Concrete Evidence

by Rachel Grant

  Her stomach lurched. She’d finally begun to hope. She couldn’t be an underwater archaeologist, but she still had a future as an environmental scientist.

  He smiled. “You have no proof of what happened in Mexico. Nothing. So let it go. You so much as mention the word ‘Aztec’ to anyone and not only will you lose grad school, but Marco will pay you a visit. Understand?”

  She could not show fear or weakness. She’d trained until she was bruised and bleeding, knowing she’d face him again someday. “I’m not a prisoner on your boat anymore, and the cops here can’t all be on your payroll. Leave me alone.” She reached for the doorknob.

  Jake reached over her shoulder and held the door closed. “Listen closely, because your life depends on it. I know why you took the job at Talon & Drake, and you need to let it go. You have no proof. Now, I need your word that you won’t tell anyone about the Aztec artifacts. You won’t tell anyone about Marco.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “If you break your word, there is no way I’ll be able to protect you.” He released the door.

  She jerked the door open and came face-to-face with Lee. She grabbed his arm, dragging him toward their office. “C’mon,” she said sharply. “We’ve got work to do.” As much as she wanted time to think, she couldn’t leave Lee alone with Jake.

  Only one thing was certain. She couldn’t tell Janice the truth.

  Not today.

  Not ever.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTER WITNESSING ERICA’S REACTION to the stranger in the hallway, Lee knew he’d finally caught a break. At last, he had something tangible to investigate. Erica didn’t say a word as she steered him back to their office, and her shuttered expression only raised more questions. She’d seemed frightened of the mystery man, yet she’d faced him head-on and taken complete control of the situation. Her fear triggered Lee’s protective instincts, while her steel nerves impressed the hell out of him.

  He had a path to follow, a code to break. All he needed was to identify the man who frightened Erica. He settled in front of his computer and searched the company network for references to a navy project. There were several, but none were in the proposal stage. JT should know. He’d ask him when the meeting with the colonel was finished. Across the room, Erica shifted in her seat. He couldn’t let her see what he was doing. With the touch of a button, he brought up the Tetris game and pretended to play.

  He glanced in her direction. She looked calm. He would even say serene. “Who was that guy?” he asked.

  She startled, proving her serenity was a façade. “Nobody.”

  “I don’t get it. First you swooned, then you acted like you don’t like him. Which is it?”

  “I didn’t swoon. I was hungry and surprised, is all.”

  “So you don’t like him.”

  “No. I don’t.” Her words were clipped.

  “Is he an ex-boyfriend?”

  “God, no.” The words came out harsh, laced with disgust.

  The amount of relief he felt worried him.

  She closed her eyes for a second and breathed slowly. Then she met his gaze. “Thank you. For helping me. When I nearly fainted.”

  “No problem, Cream Puff.”

  She stood abruptly. Her chair crashed into the table behind her desk. “Don’t ever call me Cream Puff.” She bolted from the room.

  He sat in stunned silence. In the last three days, he’d said and done several things he should have regretted, but his mission was paramount. This time, however, in crushing her sincere thank-you with a taunt, he’d gone too far.

  He closed his laptop and picked up the Thermo-Con file, mindful of the fact that he needed to look like he was working if he wanted to blend into the background as he wandered the maze of offices. Over two hundred people worked in the Bethesda office, and so far all but Erica had paid him no mind. Which was exactly what he wanted.

  He tried to look clueless and lost, but in truth he’d memorized the Talon & Drake floor plan. Nameplates on doors and cubicles aided his sense of direction as he looked for Erica. She wasn’t in the break room or any of the empty conference rooms.

  He approached the main conference room where JT and his top engineers were meeting to hammer out a contract for work in Afghanistan. The conference room door opened, and Edward Drake stepped out.

  JT’s prime suspect looked anxious. Lee paused by a water fountain. Drake headed for the stairwell. Lee followed. Making up with Erica would have to wait.

  Drake used his ID card to unlock the door at the top of the stairs. He stepped into the ninth-floor corridor and turned right just before the door swung closed.

  When he reached the top, Lee turned left. He could circle back behind the center cubicles and not look like he was following Drake. He walked with purpose, holding the file as though he were making an important delivery. Rounding the corner, he entered Drake’s office hallway from the far end and stopped at a shared printer and fax station. He flipped through the papers in the printer tray as though he were looking for a printout. At the other end of the hall, Drake entered his corner office.

  The words “Request for Proposals from the United States Navy” caught his eye on one of the pages. He felt a rush of excitement as he read the page. He’d found the navy project Erica had mentioned to the mystery man.

  The navy wanted to hire a salvage expert to pull up a Douglas TBD-1 Devastator Torpedo Bomber from the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. This had to be the same aircraft project Rob Anderson had asked Erica about in the break room just before she denied her background in underwater archaeology. He slipped the RFP into the Thermo-Con file.

  At the far end of the hall, Drake’s administrative assistant opened the man’s door. “Here’s the qualifications package you were waiting for, Ed.”

  He couldn’t hear the response, but the door started to close. The woman’s voice rose. “JT has already called—”

  “Edward Drake, line one,” the front-desk receptionist said over the loudspeaker. “Edward Drake, line one.”

