes a delicate touch to do that without destroying the card or the information stored on it.”

  “Think you can do something with it?” Nathan asked.

  “Yeah.” Malcolm handed him back the phone. “I take it there was more to this phone than a simple call. What else is there that had you running to the commissioner?”

  “I didn’t go running to the commissioner.” Jackson’s sour tone made Nathan’s lips twitch until he clicked on photos and saw a collection of images that chilled his blood. “I purposely put myself on law enforcement’s radar so the person who set me up would back off,” Jackson continued. “I assumed he wouldn’t want to deal with someone who’s being watched by the police. Not that I expected a tail twenty-four/seven. Second . . . Nathan?”

  Nathan flipped through the grainy yet oh-so-definitive photos contained on the phone, his father’s voice fading to a dull buzz in his head. Morgan, Gage, and the kids playing on the front lawn at the Fiorelli house on Tumbleweed Drive. Morgan and Kelley shopping at the mall. Drew walking home from his job at J & J Markets. Gage and Drew at the park playing softball with some of Gage’s cop friends. Sheila and Malcolm coming out of Malcolm’s doctor’s office. Sheila and Malcolm embracing soon after they’d exchanged vows at the last-minute wedding ceremony a few weeks prior. Nathan exiting Lorenzo’s Café with his morning coffee.

  “What’s this all about, Dad?” It took every bit of control he had not to snap the phone in half. “What the hell is going on?”
The anger might have taken hold if terror hadn’t been clawing at his throat.

  “Let me see.” When Nathan hesitated, Malcolm stood and ripped the phone out of his hand. Nathan couldn’t remember ever feeling as if fury was circling a room, but it descended with all the force of a tornado as his brother-in-law viewed the pictures.

  “Malcolm?” Sheila reached for him then shrank back when Malcolm shook his head, eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. “Dad, please.”

  “There’s a particular kind of terror that strikes when your family’s being stalked because of something you’ve done.” Jackson seemed calm, but after thirty-two years Nathan recognized restrained fury in his father’s voice when he heard it. But it was the undertone of fear that unsettled him most. “You cease thinking as clearly as you should, and yes, before you ask, Nathan, I tried calling the only number listed in that phone’s address book. It’s been disconnected. And as if those weren’t bad enough”—Jackson reached for a larger manila envelope on the side table and tossed it onto the coffee table—“this was waiting for me yesterday morning on the front porch.”

  “After you spoke with the police.” Nathan pulled out a selection of photos, but there was no preparation for the images that slid into his hands.

  “This would be that nighttime excursion the three of you took to Chadwick’s warehouse?” Jackson asked.

  “You mean the warehouse that exploded?” Sheila asked, all innocence. “Yeah, I think I remember that. I lost my favorite dress thanks to that debacle. Great idea of yours, Nathan.”

  “No kidding.” Nathan flipped through the prints, replaying the night a few weeks ago when he and Sheila, with Malcolm’s help, had broken into a storage facility in the hopes of discovering a cache of stolen artwork. Instead, they’d found the warehouse rigged with enough C-4 to light up downtown L.A. They’d barely made it out before the entire building had gone up in flames. But it was the “Nemesis?” scrawled across one of the pictures in thick marker that had Nathan swallowing hard. This wasn’t possible. “How would someone have been following us then? How would they have known anything?”

  “Because the man behind those photos, a man named Alastair Manville, knows me better than I realized,” Jackson admitted. “Me and my family.”

  “But what does he want?” Sheila asked.

  “Revenge. As I said, I’d hoped meeting him at the museum would be enough to satisfy him, but clearly I was wrong.” Jackson admitted. “I confessed to being Nemesis to throw him off, but now I think he just took that as an additional challenge. It’s only a matter of time before Alastair ups the stakes again, which puts all of you in danger now.”

  “He’s already upped them,” Nathan said and cringed at the silence that followed. “That phone call you walked in on earlier, Sheila?” He glanced at his sister. “I was finally able to get a name from my black market contacts. The crown hasn’t surfaced anywhere anyone can find, but until a week ago, Johnny Saxon was running his mouth about being hired for some big antiquity heist.”

  “Who’s Johnny Saxon?” Malcolm asked.

  “A talented young thief,” Jackson said. “Reckless, though, with a propensity for drinking too much and talking too loud. You think Saxon stole the crown?” Jackson shifted forward in his chair, a tinge of relief in his eyes. “He’s what? Based out of Los Angeles? We could, you could—”

  “Wouldn’t do any good to go to L.A.,” Nathan interrupted. “They pulled his body out of Pelicano Marina last week.”

  Jackson swore and downed the last of his wine, most of the color draining from his face. “If Alastair’s graduated to murder, things are even worse than I imagined.”

  “What I want to know.” Nathan still didn’t understand one crucial element of this situation. “Is how this Alastair Manville knows you’re behind Nemesis?”

  “Because forty years ago I was Nemesis. We were.” Jackson set his glass down and folded his hands in his lap, suddenly looking every day of his almost sixty years. “But it was Alastair who went to prison for it.”

