Flash

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “Don’t you dare speak to me as if I’m hysterical. There is a person up there who stalked me through the aisles.”

  “But I’m telling you there’s no other customers around—” The attendant broke off as he caught sight of Jasper standing in the doorway. “Leastways, there wasn’t until now.”

  “What’s going on here?” Jasper asked.

  Olivia spun around. “Jasper.”

  The relief in her face had an unexpectedly warming effect. He glanced down and saw that she was barefoot. Her nylons were shredded.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  “I found Uncle Rollie’s locker, but before I could get it open someone turned out the lights upstairs, and then, I swear to God, he came through the aisles with a flashlight. It was as if he was hunting me. I knocked him down with a platform truck and—”

  “Is he still up there?” Jasper interrupted.

  She frowned. “Well, yes. I think so. At least I haven’t seen anyone else come down the stairs or use the elevator since I got back to the office. But, Silas, here, just told me that there’s an emergency exit door on the other side of the building. He might have escaped through it.”

  Jasper looked at the hapless Silas. “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Sure, sure. Whatever you say.”

  Silas came out from behind the barricade of his desk with alacrity. Jasper got the impression he was grateful for the excuse to flee the office.

  Jasper looked at Olivia. “Wait here.”

  “Not a chance.” She was already in motion, striding crisply toward the door. “I’m coming with you.”

  There was no time to argue. Besides, Jasper consoled himself, if there was a stalker prowling the grounds, Olivia was safer in a crowd than she was on her own down here in the office. “Stay close.”

  She did not bother to respond to that. She went past him out the door.

  Silas reached the elevator first and punched the button.

  “Let’s take the stairs,” Jasper said. “If he’s looking for a way out, he’ll probably use them rather than the elevator.”

  “What if he hears us in the stairwell and decides tc use the elevator?” Olivia asked.

  “Lock it out,” Jasper told Silas.

  “Okay, okay. Take it easy.” When the elevator opened, Silas reached inside and pulled out a red knob “There. It ain’t goin nowhere.”

  Jasper opened the stairwell door and listened for a few seconds. No footsteps echoed on the concrete. He moved inside and started up the first flight, taking the steps two at a time.

  Olivia followed, silent on her bare feet. Silas brought up the rear. He was panting heavily by the time they hit the second floor. He wheezed on the third.

  Jasper opened the door on the fourth level and looked at the blocks of storage lockers.

  “He turned the lights back on.” Olivia peered past Jasper’s shoulder. “I wonder why he did that?”

  “Maybe he never turned ’em off,” Silas gasped behind her.

  She glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothin’, honest.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You think I made it all up, don’t you?”

  “Look, lady, the lights are on, that’s all I’m sayin’…”

  “Quiet,” Jasper said. He glanced at Silas. “Stay here to make certain that he doesn’t try to use the stairs. I’ll check the aisles.”

  “Sure.” Silas looked relieved to have someone else take command. He sagged against the wall to catch his breath. “Right.”

  Olivia stepped out of the stairwell. “I’ll come with you, Jasper.”

  “All right. But stay close, understand?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He did not like the sound of that, but he could not think of anything else to do except conduct a meticulous search.

  There was a pattern to the way the blocks of lockers had been laid out. Jasper quickly identified the main aisles and walked through them, checking each cross aisle whenever he came to an intersection. Olivia paced at his side, her eyes flicking back and forth. He was acutely aware of the tension in her.

  “The place feels empty now,” she said when they paused in an intersection three aisles from the rear wall. “But he was here. I swear it, Jasper.”

  “I believe you.”

  “The platform truck should be in the next aisle.” Olivia hurried forward.

  “Damn it, I told you to stay close.” He caught up with her just as she came to a sudden halt and stood staring down a corridor.

  “There it is,” she whispered. “I told you.”

  Jasper studied the platform truck parked innocuously in the middle of the aisle. There was no sign that it had recently been used to mow down a stalker. There was no evidence that anything at all out of the ordinary had occurred.

  “Hang on while I check the last two aisles,” Jasper said.

  Both were empty.

  Olivia watched him with somber eyes as he walked back to join her. “He’s gone.”

  “Looks like it.” Jasper glanced down the long center aisle to where Silas stood guard at the stairwell door. “Are there any empty lockers on this floor?” he called.

  “Nope.” Silas shouted back. “Rented the last one about a month ago. Only open lockers are down on the first floor.”

  “So much for the possibility that he’s hiding in an empty locker,” Jasper said.

  “He must have escaped down the stairs and out the emergency exit while I was in the office with Silas.”

  “Maybe.” Jasper walked into the aisle occupied by the platform truck.

  Olivia followed slowly. “This is spooky, Jasper. Silas thinks I got scared when the lights went out and made up the whole story. Now I can’t prove that I didn’t.”

  “I believe you.” He edged past the platform truck. “You said you thought you knocked him down with this thing?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t hang around to see if he was hurt. I ran for the stairs.”

