64
Dee finally pulled back the door. To Vic’s disappointment, she wasn’t nude. So, he thought, she’s going to make me work for it. He could live with that. Lorraine had been no challenge at all. If he didn’t need her to give him cover, she’d hardly have been worth the effort. Dee was a different story. Not only was she spectacular to look at, Vic knew she’d be good. That solitary kiss they shared back in Scottsdale had been electric, and that one feel of her under her tennis whites had stayed with him. There were times he couldn’t quite believe his level of obsession with her. He had been with so many women in so many ways, yet the fantasy of Dee had persisted beyond all reason. Now she would be his bon-voyage party and gift rolled up in one hot and stormy package.
Vic stood in the hallway, Dee facing him on the other side of the threshold. He caught a whiff of that spicy perfume she wore and it set him off. Patience be damned. Given his plans to hit the road, he decided he wasn’t in the mood to work for it. He reached out, grabbed Dee by the arm, pulling her out into the hallway. He held her arm behind her back, clutched her with his other arm, and pressed his lips hard against hers. As he kissed her, he marched her backward into the room. He reached back and slammed the door shut. But something was wrong. She stiffened in his arms. Her lips did not conform to his. She pushed back. And when he strengthened his hold on her, Dee clamped her hand over his, latched onto his thumb, and twisted it. He grunted in pain and let her go.
“What was that for?” he said, shaking the hurt out of his hand. “If you wanted to work up to it, you just could have said so.”
She half smiled at him. The smile was accompanied by an unnerving tepid laugh. Still shaking his hand, Vic took a good look at her. Not only wasn’t Dee nude, but she was clothed in a way he was unused to seeing her dress. Under a gray business jacket, she wore a white button-down blouse that fit so loosely it did nothing to accentuate her looks. Her matching gray pants and low black pumps were about as sexy as a catcher’s mask.
“You going to a bankers’ luncheon? You look like an accountant,” he said.
“Funny you should say that, Vic. I used to be one.”
Now he was laughing. “Get the hell out of here. You?”
“Me,” she said, “really. In fact, technically, I still am an accountant, certified and everything.”
“Cut it out, Dee. I never had an auditor that looked like you. Besides, why would a poor little rich girl need to be an accountant? What, your daddy needed someone he trusted to watch his money?”
She gave him that half-smile again as she reached over to the nightstand. Vic got a bad feeling when he saw the shape of the small black leather folder in her hand. When she flipped it open and held it out for him to read, Vic’s bad feeling got considerably worse.
“Special Agent Diana Evans,” Vic said as much to himself as to Dee.
“That’s correct, Mr. Prado. I am an accountant, but my status with the FBI trumps that.”
Vic noted that the vaguely Southern accent and come-and-get-me charm in Dee’s voice had vanished. It had been replaced by a flat, cool voice with not an ounce of flirt in it.
He put his right hand over his heart. “Mr. Prado, is it? I’m hurt.”
“Very funny, Vic. You’d have to have a heart for it to hurt.”
“So, you’re a liar,” he said. “So what?”
“Undercover work requires lying sometimes. I’m sure you have an encyclopedic knowledge of lying.”
He stalled for time. “Yeah, maybe, but Kayla’s going to be hurt. She really liked you. She trusted you.”
Dee frowned. “Undercover work requires that sometimes, too. I’ll explain it to her when I get the chance. She should be pretty familiar with hurt, given that she’s been married to you for so long.”
He shrugged. “So you mind if I ask you what all this intrigue and undercover bullshit is all about?”
“Harry Freeman,” she said, as if those four syllables explained it all.
“Harry who?”
“Harry Freeman.”
“Sorry,” he said, “but I got nothing. Who’s Harry Freeman?”
“Was.”
“What?”
Her smile turned cold. “The question should be: Who was Harry Freeman? He’s dead.”
Vic said, “Too bad for him.”
“And you.”
“How’s that, Dee—Diana? How is the death of some guy I don’t know bad for me?”
“Murder,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Harry was murdered.”
“Same question.”
“Harry was a college professor of mine who consulted for the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
“Were you fucking him to get good grades? I bet you got all A-pluses.”
She slapped Vic so hard across the face that she split his lip. When he saw that he was bleeding, he came at her. As he got close to her, she pressed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter into the soft part of his neck.
“Go ahead, Vic, give me an excuse.”
He threw up his hands and backed away.
“Okay, all right, but you didn’t have to slap me.”
“Harry was my mentor. He guided me, took care of me. He never touched me,” she said, her face distorted by grief and anger. “I’ll tell you what he did do. He gave me your name and the names of your companies and told me to watch out for you. He said that something fishy was going on with the companies you were buying pieces of, that things didn’t add up. He said he was about to go to the SEC and ask them to initiate an official investigation of your firms’ practices. Two days later, he was murdered.”
“What, somebody put a bullet in him?” Vic said. “Like on TV?”