  Drake’s assistant pointed up at the commanding speakers. “He wants you in the meeting.”

  Lee heard Drake clearly this time. “Answer the page and tell the interfering prick I’ll be back in five minutes!” The door slammed.

  He waited another minute, then headed toward Drake’s office. He paused when he reached Drake’s assistant at the corner. “Which way is Arnie Ross’s office?” he asked.

  She pointed in the direction he’d been heading. “He’s at the end of the hall, near the stairwell.”

  Drake’s office door opened a crack. Drake was speaking to someone inside. “I appreciate you stopping by on your way to the senator’s.”

  “I’ll talk to Joe, but I don’t think it’ll make much difference. Per Senate ethics rules, JT’s in charge.” Lee recognized both the cadence and the voice. Sam Riversong was inside Drake’s office. Drake was trying to use Riversong to override JT.

  The door opened another inch. So far, the one thing Lee had going for him was his intern status, which made him invisible to the powers-that-be in the office—a difficult feat for a six-foot five-inch man. But Riversong had seen him. And he’d certainly notice Lee now and likely say something that would make Drake take notice. He had to get out of there. Fast.

  Lee hurried to Arnie Ross’s office and twisted the knob. The door was locked. Crap!

  Days ago, he’d made a copy of JT’s ID card, which opened every office door but left an electronic trail that couldn’t be erased. He had no choice. He slid his magic card in the slot and entered. Thank goodness the concrete engineer was in the meeting with JT.

  He stood by the window that faced the hall. After setting the Thermo-Con file on a shelf, he closed the blinds, then held up one slat a fraction of an inch and watched Drake and Riversong pass by.

  Exactly which of JT’s plans did Drake want to override? And why hadn’t JT told Lee he was rattling Drake’s cage? Was JT holding out on him?

  Lee waited a
few minutes, then reopened Arnie’s blinds and slipped into the hallway. After using his card to relock the door, he casually strolled down the corridor.

  He was safely back at his desk, wondering where Erica was, when he realized he’d left the Thermo-Con file inside Arnie’s locked office.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ERICA SAT AT HER DESK and simmered. She was supposed to be working, but in her mind she heard Jake’s threats, while in her office she heard Lee’s incessant questions.

  She’d given him an environmental assessment template and asked him to use it to create the Thermo-Con report. All he had to do was adapt the headings to this particular project and paste in the sections that had already been written. He cooperated by asking her to explain every aspect of the task.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “If the appendices aren’t paginated with the rest of the report, how do we show them on the table of contents?”

  She was too frazzled after seeing Jake. She couldn’t take his incompetence for another second. She growled and said, “Give me the Thermo-Con file. I’ll do it later.”

  “But I need to know—”

  “Play Tetris and leave me alone!”

  She hit the print button for another cell tower report. The blue screen of death flashed on her computer. “Nooooo!” she wailed. Not today. She couldn’t take this today.

  It took ten minutes to reboot her computer, and when she got back into the cell tower database, her worst fear was confirmed. The crash had corrupted the file. Even the backup contained the damaged data. As if today wasn’t already on her top-ten list of most rotten days ever.

  She glanced at Lee, wondering if he could help. But when she’d explained how to cross-reference the Thermo-Con photo captions, he’d accidentally deleted the photos.

  He was hopeless with computers.

  Unless he was playing Tetris, which he was doing now. She smiled grimly. This was the first time all day he’d done as instructed.

  After cursing and sighing, she started copying the data one record at a time and pasting it into a clean, bug-free file. The task would take hours. Hours in which she wouldn’t be working on Thermo-Con, but it was the only way to rescue the database. And no matter what happened, she needed this job, needed to keep her annoying cell tower clients happy.

  She would never be safe. Not unless Jake, Marco, and the crew were locked up. Several times over the last year, she’d considered going to the FBI with her photographs of the artifacts, but she’d chickened out every time.

  Without the actual artifacts, the photos proved nothing.

  Lee left the office at five o’clock, triggering envy that he was done for the day and a surprising disappointment at his absence. He might be useless as an assistant, but she didn’t feel lonely with him in the room. She worked into the night, afraid to go home, afraid Marco would be waiting for her.

  She’d come face-to-face with Jake and was such a wimp that she’d almost fainted. Pathetic.

  At nine fifteen, she finished and shut down her computer. She stretched her neck and rolled her knotted shoulders. Her body ached from sitting and staring at the screen. She grabbed her purse and heard the rattle of antacid tablets.

  Some people salivated at the smell of steak, but for her it was antacids, the one thing she ate on a regular basis. She popped two into her mouth and called it dinner. Her experience in Mexico had taught her what true hunger was. This was nothing compared to that.

  She heard the click of a door closing in the hallway and jumped. Another person working late? “Is anyone there?” she called out.

  Silence was the only answer.

  What if Jake was still here? This time of night, even the cleaning crew had gone home. The building was empty. Chills raced up her spine.

  She leaned through her open door into the hallway. The lights were on. The motion detector switches had been triggered by someone. “Hello? Who’s here?”