  “Smart.”

  Jasper crouched to study the front edge of the wooden platform. It was scarred and nicked from years of heavy use. There was no way to tell if it had collided with a man’s leg during the past half hour.

  Then he saw the crushable khaki canvas hat lying beneath the front right caster just as he started to rise. “I think you may have managed to score yourself a souvenir of today’s events, after all.”

  She followed his glance to the mashed hat. “Do you suppose he dropped it when the truck hit him?”

  “Maybe.” He picked up the hat and took a closer look. It was a soft, wide-brimmed affair studded with metal grommets for ventilation. It was designed so that it could be rolled up and stuffed conveniently into a back pocket. “Could have fallen out of his pants or his shirt when he fell.”

  Olivia grimaced. “I don’t think Silas will see that hat as proof that there was someone besides me up here this morning. It could have been dropped on the floor days ago.”

  Jasper glanced up. “Kind of a coincidence that it ended up beneath the casters on that platform truck.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Hey, down there,” Silas yelled. “You folks about finished? I gotta get back to work.”

  “We’re through,” Jasper called. “You can go down-stairs now.”

  “About time.”

  The stairwell door opened and closed. Silence descended.

  Olivia’s eyes widened. “I never got a chance to open Uncle Rollie’s locker.”

  “We’ll do it now.”

  “It’s in the last aisle. Number four-ninety.” Olivia looked down at her side. “Oh, damn.”

  “What?”

  She whirled and dashed around the corner. “I just realized I dropped my purse and the pouch full of keys back there.”

  Jasper went after her. He found her in the last aisle, bending over to pick up a shoulder bag and the key pouch. She straightened and turned toward him, a relieved expression on her face.

&
nbsp; “They’re both still here.”

  Jasper looked at the shiny padlock on locker four-ninety. “Doesn’t look like it’s been there very long.”

  “I know. Maybe Uncle Rollie installed a new one before he left on his trip.”

  In the end none of the keys in Olivia’s pouch fit. Jasper went back downstairs to the Jeep and got his tools.

  It did not take long to cut off the small padlock on locker four-ninety.

  Olivia looked inside when the door swung open. Dismay replaced the anticipation that had gleamed in her eyes.

  “It’s empty,” she said.

  “I don’t understand it.” Olivia paced back across her living room, arms crossed, shoulders hunched. “Why keep an empty locker?”

  “Who knows?” Jasper lounged against the sofa and watched her pace. He could feel the cold anger moving through him. “Maybe Rollie cleaned it out before he left on vacation.”

  She turned and started back across the room. “Why keep the locker, in that case?”

  “He may have planned to move something else into it when he returned. After all, he’d paid for a year’s rent.”

  Olivia threw up her hands. “It makes no sense.”

  He looked at her. “You shouldn’t have gone to the storage facility without me today.”

  That brought her to an abrupt halt. She turned, frowning. “What on earth are you going on about that for?”

  “You had no business trying to get into that locker alone,” he said very evenly.

  “What’s the big deal?” She waved her hands. “My morning was clear, yours wasn’t. Then my afternoon got crowded. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away later. It made perfect sense for me to run down to Pri-Con to take a quick look.”

  “You call that an example of good sense?” Jasper got to his feet. He walked toward her. “What if that jerk who turned out the lights was doing more than playing games with you? What if you hadn’t gotten lucky with the platform truck?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve got no right to lose your temper with me. I made a perfectly reasonable executive decision under the circumstances.”

  “Reasonable?” He stopped directly in front of her and lowered his voice still further. “Who knows what that guy intended?”

  Olivia’s head came up swiftly. “Don’t you dare use that tone with me. Let me remind you that this blackmailer has targeted my family. When you get right down to it, this is my problem, not yours.”

  “No.”

  She gave him a ferocious glare. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean,” he said very quietly, “that this is no longer just your problem.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I found a blackmail note waiting for me this morning on the front seat of my Jeep.”

  For a few beats she did not seem to comprehend. Then understanding flashed in her eyes.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “But what—?”

  Jasper said nothing. He watched her intelligent face as she made the connections.

  “I see.” She turned away and sank down slowly onto the tiled window seat. She pressed her knees together and clasped her hands on top of them.

  “There goes our theory that the blackmailer is using information from Uncle Rollie’s files,” she said eventually.

  “Not necessarily.”

  She glanced sharply at him. “Why do you say that?” Jasper went to stand at the bank of windows that looked out over the Space Needle. “Rollie and I had similar approaches to business. I told you, I had him thoroughly checked out before I did the deal. He probably did some serious checking into my background before he signed that contract with me.”

  “So?”

  “It’s just barely possible,” Jasper said, “that he stumbled across something.”

  “Whatever it was, he obviously didn’t think it was very important,” Olivia said. “After all, he went ahead and signed that contract with you.”

  “Probably because what he found was not directly related to me.” Jasper gazed intently at the Needle. “It involved someone else. Someone who died over eight years ago.”