“Something like that. He was beaten to death. The media reported it as a mugging that went wrong. How many muggings ever go that wrong? When I spoke to the investigating detective, he said he’d never seen a mugging like it. That, sure, sometimes muggings went wrong, but that when they did, people got shoved to the ground, even shot. But no mugger took the time to beat someone to death. Harry wasn’t the type of man to fight back. He would have given the mugger anything he wanted. Pretty convenient for you, Harry getting killed that way. When he died, the investigation into your little financial empire died with him.”
“Sorry to hear about your friend, but where’s the connection to me? Sounds pretty thin.”
“I don’t care how it sounds to you. Maybe it’s the kind of thing your pal Joe Breen might do. What do you think?”
But if she thought mentioning Breen’s name was going to get a rise out of Prado, she was wrong.
“Joe Breen’s not my friend,” Vic said. “That miserable bastard doesn’t have friends.”
“So you admit you know him?”
“For a long time. We grew up in the same neighborhood.”
“With Mike and Lorraine Frazetta,” she said.
“Yeah. So what?” He shrugged. “I know Mike, Lorraine, and Joe Breen. I’m sure if I looked into your background I’d find some people you knew who you wouldn’t be so proud of knowing.”
She holstered the automatic and handed the surveillance photos to Vic. He looked at them without so much as blinking.
“I hate to keep repeating myself,” he said, “but so what? I was visiting an old friend. Mike was my buddy in high school and Lorraine was my girlfriend. So the cops got pictures of me visiting them. Big deal.”
“I got you, Vic,” she said halfheartedly.
He threw the photos on the bed.
“You got nothing. You’re desperate. You’re fishing.” He smiled that white charming smile of his as he wiped the blood from his mouth. “You made yourself a part of my life and of Kayla’s for a year and you came up empty. Let me explain something to you. You shouldn’t mix your heart up in your business. It makes you blind. Worse, i
t makes you stupid. And revenge, it makes you even stupider and blinder than love. I’m leaving now. I’m willing to let this go without making a thing about it, but you come near me again and I’ll sue you and the Bureau up the wazoo.”
“This isn’t over, Vic.”
“Oh yes it is, darlin’,” he said, mocking her. “It’s more over than you know.” He started for the door, then hesitated. “You should have let me have you. I wanted you so bad, it might have worked better than this. This . . . this was stupid. This was amateur hour. Good-bye.” He blew her a kiss and left.
When the door shut, she slumped onto the bed. Vic was right. She’d been stupid and desperate. He was right about something else: She should have slept with him. That couldn’t have been any worse a disaster than this. If there had been a white flag available or anyone to wave it at, she would have been waving it.
At the elevator, Vic pressed the down arrow. Dee or Diana or whatever the hell her name really was had done him a favor. The time had come to get gone. So he didn’t even bother going back to his room. Instead, he texted his lawyer and had the doorman get him a cab.
65
When Jesse walked through the stationhouse door, Molly gave him a look that told him nothing good had come of the stuff he’d asked her to do.
“Give me a minute and then come into my office,” he said as he passed her.
As he sat behind his desk, Jesse wanted nothing more than to pour himself six fingers of Black Label. It had been a hell of a shift so far, and he was only halfway through it. He put his .38 away, then reached for his glove instead of the bottle in his desk drawer. As he pounded the ball into the perfectly formed leather pocket of his old Rawlings, he tried to clear his head. Sharon hadn’t called his cell phone, so he couldn’t be sure that it was Vic Prado who’d met with Harlan Salter and Monty Bernstein. What if it was? If it was, why? And could there be any connection between Vic, Martina Penworth’s murder, and the Salter kid’s abduction? Those questions had kept their grip on him for the entire ride back from Helton to Paradise. Driving hadn’t helped him make any sense of it. He put the glove down just as Molly knocked and came in.
“How did keeping your word go?” Molly said.
“It worked out in the short run. What have you got?”
She handed him a small slip of paper with a phone number on it. “That’s the number in Taos you asked me to get. I’m not so sure you’ll want to call it yet.”
“Why’s that?”
“Boston PD towed Kayla Prado’s rental car late yesterday afternoon. It already had four tickets under the wiper for unpaid meters when they hooked it up and brought it to the impound lot.”
Jesse said, “Not good, but I could explain that away. Maybe she was running late for the airport. Decided to take a cab instead of trying to get to Logan on her own. Maybe the car didn’t start. Could be a hundred reasons.”
“Do you believe any of that, Jesse?”
“No.”
“She never made it to the airport. At least not to the flight she booked. She’d checked in online that morning but never showed at the gate. She hasn’t tried to rebook.”
“Damn.”
“It gets worse, Jesse.”
“How could it get worse? Did they find her bod—”
“Nothing like that, but it’s still not good. After I alerted them about Kayla as a possible suicide candidate, Boston PD did some canvassing around the street her car was towed from.” Molly hesitated, taking a deep breath. “It didn’t take them long to find someone who’d spotted her. There’s a witness who claims to have seen a woman fitting Kayla Prado’s description involved in an incident on her block. She claims that the woman fitting Kayla’s description fainted on the sidewalk and was helped into a car by a man.”
“What man? What car?”
