by Meryl Sawyer
“What’s wrong with the security firm the company has been using?” Brianna asked.
Good question, Taylor thought.
Leave it to Brianna to hone in on anything unusual. Her beauty kept most people off guard, but Taylor had discovered Brianna was one of the most intelligent women she’d ever known.
Taylor liked her, but she couldn’t help feeling disloyal to Aunt Sophie. Taylor had never much cared for her aunt, having learned over the years how self-centered and cold the woman was. But she sympathized with the betrayal her aunt had suffered, the humiliation.
No one had expected strait-laced Doyle Maxwell to divorce his wife, then turn up later that year with a sexpot young enough to be his daughter.
Everyone claimed Brianna was after his money, and Taylor suspected it was true. Even so, Brianna was likable and easy to get along with—much more so than Aunt Sophie had been.
The only problem was Vanessa’s snotty friends. They never included Brianna in their plans. Taylor’s mother—always sensitive to her friend’s opinions—never saw Brianna unless Doyle was with her in a small family gathering that did not include Vanessa’s society buddies.
Taylor had spoken to her mother several times about it, but Vanessa brushed off her suggestion that she should develop a relationship with Brianna. Taylor had made it a point to meet Brianna once a week for lunch.
“Many of our orders come in through the Web site. One of the employees, a young man just out of college, picked up a glitch. Our financial records, our sales info—a number of sensitive matters are at risk if some hacker is after us,” announced Vanessa.
Since when? Taylor wondered.
She’d been at the office all day yesterday and no one mentioned this. Something in her brain clicked, and she looked at Trent. He was carefully inspecting the polished marble beneath his feet.
He knew all about the change in security companies and hadn’t mentioned it. Why not?
Raoul.
Raoul Cathcart was involved, the way he was so often now. Did he have anything to do with “discovering” this Renata person, Taylor wondered, her thoughts skipping from one subject to the other. She forced herself to concentrate on the computer problems.
She ventured a glance at her uncle. Doyle was staring at Vanessa, his eyes narrowed. Taylor knew he was feeling as betrayed as she was. Normally, they would have been told about the problem and been consulted before the company changed security firms.
But this wasn’t like old times, when Trent and Taylor ran the company and Uncle Doyle handled the finances while Vanessa swanned through the office once a week, giving creative input.
Since Raoul had moved in with Trent, her brother began to have more and more opinions about how To The Maxx should be run, infringing on areas Taylor and Doyle oversaw. Vanessa was being increasingly dragged into the business even though her health should have kept her at home.
“The formulas are still secure, aren’t they?” asked Brianna.
“Of course,” Trent assured everyone. “They’re all in the safe here. None of them are in any computer.”
“Still, there is enough valuable information on company computers to be concerned,” Shane said, his tone firm.
Now Taylor was confused. Maybe he actually knew computers. Then what was it about him that made her so edgy?
“We’ve gotten off course here,” Vanessa said. “This afternoon we hired Vince and Shane to work on our computer security.”
“It’s so important I pulled Shane off another case,” Vince added.
“Since I had received the tip from the Missing! hot line, I thought Vince and Shane should investigate, since they are now handling our security.”
“Does your firm have experience with this sort of case?” Taylor asked. She knew she sounded snappish, but she couldn’t help herself. Her world seemed to be veering out of control and she was powerless to do anything about it.
“No,” Vince admitted. “We focus on computer security, but that often branches out to other concerns.”
“When there’s been a computer breach, we review the security camera tapes to see who’s been in the building, and we also follow the computer trail,” Shane explained. “That often forces us to use surveillance and other types of investigative tools.”
“Checking Renata Rollins’s claim isn’t exactly rocket science.” Vince tried for a laugh but it fell flat.
“You haven’t been able to verify or disprove,” Brianna pointed out. “I guess it isn’t so easy.”
“All it will take is a DNA test,” Shane responded.
“And the time to process it.” Vanessa spread her hands wide. “I don’t have the time to waste. I want you to interview Renata,” she said to Shane. “If there’s even an outside chance she’s my daughter, I want to meet her. I’d go there myself, but …”
No one had to be reminded that Vanessa was too ill to travel. Her blood had to be monitored every few days, and she was on a regime of more medications than Taylor cared to count.
“Go with him, Taylor,” her mother added. “I need Trent and Doyle to tackle the computer problem with Vince. Let me know if I’m right. Renata is my daughter.”
Doyle allowed Brianna to pull him aside while everyone filed into the enormous dining room often used for Vanessa’s charity galas. Tonight it was set for an intimate five-course family dinner.
“You don’t trust me.” Brianna’s full lower lip jutted out and her eyes widened.
“Of course I do,” Doyle lied.
When Brianna had volunteered to go to New Orleans to help Taylor and Shane, Doyle had insisted he needed Brianna here to help sort information on his home computer, to cross-check info that might also be on the company computers.
“I need you to help me, that’s all.”
Her sexy pout remained in place. “We could do it in a few hours, tonight. Then I could go with Taylor.”