  Cold sweat broke out on her brow. A fellow employee would have answered. She reached into her purse and grabbed her pepper spray. What if both Jake and Marco were here? She felt her knees tremble and placed her hands on a file cabinet to steady herself. Dammit. How could she be so weak?

  Because Jake broke my will with dehydration, starvation, and the threat of gang rape.

  Yeah, but what has he done to you lately?

  She let out a small, bitter laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She jumped and faced the door. JT Talon stood before her, a wry smile on his handsome face. “Jesus! You scared the crap out of me!” Her hand went to her racing heart, and she realized she still clutched her pepper spray. “You’re lucky I didn’t use this.” She held up the spray, and they both could see how badly her hand shook. He was even luckier she hadn’t launched into a roundhouse kick.

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize anyone was here.”

  “I called out.”

  “I must’ve been in the stairwell. I came down, then realized I forgot something and went back up.”

  She felt tension release by slow degrees and tucked the pepper spray inside her purse. “Sorry I snapped at you.”

  “You shouldn’t be here so late by yourself.”

  “If I had a better computer, I’d have left hours ago.”

  He laughed. “Point taken. Will you be here much longer?”

  “I just finished.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “I’m taking the Metro.”

  “You’re riding the subway this late? Alone?”

  She shrugged. “I do it all the time.”

  “Not tonight you’re not. I need five minutes; then I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “The Metro is perfectly safe—”

  “If you argue with me, you’re fired.”

  She laughed, surprised at the relief she felt. Someone was looking out for her.

  “I’ll be right back.” He disappeared down the hall. The stairway door closed, echoing in the silent building, and she recognized the sound that had alerted her earlier. He’d been telling the truth about being in the stairway.

  She grabbed her purse. Maybe during the drive she could get him to talk about the new room at the casino. Did he know she’d been there last night? The last thing she wanted to talk about was Tommy Riversong.

  He’d said he loved the Thermo-Con house. That was a safer subject. She reached for the project file to act as a prop to get the conversation going, but the folder wasn’t where it belonged.

  She searched her desk and Lee’s. The file was gone. Could Lee have taken it home? Why would Mr. Incompetent do that?

  “Ready?” JT asked from the doorway.

  “I can’t find a project file I was hoping to work on tonight.”

  He smiled. “Next you’ll be wanting a better computer for your home too.”

  “A laptop would work for both.”

  “Nice try.”

  She gave up on the file and followed him out the door.

  JT drove a bright orange, foreign, and obviously expensive convertible sports car. The low car hugged the road as they sped along the George Washington Parkway with the top down. She knew a large percentage of the single women—and even a few of the married ones—who worked for Talon & Drake would envy her right now. The man was more handsome in person than in his publicity shots, a feat that shouldn’t be possible. Wealthy and credited with a genius IQ, he had been photographed several times escorting trophy-wife wannabes to newsworthy functions. She’d been prepared to dislike him, but he seemed rather personable over a binding machine and was kind to give a lowly employee a ride home.

  Young, handsome, rich, successful, and son of a presidential contender, JT Talon was the object of many women’s fantasies. But not hers.

  She would never get involved with anyone who held so much power over her.

  As the miles sped by, she knew she was wasting her opportunity but had no idea how to open the conversation. At last, inspiration struck, and she spoke. “Is your f
ather going to make his announcement soon?”

  He smiled but kept his eyes on the road. “Yes.”

  His frank answer surprised her. “He’s really going to run,” she murmured. She’d thought about the senator running for president on an abstract level, of course, but her focus during the last year had been so narrow, she’d missed the broader view. “He really could win,” she said, and heard the awe and excitement in her own voice.

  His grip tightened on the steering wheel. “Yeah. Kind of crazy, isn’t it?”

  Here was her opening. “He’d have a huge advantage if casino profits could fund the campaign.”

  He glanced sideways at her. She knew the statement was odd for a casual conversation. So I’m not normal. Get over it and tell me something I can use. Please.

  “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “We’re our own nation, so some rules don’t apply.”

  “Will tribal gaming be a negative for him? Many people are against gambling.”

  “The casino is a mixed bag,” he said. “It’ll turn off some voters for sure, but the senator is prepared for that. And Sam Riversong has worked hard to make sure our casino is better than the rest. The museum component is key. We’re not just making money off gambling, we’re educating people on tribal issues, history, and prehistory. As an archaeologist, you must appreciate that.”

  She felt the solid thud of her pulse all the way to her fingertips—much as she’d felt last night when Tommy offered to show her the room. This was her chance. “I do. I’ve been to the casino several times just to see the exhibits. I can’t wait to see the new room. I’m dying to know what the theme will be.”

  He smiled. “You’re going to love it.”

  That was it? “C’mon. What is it?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a secret.”

  “At least tell me when it’s going to open.”

  “Nope. All I can say is the displays will be top-notch. I can’t believe the stuff Sam managed to procure.”

  A translucent jadeite monkey, perhaps? A cast-gold skull necklace?

  She gave him directions to her apartment, and minutes later, they pulled up in front of her building in Southwest DC. She climbed out of the flashy car and leaned over the closed passenger door to shake his hand. “Thanks for the ride.”