  ***

  “How long would it take you to run a complete background check on Laurel Scott?” Nathan asked Malcolm once Sheila coaxed Jackson into taking a walk through Catherine’s rose garden. His sister always had been intuitive when it came to picking up on people’s moods and Nathan’s was about as dark as he could get. If they were dealing with murder, he needed every bit of information he could get. “And by check, I mean a no-holds-barred, turn-over-every-stone-possible kind of check?”

  “I’m assuming covert is implied?” Malcolm clutched the burner phone in his hand.

  Despite the disturbing revelations of the day, they’d gone from no information to discovering who was behind the theft of the crown and suspecting who had been hired to commit the crime and frame Jackson. If Nathan could prove how the crown was stolen—Saxon had a certain panache when it came to B&E’s—he could lock in an important piece of the puzzle and maybe put some distance between Manville and the Tremaynes. He could explore on his own, but having a witness to whatever he discovered, say, someone like Laurel, could end up being additionally beneficial.

  “If we get her prints it’ll be faster,” Malcolm said. “Two, maybe three days if we want it totally off the radar. I take it you want to run Alastair Manville as well.”

  “Oh, most definitely, but be careful. And while you’re at it, anything you can dig up on the crown will help.” He’d bet Laurel could be a wealth of information on that topic as well. “All this isn’t going to be too much for you, is it?”

  Malcolm’s knuckles whitened around the phone, and he stared at Nathan with an intensity Nathan had rarely seen in his friend’s eyes. “I have cancer, Nathan. You and everyone else need to stop treating me as if I’m going to break apart at any moment. Having something to concentrate on will be a relief. Besides, I’ll be damned if I’ll let someone destroy my family now that I have one I actually like. Well, besides my brother and grandmother.”

  “We mustn’t forget Alcina and Ty, that’s for sure.” Nathan nodded and added them to the list of possible collateral fallout. “And spoken like a true Tremayne. The sooner the better on that info.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about your girlfriend?” Malcolm slipped back into that teasing tone that lightened the mood.

  “Jesus.” Nathan scrubbed a hand down his face. “Since when is Gage a bullhorn of gossip . . . No, wait.” He should have known. “It wasn’t Gage. Kelley said something?”

  “Our niece might have mentioned the pretty lady sitting in the park with Uncle Nathan. Sheila and I didn’t push for many more details.” Malcolm grinned and Nathan felt a bit of the tension in his chest loosen. “She didn’t have any.”

  “Laurel Scott is in charge of the insurance investigation, which means she knows more about this crown business than anyone else in town. I don’t believe in coincidences in the best of circumstances and her being here definitely isn’t that. TransUnited insured a number of the items Nemesis stole. If she’s as smart as I think she is, it’s only a matter of time before she puts two and two together. I need to make sure she doesn’t get that chance, so I want to stick close. There’s something that doesn’t add up. The crown disappeared the same night as the Nemesis theft and now the phone, the photographs.” He shook his head. “This took serious planning. This Manville guy, whoever he is, isn’t as deep in the shadows as Dad seems to think. Not now that we’ve got bodies hitting the morgue.”

  “Your dad hasn’t gone into many details about his past with Manville. You still want me poking around?”

  “Information is the real power in all this. Poke. Prod. Excavate with that fine-tooth computer of yours, Malcolm. It takes a special kind of obsession to go to this much trouble.”

  Just as it would take a certain dedication for Nathan to stop Manville from getting what he wanted. Whatever that might be.

  “He does seem
to take an inordinate amount of pleasure from taunting your father. Especially with the warehouse photos. You think he’d send them to the police? Or are you worried he might finger the rest of us as Nemesis and you all will finally have to come clean with Morgan?”

  Sometimes his brother-in-law was too right for his own good. “Until now we didn’t think she’d understand.” But if it came down to a choice between keeping secrets and protecting his sister and her family, there was no choice.

  “First of all, you underestimate your little sister.” Malcolm leaned forward and braced his forearms on his knees. “The fact that Nemesis is a good part of the reason she still has a charity to run is a foregone fact, so I can bet at some point she’ll thank you,” he added. “Secondly, Gage knows.” Nathan opened his mouth to interrupt, but Malcolm shook his head. “No, he hasn’t said anything, but given your conversation with him in the park can you honestly think anything different? If there’s one thing I’ve learned about our future brother-in-law it’s that Gage will never, ever lie to Morgan. We’re on borrowed time with Nemesis, so you’d best figure out how and when to fill both of them in, if for no other reason than so they can protect themselves. And their kids. At some point this entire situation is going to cease being a Nemesis problem and become a full-on Tremayne issue.”

  “You have a point,” Nathan said, wishing he could argue with anything Malcolm had stated. “But none of this is going to mean a damned thing if I don’t find that crown and get it into the right hands.”

  “And by ‘right hands’ you mean?”

  “Hell if I know,” Nathan admitted. The police? The museum? Maybe he should hand deliver it to the D.A. himself. “But in order to do that I need more information.” Starting with Laurel. He needed to know what she knew, otherwise they were flying blind.

  “One thing’s for sure. This Manville is dangerous, Nathan,” Malcolm said. “If he’s cutting loose threads like Saxon, there’s no telling what he might do. Those pictures, they’re beyond personal. They’re a promise. And if what Jackson believes is true, if revenge is what this guy is after, I don’t know what’s going to stop him. Or how much time we have before he strikes again.”