“I came to see if I could find Ms. Ware’s appointment calendar,” Michelle mumbled.
Maddie noted that the young woman’s hands were trembling. She put a hand on Jase’s arm as she moved past him, caught his eye and mouthed, “Good cop.” Then she dropped to her knees in front of Michelle and stilled her hands. “Why did you think the calendar would be here? And how did you get a key?”
Michelle’s head popped up at that, and her voice was suddenly stronger. “Ms. Ware gave me a key. Sometimes she would get to work and remember that she’d left a sketch of a design at home. She’d ask me to come here and pick it up.”
Okay, Maddie thought. That jelled with Jordan’s description of Eva as a bit disorganized. Plus, she’d seen the sketches littering Eva’s desk. “She trusted you then?”
“Yes. Yes, she did.”
“Why did you think the journal was here?”
Avoiding Maddie’s eyes, Michelle sat back on her heels and folded her hands together. “I knew you were interested in finding it. I was on my way home from work when I remembered Jordan saying that she’d brought everything that the police had returned to her to this apartment because she couldn’t bear to go through it yet. It’s right on my way home, so I decided to stop in and see if it was here.”
Liar, Maddie thought.
“I don’t think so.” Jase’s voice had turned so clipped and cold that it nearly sent a shiver down Maddie’s spine. “I think you eavesdropped on Maddie and me when we were talking on the speakerphone with Jordan.”
Michelle shook her head. “No.”
“Yes. Then when I told you that we were going to be tied up for some time at the police station, you saw an opportunity to get hold of it before we did.”
Michelle shook her head again.
“Jase,” Maddie said. “Can’t you see she’s upset?”
“She should be upset. What’s so important about that appointment calendar that you had to sneak in here to steal it, Michelle?”
Michelle looked at him then. “Nothing. I wasn’t going to steal it. I was just trying to help.”
“Help yourself, maybe,” Jase said. “You were worried about something that it might contain.”
“No. Why should I be? I have nothing to hide.”
“Jase.” Maddie injected a note of warning into her tone. Then she took Michelle’s hands in hers. “We know that you deposited one hundred thousand dollars into your checking account three days after Eva Ware Designs was robbed of over a hundred thousand dollars worth of jewels.”
Michelle’s eyes went wide with shock, then flooded with tears. “You think—no. You can’t. I didn’t.”
The young woman’s emotional reaction could be fake, Maddie told herself. “Then where did you get the money?”
Michelle opened her mouth, shut it, then shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”
When Jase didn’t say anything, Maddie pushed forward. “You’re going to have to. We already know that Cho Li is your grandfather.”
Michelle dropped her head into her hands and began to cry.
A HALF HOUR later, Jase stood next to Maddie beneath the awning of Eva Ware’s apartment building watching as two uniformed policemen helped Michelle into the backseat of a patrol car.
She hadn’t said one more word while he’d called Dave Stanton and they’d waited for the police. Neither had Maddie.
Stanton had sent someone to pick up Cho Li and he was going to question Michelle personally as soon as she reached the precinct. He and Maddie had been invited to come down and watch.
“I don’t like it,” Maddie murmured as the patrol car pulled away.
There were quite a few things that Jase wasn’t liking, the top one being that they’d stayed a lot longer than he’d intended at Eva’s apartment, plenty of time for someone watching the place to put a plan into operation. And he had a bad feeling about that.
He’d insisted that she put on the scarf and sunglasses again, but the disguise was a thin one. He scanned the street, spotted a taxi blocking the entrance to an alley across the way, and recognized the driver as the one he’d tipped heavily to wait for them.
“C’mon. Our ride’s over there.” He took Maddie’s elbow and urged her toward the curb. The street in front of Eva’s apartment was narrow. Vehicles took up every parking space and two were double-parked. Since it wasn’t a Manhattan thoroughfare, traffic was minimal at this time of night. Still, Jase paused to look both ways. His bad feeling hadn’t eased.
A car was moving slowly toward them from the left. Jase eased Maddie to his other side, using his body to block hers. Once the vehicle had passed by, he said, “Let’s go.”
“I can’t believe that she robbed Eva Ware Designs, can you?”
“A good investigator keeps an open—” The roar of an engine cut him off, and he caught the sudden blur of movement to his right. He had just enough time to register that the cream-colored sedan matched the description of the car that had run Eva down.
Maddie turned her head and he felt her freeze. The headlights flashed on, blinding them both.
There was no time to think. No time even to panic. He just let his reflexes take over. Whipping his arm around Maddie’s waist, he lifted her.
The roar of the motor grew louder, the lights closer. Jase leapt into the air and twisted his body to take the brunt of the impact as they landed on the taxi’s hood. Holding Maddie tightly, he rolled and brought her with him to the sidewalk on the other side of the cab. This time it was his shoulder that took the hit and his breath whooshed out. For a second, he just held on tightly. Then he said, “You all right?”
“Yes. You?”
Easing her next to the side of the taxi, he got to his feet. But all he could see were the taillights of the car just before it careened around the corner.