Molly handed Jesse several more sheets of paper. “It’s all there. Boston PD faxed over the witness statement. You can read it later. The crib-notes version is that the witness couldn’t describe the man beyond saying he was on the small side. He might or might not have been wearing glasses. The witness thinks the man had on a dark blue suit that might have been black. She says there wasn’t much memorable about him. Strange because she described Kayla Prado perfectly and described the car as a white Honda or Nissan. She got a partial tag number, too.”
“Between the description of the car and the partial, it should narrow things down.”
“Yeah,” Molly said, “to about two thousand cars, give or take. I’ve got the list on my computer if you want me to send it over. Even if we eliminate the cars from the western half of the state, it would take us a week to individually check out all these cars.”
“Did you check with the hospitals? Maybe she really did just faint,” Jesse said.
“Checked with most of the hospitals between here and Boston. Nothing. I’ve got a notice out to the rest of the hospitals in the state and the rest of New England.”
“Maybe I should go talk to Vic. He needs to hear this, and there’s a chance he might know something about what’s going on.”
Molly made a face that Jesse couldn’t decipher.
“Put it into words, Crane.”
“While you were over in Helton on that mysterious mission to keep your word, we had an interesting incident happen at the hotel. Some big guy went into a restricted area and assaulted Connor Cavanaugh. He—”
“Connor Cavanaugh?” Jesse said.
“Played fullback with Suit. Then linebacker at UMass. Had a training camp with the Pats. Now he’s head of security at the hotel.”
“Go on.”
“When Cavanaugh and the hotel manager confront the trespasser, the guy gave Cavanaugh a chop to the throat and put him down. Suit took the report.”
Jesse was losing patience. “Okay, Molly, but what’s this got to do with Kayla Prado or Vic?”
“I’m getting to that. This big guy was questioning the help about Vic and some woman he had with him in his room last night.”
That got Jesse’s full attention. He stood up and paced in front of the window.
“We have a description of the big guy and of this woman who stayed with Vic? Could it have been Kayla?”
“Yes. Yes. And no,” she said. “Suit got a description of both the guy who attacked Cavanaugh and of the woman, but she wasn’t Kayla. She had black hair, was attractive enough, but besides those two things the description doesn’t match Kayla Prado.”
“Okay. I think it’s time I go have a talk with my old infield partner.”
“You can try.”
Jesse said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means Suit thought he should warn Vic Prado after he took the report. According to Cavanaugh, this big guy was pretty menacing, so Suit thought he should give Vic a heads-up.”
Jesse smiled. He had always been on Suit to show initiative, to act on his instincts. After all these years, Jesse was glad his lessons were paying off. Then he realized that Suit might have simply wanted Vic’s autograph. Either way, it was the smart move.
“What happened when Suit spoke to Vic?”
“That’s the point. Suit never got the chance. Vic wasn’t in his room, and when Suit asked around, the doorman said he got a cab for Vic that afternoon.”
“Did the doorman hear where Vic was headed?”
“No, but it wasn’t local because the doorman heard the cabbie saying that a trip out that way wasn’t on the meter, but a flat rate.”
“All right,” he said, retrieving his .38 and reloading it. “I’m going over to the hotel. Something’s going on here.”
“Something like what?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to go over there.”
Molly shook her head, smirking. “I wish I was smart like you. Then maybe they’d make me chief.”
“Maybe.”
> “Should I ask you why you need to reload your weapon?”
“Probably not.”
“Keeping your word took five bullets?”
“Four,” he said. “One was just for show. Didn’t I tell you not to ask?”
“You suggested it. That’s different.”
“From now on, when your chief makes a suggestion, take it as an order.”
She stuck her tongue out at him.
“Very nice.”
But their banter fell flat. They had both been cops too long to think there was an innocent explanation for what had happened to Kayla Prado. Jesse handed the slip of paper with Kayla’s parents’ phone number back to Molly.
“Call them up. Pretend to be a friend from Scottsdale. I want to make sure she really didn’t get there. Try not to scare them.”
Molly said, “They’re probably already scared.”
“You may be right. Do your best.”
Jesse walked past her. She chased after him and caught him before he made it to the front door.
“Jesse!”
He stopped. “What?”
“I almost forgot. A woman called. Said her name was Sharon.”
“Yeah.”
“She said you were right. She looked online and that was the guy at Burt’s. She also said to thank you again.”
Jesse smiled for a brief moment, but not brief enough that Molly hadn’t noticed.
“Is this another one of those things you’d suggest I not ask about?”
“You’re finally catching on, Crane. Maybe they will make you chief someday,” he said.
He left without another word.
66
Joe Breen waited for Lorraine Frazetta’s car at a corner three turns away from his boss’s house. No matter which direction she approached from, she would have to pass this corner. It was far enough away that even if the cops had eyes on the house, they wouldn’t be here. And on the odd chance that they were following Lorraine, it wouldn’t seem strange to the cops for Mike’s right-hand man to have a chat with Mike’s wife. Joe thought that was kind of funny because the only people it would seem strange to were the three of them. While Mike Frazetta didn’t quite understand the depth of the animosity between his wife and Joe, he knew there was no love lost between them.
Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot Page 22