He didn’t know what to say. There was no skirting the truth. Shane was a stud, if ever Doyle had seen one. He didn’t have matinee idol looks like Raoul, but he was a man’s man with the kind of rough-hewn good looks that appealed to women.
Doyle wasn’t giving sixty a hard shove for nothing. If he’d learned anything in all these years, it was not to throw two oversexed people together.
Once, Doyle had been a sex-starved man married to a good Catholic who thought sex, except for procreation, was a mortal sin. Brianna had been a brunette lap dancer in Little Havana.
The rest was history.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Brianna. I just don’t want you in the middle of this.”
“What if Taylor were going alone?” she challenged. “Would you let me go then?”
“Well … I guess,” he hedged. “But that isn’t the case. Shane—”
“Is walking testosterone, and you don’t trust me near him.”
She had her hands on her hips now, the way she’d had the night he’d suggested she become a blonde. It had taken a little convincing, but the result had been sensational. Blond Brianna became so much in demand, Doyle had been forced to marry her or lose her.
“Don’t worry. Shane has the hots for Taylor. He doesn’t even know I exist.”
Doyle had to admit his niece was beautiful. A cool blonde while Brianna was a hot blonde. He trusted Taylor. She’d spent her youth in Catholic schools, but his wife was another story. Part Cuban, part white trailer trash, Brianna was too sexy for her own good.
“I trust you,” he replied, struggling for something, anything, to strengthen his argument. “I just—”
Brianna sidled up to him, her searing green eyes staring into his. She kissed him lightly on the mouth, but in the instant their lips met, her tongue grazed his, sending a current of arousal to his groin.
“Then it’s settled, darling. I’m going with Taylor.”
Brianna bolted into the dining room, announcing, “We’ve worked out our scheduling problems, Taylor. I’m going with you.”
Doyle hadn’t se
en Taylor look so happy since that worthless photographer had vanished. It was almost enough to make him smile. Almost.
“How many times do you have to keep telling me the same shit?”
“Until you get it right.”
“Fuck you!”
“Is that any way to talk to me?”
Renata swung around so her back was on the sofa and her long, bare legs were flung over the top. She looked backward at Caleb Bassett—the upside-down image no better than the face-to-face version. He was munching on take-out pepperoni pizza—her favorite—and chugging Abita beer.
“I have to dance at nine,” she told him, her stomach rumbling. “I can’t eat until two, when I finish.”
“One bite.” He rose to his feet and hovered above her head. “To tide you over.”
Renata twirled around, her feet hitting the wood floor in her French Quarter flat with a dull thud.
“I can’t have one bite and you know it.”
She snatched the slice of pepperoni pizza from his hand and hurled it against the fireplace. It landed with a wet splat and plopped onto the hearth.
Caleb sauntered back to his chair, his loose-limbed gait not fooling her for one second. He was pissed. Caleb reached into the cardboard box for another slice, took a loud, satisfying bite, then dropped into the chair.
Renata’s tummy protested with a bleak roar that she was certain Caleb heard. She was hungry all the time—it seemed. She finally made decent money, but she still couldn’t eat.
Not if she wanted to keep her job at Puss ’N Boots, the nightclub where she worked.
If she ate now, her stomach would pooch out, and her body would no longer be perfect. She had to wait until after work, then eat as little as possible, or stick her finger down her throat so her stomach was flat again for tomorrow’s show.
Caleb smacked his lips—because it drover her crazy—and polished off the slice of pizza before speaking. “This could be the last week at the Puss.”
She hated the way he made the P ’n B—the workers’ nickname for the club—sound disgusting. But she didn’t call him on it. Time had taught her a few lessons.
This man got off on baiting her.
Don’t play into his hands.
“I know the drill.” Renata stood up and strutted across the room, practicing her stage walk. “I know how to handle May Ella—”
“No, no! Her name is Vanessa now. Forget she was ever May Ella Jones. All you need to know is that you’re her long-lost daughter.”
Sometimes she hated Caleb with every bone in her body. He often felt the same way about her. But she had to admit they were a good team.
Life sucked the big one.
She jumped to her feet, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To visit Marie.”
“That’s crazy and you know it. You should—”
Renata slammed the door behind her, cutting off his final words. She knew Caleb thought she was a nut to be so superstitious, but she couldn’t help herself. Visiting the grave of Marie Laveau, the legendary voodoo queen brought good luck.
Her tombstone was covered with triple X’s and had candles placed on it by people who believed in the black arts. Renata’s luck had changed the day she’d come across Marie’s grave in the St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans.
She had run her hands across the triple X’s and lit a candle. Miracle of miracles—a long string of bad luck had changed. She’d been offered a job at Puss ’N Boots and began to make real money.
“Call me superstitious,” she mumbled to herself. “My luck is about to change again.”
Chapter 4
Blowback.
An interesting concept. It hadn’t been on anyone’s radar screen until terrorists had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Then the idiots in the media interviewed the military, who had coined the term.
Blowback meant something you did could backfire and return—with a vengeance—to haunt you.
Unintended negative consequences.
