Flash

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  She wondered if Crawford Lee Wilder’s version of the legend of Logan Dane was going to haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Jasper looked at Todd. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you came by the office to introduce yourself. I was just wondering if the reason you’re here is because you’re worried about the future of Glow, Inc., or because you’re concerned about your sister?”

  “What do you think?” Todd did not take the seat that Jasper had offered. He went to stand at the office window, instead. “Just because most of the Chantrys you’ve met so far seem more concerned about their jobs and their Glow pensions, doesn’t mean everyone is.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Jasper leaned back in his chair. “Makes a change.”

  Todd shot him a quick, annoyed glance before turning back to the window. “It’s not that they don’t care about her, you know. It’s just that they all think she can take care of herself. They expect her to look after them, not vice-versa.”

  “I got that impression,” Jasper said dryly.

  “A lot of it is Uncle’s Rollie’s fault. He always said that she inherited his head for business.” Todd’s jaw tightened. “He was right. But Olivia never wanted to take over Glow. She loves Light Fantastic.”

  “It suits her.”

  “Uncle Rollie knew that. But from the time she was little he drilled it into her that, after he was gone, she was supposed to make certain that Glow stayed in the family. It was a big burden to put on a kid’s shoulders.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that in the end he decided not to stick her with the full responsibility for Glow, after all?” Jasper asked quietly. “Maybe that’s why he did the deal with me. Maybe it was a way of letting her off the hook.”

  Todd’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t make any sense. Uncle Rollie intended to pay off the financing you arranged for him. He never intended for you to inherit half of Glow.”

  “Fifty-one percent,” Jasper corrected softly. “And bear in mind, Rollie was eighty-three years old. Who knows what he intended? I can tell you one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Rollie was in no hurry to get out from under the loan I made him. By the terms of our contract, the first payments on the principal were not even scheduled to begin for another two years. All the payments he made before he died were interest only.”

  “Why did you agree to that?”

  Jasper shrugged. “Felt like it. I’ve always had a good sense of timing when it comes to business.”

  “Your timing was pretty damn good in this case, wasn’t it?” Todd watched him warily. “You wound up owning half of a company that’s set to make a lot of money in the years ahead.”

  “Fifty-one percent,” Jasper said. “I own a little more than half of the company. Why do I have to keep reminding everyone?”

  At seven that evening Jasper walked into the Light Fantastic studio with a pile of take-out boxes in his hands.

  Bolivar intercepted him within ten feet of the door.

  “Please tell me there’s a pizza in one of those boxes,” he said.

  “Bottom container. Help yourself.”

  Bernie and Matty loomed in his path. Both gazed at the stack in his arms with longing eyes. He handed them each a take-out box. “Focaccia sandwiches.”

  “Great.” Bernie tore into his container with relish.

  “Mr. Sloan.” Zara gave him her Sybil smile. “How lovely to see you this evening. I don’t suppose—?”

  “Phad Thai. Medium spicy.”

  “One of my favorites,” she murmured, relieving him of another box.

  By the time he walked through the door of Olivia’s office, he was down to one box of chilled buckwheat noodles with sea vegetables, wasabi, and dipping sauce.

  She peered at him through her designer glasses as he cleared a place on the corner of her desk. He put down the box and raised the lid.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked as he placed two packets of chopsticks and some napkins on the desk.

  “Feeding you. Have you noticed that I do that a lot these days?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s dinnertime.”

  She glanced at her watch and frowned. “Good grief. I didn’t realize. We’ve been swamped getting ready for tomorrow night. I’d better tell the others to take a break.”

  “They are on break even as we speak.” He pulled up a chair.

  “Oh.” she examined the contents of the box with deep interest. “What have you got there?”

  “Noodles and seaweed.” He handed her a set of chopsticks.

  “Thanks.” She put down the papers she had been working on and dug in with the chopsticks. “Where have you been all afternoon?”

  “Long story.” He picked up his own chopsticks. “We need to talk.”

  “So talk,” she said around a mouthful of noodles dipped in sauce and hot green wasabi paste. “Did you have any luck with the Pri-Con Self-Storage attendant?”

  “Silas was very informative in his own way.” Jasper dipped some of the noodles into the tamari-laced sauce. “He said there have been no move-outs from the fourth floor in at least two months. And he was pretty adamant about the fact that no one could have removed the entire contents of a locker without his knowing about it.”

  “So what happened to the stuff Uncle Rollie stashed in locker number four-ninety?”

  Jasper shook his head. “We don’t even know for certain that he had anything stored in that damned locker.”

  “Why pay rent on a locker he never used?”

  “He may have had plans to put something in there and never got around to doing it.”

  Silence fell.

  “Jasper?”

  Something in her tone of voice made him look at her very sharply. She was watching him with enigmatic eyes. “What is it?”

  “I had a wild thought this afternoon. I did a little checking. I’m still not sure, and I’ve got absolutely no proof, but…”

  “Talk fast.”

  “Two words. Melwood Gill.”

  Jasper hesitated while he assimilated that. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that it was your stated goal in life to protect poor Melwood.”