  “I don’t understand. If it didn’t involve you, why would a blackmailer come after you with threats?”

  “For the same reason that he targeted you with threats that would hurt people in your family.”

  She sighed. “He knows that you’ll want to protect someone who would be hurt if the information were made public?”

  “Yes.” He turned to find her watching him with her clear, perceptive eyes. “Eight years ago I went to great lengths to conceal some information about my stepbrother, Fletcher. I thought I had been successful. But obviously I was not.”

  She watched him very steadily. “Now what?”

  He smiled humorlessly. “Now, I will have to tell you what I have told no one else in eight years.”

  She tensed. “Jasper, maybe I don’t need to know this. If you’d rather not…”

  “You need to know,” he said. “You told me your secrets. Now I’ll tell you mine. We’re in this together.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she nodded. “I’m listening.”

  He sorted through the facts, searching for a place to start. It was strange, he thought. He had buried the information in the farthest corner of his mind, but when he went looking, he found it all too easily.

  “Fletcher was several years older than I was. I idolized him when I was a kid. He spent time with me. Showed me things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Jasper shrugged. “All the things my father never had the time to show me. How to fish. How to play basketball. How to wear a tux.”

  “I see.”

  “He was a natural salesman. People responded to him. He had a way of making the world seem like a more exciting place.”

  “I know the type. Larger-than-life. Logan was like that.”

  “Fletch moved from one job to another. He worked for Dad for a while. Then he went on to some brokerage and investment houses. He loved the adrenaline rush that goes with the financial markets. He was always chasing the next big deal. But adrenaline is like any other drug. Once you get addicted to it, you need more and more of it.”

  “What happened?”

  Jasper went back to the window. “What happened was that when I got out of college, Fletcher suggested we go into business together. We formed Sloan & Associates. We were a good team. I had an instinct for selecting the right projects to back. Fletcher had a gift for talking investors into putting their money into the companies I selected.”

  “Go on.”

  “Things went well for a while. Fletcher married a woman named Brenda. They had two sons, Kirby and Paul. I married Rachel Sands. She was a vice-president in the firm.”

  “That was the marriage based on business interests that you once mentioned?” Olivia asked.

  “Yes. It fell apart when Kirby and Paul came to live with me after Fletcher and Brenda were killed in a skiing accident. Rachel wasn’t into motherhood, especially not with two young boys who were not even related to her.”

  “How did you take to fatherhood?”

  He turned slightly toward her and propped one shoulder against the steel frame of the window. “It was a little rocky at times, but we all made it.”

  She gave him a quick smile. “Know what? I’ll bet you made a pretty terrific father.”

  The comment startled him. “Why do you say that?”

  She hesitated, as if she had to search for the right words. “Because you’re the type who sticks to things once you’ve made a commitment. Sticking to the job is most of what parenting is all about.”

  He frowned. “There’s a lot more to being a good father than just sticking to the job.”

  “No,” she said. “There isn’t. I can’t think of anything more important than just being there, day in and day out, come hell or high water.”

  The directness of her gaze made him uncomfortable. Jasper was aware of an awkward heat
in his face. He hoped he was not doing anything really dumb like turning red.

  He cleared his throat. “A few months after Kirby and Paul came to live with me, one of the investment projects for which Fletcher had had primary responsibility and which had been sold to a consortium of investors began to unravel.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “It took me a while to find out,” Jasper said softly. “Things nearly blew up in my face before I realized that Fletcher had scammed everyone, including me.”

  “Oh, Jasper.”

  “Yes.” Absently, he rubbed the back of his neck. “I won’t bore you with the details. It took me nearly three months to work through them, myself. But the bottom line was that the investment was a total fraud. The equivalent of a very complicated pyramid scheme. God only knows how Fletcher intended to pull it off. He must have figured he could keep it going like a game of three-card monte.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It cost me a bundle, and I nearly went bankrupt before it was over, but in the end I managed to cancel the deal and pay off the consortium’s investment. The clients weren’t happy when I told them some mistakes had been made in the original projections, but at least they hadn’t been defrauded.”

  “And after you had cleaned up the mess, you destroyed the evidence of Fletcher’s involvement, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  She got to her feet and came toward him. Her eyes were deep and knowing. “Because you didn’t want Kirby and Paul ever to know that their father had been a swindler and a thief.”

  “Hell, I had a hard enough time facing the truth, myself. Fletcher was my big brother. I trusted him. Kirby and Paul loved him. I did not want his memory tarnished in their eyes. He was, after all, their father.”

  She smiled tremulously. “Believe me, I understand.”

  Something eased slightly inside him. He thought about her desire to protect Nina and Zara and everyone else around her. “Yes, you do, don’t you?”

  “Tell me, was it after you cleaned up the mess Fletcher left behind that you began doing serious background checks on potential clients?”

  He smiled humorlessly. “You could say the incident taught me a lesson. I learned a lot about the importance of information. If you can’t trust your big brother, who can you trust?”