The CIA trained Afghan men during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the days of the Cold War, when limiting the spread of Communism was a priority for this country. Later those same men took their experience and unleashed it on American targets.
Blowback. Big time.
“That’s biting the hand that fed you.” He chuckled, then amended his statement. “No, it’s cutting off the hand that fed you. That’s blowback. It’s worse than what you put out in the first place. It intensifies with time, feeds on hate.”
He looked out the window at the heat shimmering upward in moist curls from the damp pavement, bringing with it a whiff of the loamy soil in the planters, thinking.
Another interesting aspect of blowback was its unexpectedness. It wasn’t the old “you reap what you sow.”
Not at all. Things done with the best of intentions—even love—could boomerang after sulking in the shadows for years.
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
That was certainly an aspect of blowback in this case. He couldn’t help being pleased with himself. The Maxwells were experiencing big-time blowback.
The past was coming back to haunt them. No. Torture them is a better way of putting it.
Death would be the ultimate price for crossing him.
Too bad no one would be smart enough to figure the blowback angle. It was a killer concept.
Accurate.
Deadly.
Utterly fascinating.
“I’m finally enjoying myself.”
Shane stood beside Brianna and Taylor, waiting for Caleb Bassett to answer the bell at the Creole town house on the fringe of New Orleans’s French Quarter. The paint on the building once had been a warm coral, but it had faded to a dirty, nameless shade. It was cracked and peeling in so many places that the building appeared to be molting. The rancid smell of garbage spilling from an overturned trash can across the narrow street reminded Shane of the places he’d visited in Third World countries.
Shane rang the bell again, conscious of Taylor looking up at him. On the flight from Miami, she’d sat in stony silence and let Brianna do the talking. He didn’t press it.
The one thing he had on his side was time.
“Why would he leave if he told us to come over?” Taylor asked.
After they’d checked into the Windsor Court Hotel, Shane had called Caleb Bassett, father of the woman who might be Vanessa’s daughter. Renata was unavailable, but Caleb said he would be willing to talk to them.
Where in hell was he?
Unexpectedly, the door swung open. A handsome man with thick black hair burnished with silver at the temples beamed a grin worthy of a televangelist. He was dressed in a maroon something—would it be called a smoking jacket?—and black velvet Hush Puppies.
“Shane Donovan.” Shane extended his hand. “This is Brianna Maxwell and Taylor Maxwell.”
“Caleb Bassett.” He bowed slightly to the women while he shook Shane’s hand with a firm grip. “Come on in. I have tea ready.”
Tea? What a brilliant idea.
Shane waited for Brianna and Taylor to enter, already dreading interviewing this man. His shit-o-meter had just gone off the chart.
This kind of man would be hard to judge. Shane could already see Bassett had a certain quality some people would find charming. And he knew how to exploit it.
So did most con artists.
They followed Caleb, as he wanted to be called, down a narrow hallway with wood floors so highly buffed that Shane could almost see his reflection. The living room—Caleb called it the parlor—was a sunny room facing an immaculately maintained rear garden.
The room was decorated in what Shane assumed were period pieces, possibly authentic antiques. The kind of prissy French furniture upholstered in brocade that made a big man like Shane think twice before sitting down.
He planted himself on the end of a chaise across from Caleb and near Taylor who had taken a F
rench chair with flimsy wood legs. Brianna had seated herself next to Caleb and she was saying something about how lovely the home was.
“You were expecting something less … refined?” Caleb asked.
“Well, we weren’t sure—”
“Security, my dear.” Caleb leaned closer to Brianna. “The Quarter is rife with crime. From all appearances, we wouldn’t have anything to steal, would we?”
Got that right.
Brianna giggled and Taylor managed a smile. While taking in as much of the rest of the room as he could without making it obvious, Shane kept his gaze on Caleb, who was now offering them tea.
No family photos. Nothing that seemed really personal.
The place reminded Shane of a movie set except for a trace of something in the air. It might have been incense except Shane had spent too much time in Colombia not to recognize kick-ass marijuana.
He listened to Caleb describing the crumpets, scones, and pastries on the coffee table in front of them. A multi-tiered dish held a variety of bite-size sandwiches on bread with the crusts cut off. Shane couldn’t help recalling afternoon gatherings in foreign embassies when he’d been with Special Forces. You’d need a mountain of those things to equal half a sandwich.
Real men did not eat cucumber sandwiches.
As he listened, Shane detected more than a hint of the deep South in Caleb’s voice. Arkansas. Alabama. Maybe Tennessee.
Linguistics wasn’t his expertise, but he’d been in enough dangerous places to know to listen to the difference in intonation that could warn you about a person’s background.
In some places like the Middle East and South America, the slightest difference in pronunciation indicated a person was from another tribe—an enemy. Mistaking someone for a member of the wrong group could prove to be deadly.
The world had gone global in many aspects, yet in other ways the world seemed to be hunkering down into nations within nations, split-off states, tribes—and in America—gangs.
“Milk in your tea, Shane?” Caleb was asking.
Shane shook his head and waved off the cube of sugar Caleb was offering with silver tongs. Caleb reached for one of the cucumber sandwiches.