  She shifted uncomfortably. “I admit he seems a little pathetic. And he hasn’t been himself for the past few months.”

  “He’s an embezzler. What makes you think he’s also into blackmail?”

  “His hat.”

  22

  Olivia gazed unhappily out the rain-spattered windshield as Jasper drove her car through the quiet streets of Queen Anne. The comfortable, well-established homes and dignified brick-faced apartment buildings climbed the hillside overlooking downtown and Elliott Bay. It was not the richest neighborhood in the city, but Olivia knew that there was a fair amount of wealth tucked away here and there in the cul-de-sacs and lanes of Queen Anne.

  “Melwood has lived here for as long as I can remember,” Olivia said. “He once told me that the house belonged to his parents. He inherited it.” She was chattering, she thought. A sure sign of nervousness. She clenched her back teeth together.

  Jasper did not look at her as he navigated the winding street. “You okay?”

  “Yes. Sort of.” The truth was, the prospect of confronting Melwood Gill was proving to be far more disturbing than she had anticipated. “How do you look a person you’ve known for years in the eye and ask him if he’s blackmailing you?”

  “Simple. Start by telling him that we can prove he’s been embezzling from Glow for months. While he’s still dealing with the shock of knowing that he’s been found out, we’ll hit him with the blackmail questions. My guess is Gill will crumple fast.”

  Jasper’s words were imbued with a calm ruthlessness that stunned her. She turned her head quickly to stare at him. His face was hard and unyielding in the last light of the dying day.

  Why was she so shocked? she wondered. Her intuition had warned her about this side of his nature.
She had caught glimpses of it from time to time. She could not let a couple of nights of great sex blind her to his basic nature. She crossed her arms and hugged herself.

  “You’ve done this kind of thing before, I take it?” she asked.

  “It happens in business.”

  She shivered. “It’s never happened to me in my business.”

  “It has now,” Jasper said softly.

  She could not think of anything to say to that. “Next right.”

  Jasper turned the corner. And drove immediately into a space at the curb.

  “Oh, my God.” Olivia stared at the scene through the windshield.

  The flashing lights of the ambulance and the police cruiser were reflected on the rain-slick street. People stood in small clusters, some with umbrellas, watching the activity with the morbid fascination reserved for crime and accident scenes.

  Olivia saw a medic close the door of the aid car and get into the driver’s seat. A terrible sense of certainty settled into her stomach.

  “Melwood’s house is that narrow, two-story one on the left. You don’t suppose …?” She could not finish the question.

  “Be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Jasper switched off the engine, pocketed the keys, and got out of the car. “I’ll be right back.”

  With his usual air of quiet authority, he started toward the nearest uniformed officer.

  Olivia shoved open her own door and started after him. She paused when she overheard a nearby conversation among two onlookers.

  “… wasn’t paying attention. Never even saw the car. Hasn’t been himself lately, you know.”

  Olivia stopped. Jasper was already talking to the cops. She might as well see what the neighbors had to say.

  “What happened?” she asked a middle-aged woman.

  “Hit-and-run,” the woman said. “No one saw it, but we heard the most ghastly thud. My husband is the one who called nine-one-one.”

  “Who was hit?”

  “Melwood Gill.” The woman pointed at the unlit windows of the narrow house in the middle of the block. “Lived over there. He always takes his walk at this time of night in the summer months. Regular as clockwork.”

  Olivia tightened her grasp on the strap of her shoulder bag. Jasper had finished his conversation with the officer. He was walking back toward her.

  “Lived?” Olivia repeated carefully. “Past tense?”

  The woman looked at her. “I heard someone say poor Melwood was killed instantly.”

  Forty minutes later, Jasper parked Olivia’s car in her slot in the condominium building garage. The deeply troubled look on her face made him uneasy. She had said very little since learning of Melwood Gill’s death. He knew she was going over the various possibilities and coming to the same unpleasant conclusions that he had reached.

  They walked to the elevator in silence. A short while later they stepped out of the cab into the hall. He took the key from her hand and shoved it into the lock.

  “I think we both need a drink,” he said.

  He went into the kitchen to rummage through her cupboards. He knew he had seen a small bottle of cognac in one of them.

  Olivia stood watching him from the other side of the counter. “I still can’t believe it. Hit-and-run.”

  “Yes.” He found the cognac and opened it. “There will be an investigation. But if the driver doesn’t turn himself or herself in, it could be a long time, if ever, before the cops locate the owner of the car.”

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?”

  “Probably.” He finished pouring the cognac into two small glasses and turned to face her. He met her shadowed eyes through the opening above the kitchen counter. “But we could both be wrong. It really could have been an accident.”

  She nodded slowly. “There’s a general consensus of opinion that Melwood hadn’t been himself for a while. He might not have been paying attention when he took his evening walk tonight. A drunk driver might have hit him and then fled the scene. Accidents happen.”

  “So do coincidences,” Jasper said quietly. “But I don’t trust them. Gill was an embezzler and possibly a blackmailer. He could have been deliberately run down by someone who had a reason to want him dead.”