MADDIE LAY flat on the sidewalk, her mind still spinning while she tried desperately to process what had just happened. Her body was cold and numb. And all she could hear was a sort of soft buzzing sound like white noise.
Someone had tried to run her and Jase down.
When she’d heard the racing motor and turned her head, those blinding lights had been so close. She’d even been able to see the hood ornament.
Voices began to penetrate. She recognized Jase’s. Someone else was speaking with an accent.
“I saw part of the plate number. You blocked my view when you landed on the hood of my car.”
“What kind of car?”
Jase’s voice again.
“A light-colored sedan, a Mercedes,” replied the voice with the accent.
“Did you see the driver?”
“He was wearing a jacket with a hood.”
It had really happened then. Someone had almost succeeded in running them down. If it hadn’t been for Jase’s quick reflexes, they would both be lying out in the street. Bleeding. Dead.
And the driver of the car would have gotten away with it. Again.
The bastard.
Fury gave her the energy to scramble to her feet.
Jase turned to her and joined her on the curb. He ran his hands up and down her arms as he studied her. “You’re all right.”
“You too.” She wrapped both arms around him and simply held on. Something else moved through her then, something that had the fear and anger fading. And another kind of fear building. She realized that she didn’t want to let Jase go. Not now.
Maybe not ever.
13
MADDIE STOOD with Jase and Detective Stanton in a small anteroom. In the adjacent room, beyond the one-way glass, Michelle sat with her hands folded on a table, her face drawn, her knuckles white. Although the detective had questioned her for over an hour, Michelle hadn’t varied from the story she’d told Jase and Maddie.
“I’ll keep after her for a while,” Stanton said, “but she’s pretty stubborn. She denies ever having the security code to the Madison Avenue building or having anything to do with the robbery.”
“Cho could have h
ad the security code,” Jase pointed out.
“True. She refuses to talk about the hundred thousand in her account.”
“It didn’t stay in her bank account very long,” Jase said. “According to my partner, the money appeared via a bank check, but was withdrawn in cash two days later.”
“It’s the amount and the timing that are so incriminating,” Maddie said.
“I agree. It looks as though she needed some cash fast and she knew just how to get it,” Stanton replied.
“My partner is tracking down where it came from,” Jase said. “And I’m expecting to hear back from an informant who knows a lot of fences in the area.”
The detective turned to Maddie. “You look better than you did when you came in.”
She managed a smile. “Thanks. I want to know who was driving that car.”
“Working on it. I’ve sent a couple of uniforms to go door to door. The bastard had to be waiting for you. Same way he waited for your mother. We’re running the partial plate number. Your description of the hood ornament matches well with the taxi driver’s certainty that it was a light-colored late-model Mercedes, so that should narrow the search.”
Jase slipped his hand into hers. “Maddie, the car that ran down your mother was also described as a light-colored sedan.”
She turned to him. “You think it might be the same driver?”
“Could be,” Stanton said. “Killers are unbelievably cocky. The bastard got away clean the first time. Probably figures he can do it again.”
“The one thing we know for sure is that Michelle wasn’t behind the wheel,” Maddie pointed out.
“Right. But she could have an accomplice,” Stanton said. “We haven’t been able to locate Cho yet.”
Maddie shook her head vehemently. She’d already had this discussion with Jase on the ride to the station. “I can’t see Cho running anyone down. I’ll bet he doesn’t even drive.”
Stanton glanced at Jase and then back at Maddie. “I’m checking all possibilities. I’ll be at Eva Ware Designs with a search warrant when it opens tomorrow morning, and I’ll be questioning everyone again about the robbery. Nothing like a couple of suspects to jog everyone’s memory.”
Turning, Maddie studied Michelle through the one-way glass. “My guess would be that she’s gone silent because of her loyalty to her grandfather. I never should have mentioned Cho’s name.”
Stanton’s eyebrows shot up. “You don’t like him for the hit-and-run, but you suspect him for the robbery?”
“I don’t want to,” Maddie said. “They make a pair of unlikely jewel thieves.”
He snorted. “They didn’t have to be pros if they had the security codes. And Eva Ware trusted Michelle enough to give her the key to her apartment.”
“She may open up when you get Cho in here,” Jase said. “Or he may open up once he sees that she’s under suspicion.”
Stanton glanced at his watch. “I’ve had men stationed outside his apartment ever since you called. There’s no sign of him. The apartment is dark, he’s not answering his phone or his door.”
“Maybe he skipped,” Jase said.
Maddie turned from the window to face Stanton and Jase. “Even if Cho or the two of them robbed Eva Ware Designs, I still can’t see either of them running Eva down.”
“Money does strange things to people,” Stanton said.
“Maybe Eva was onto them and confronted them. With her gone, their jobs are secure, Cho’s reputation is golden.” Jase frowned. “The thing is, neither of them has a motive to hire a hit woman to kill Maddie.”
“The two things don’t have to be connected,” Stanton said.
“No,” Jase mused. “But something tells me they are.”
Once again Stanton sighed. “Me too.”
There was a knock at the door, and a young uniformed officer poked his head in. “I’ve got something on the plate that you might be interested in, sir.”
“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 E
va 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.”
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