  Olivia took the glass of cognac from him. It trembled ever so slightly in her hand. “Someone like you or me or Aunt Zara, you mean.”

  “Not you and not me.” He leaned back against the counter. “We have each other for an alibi.”

  “Not Zara, either,” Olivia said with absolute conviction. “I know it wasn’t her. She didn’t have a clue that we suspected Melwood. She’s still hoping that the blackmailer is one of her old rivals.”

  “What we don’t know is how many other people might have been on Melwood’s list of blackmail victims.”

  “True.” She took a sip of the cognac and looked at him very steadily. “But if he was getting the damaging information from Uncle Rollie’s files, then we have to assume that, if there were any more victims, they’re either family or closely tied to Glow, Inc.”

  “Could be a long list.”

  Olivia put down her glass and propped her elbows on the counter. “I realize I’m biased, but I honestly cannot imagine anyone in my family resorting to murder to stop someone like Melwood Gill.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a family member. As you said, it could be someone who is somehow tied to Glow, Inc. Someone with whom Rollie did business, perhaps.”

  She met his eyes. “What are we going to do now?”

  “The first step,” Jasper said, “is to take a look at Melwood Gill’s personal files.”

  She frowned. “His office files? I doubt that Melwood would have kept any incriminating evidence at Glow.”

  “Not his office files,” Jasper said deliberately. “The ones he kept in his house.”

  “What makes you think there are any?”

  Jasper finished the cognac and set the glass down on the counter. “I know a fellow obsessive-compulsive filer when I meet one.”

  Shortly after one o’clock in the morning Olivia stood, shivering, on Melwood Gill’s back step and watched as Jasper put a gloved fist through the window he had just finished taping.

  There was a soft, muffled crunch and a few tinkling sounds, but no telltale crash of breaking glass. The tape held most of the shards in place.

  “I sure hope you’re right about Melwood never having installed an alarm system,” Olivia muttered.

  “If he had he would have plastered those little stickers the security companies give you on every door and window.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because the stickers warning the crooks that there’s an alarm system are the first line of defense,” Jasper said patiently. “In fact, some people don’t go any farther than putting on the stickers.”

  “Yes, but—” She broke off when he opened the door and moved quietly into the kitchen.

  This was a very bad idea. She knew it in her bones.

  But she also knew that there was nothing else she could do except follow Jasper inside. It had not been easy convincing him to allow her to accompany him on this jaunt. If she got cold feet now, he would probably spend the rest of the night saying I-told-you-so.

  Ahead of her in the gloom, Jasper was a large, dark shadow. He was already moving silently through the kitchen into the front room. She followed quickly, wincing when her rubber-soled shoes made tiny squeaking sounds on the vinyl tile floor.

  Jasper halted briefly in the living room. Olivia stopped just behind him and surveyed the surroundings. The curtains had been left open. Enough light filtered in from the street to reveal a sofa, two arm-chairs, and a television set. There was a shabby, out-of-date feel to the room, as if no one had bothered to redecorate in a very long time.

  “Melwood’s wife died a few years ago,” Olivia said. “He never remarried. Aunt Rose said he asked a couple of the women who work at Glow out to dinner, but it was always a disaster.”
/>
  “Why?”

  “Aunt Rose said the women claimed it was like dating a robot. I gathered Melwood was not exactly the spontaneous type.”

  She saw Jasper turn his head to look at her in the shadows, but he said nothing. He led the way down a thinly carpeted hall. They passed a bathroom. At the end of the corridor they found a small room cloaked in darkness. The curtains had been drawn across the windows, cutting off the street light.

  There was a small snick. An instant later the pencil-thin beam from Jasper’s flashlight pierced the shadows. For a moment Olivia could only stare, uncomprehending, at the scene of chaos.

  Then she realized that she was looking at a home office that had been turned upside down. File cabinets stood open. Folders full of papers littered the floor. The drawers of the desk had been emptied. The contents were strewn across the rug.

  “Damn,” Jasper said softly. “Looks like someone got here ahead of us.”

  Olivia heard a small squeak.

  “Your shoes?” Jasper whispered.

  “No.” Her mouth went dry. “The ceiling, I think.”

  “I was afraid of that.” He flicked off the flashlight and went to stand, motionless, in the doorway.

  The squeak sounded again. Olivia stopped breathing for a few seconds.

  Whoever had ransacked Melwood’s office was still in the house.

  Jasper shifted slightly in the dark opening. He glanced back at her and hesitated. Olivia read his intentions as surely as if he had sent her a telepathic message. He wanted to go after whoever was prowling around upstairs, but he was afraid to leave her alone down here.

  Anger surged through her. She was not about to let him risk his neck in such a foolish stunt. She grabbed his arm and shook her head emphatically, mouthing two words. “No way.”

  He glanced back out into the darkened hall. She detected a hint of something that bordered on a predatory eagerness in him. But he finally nodded reluctantly. She let out a small sigh of relief, aware that her presence had been the deciding factor. Jasper did not want to take any chances with her safety.

  He reached for her hand. She gave it to him. He tugged her very close and put his mouth on her ear.