His first thought was that hot didn’t even begin to describe those conversations, but she’d have tried to deck him if he pointed that out right now.
“No,” he said, watching her tense, “it was not a coincidence.”
Bobbie Faye hated the way Trevor stood there, watching her, emotionless, his arms crossed, leaning his hip against the dresser as if they were having a casual conversation about the weather. He was so damned unreadable, it drove her crazy, although she was beginning to think if someone Googled the word “crazy,” there’d be a star over her trailer, so maybe she’d already arrived there. She also hated, just for the record, the fact that there was a low hum to her body whenever he was nearby, that simply being aware that he stood not five feet away made her body ache.
Somehow, the dresser drawer broke. Possibly slamming it was a bad idea. She didn’t even remember opening it. Then he did the thing she hadn’t realized she’d been wanting: he stepped into her space and pulled her into his arms.
“I don’t think the dresser ever did anything to you.”
“Bastard.” The word didn’t have as much force muffled the way it was into his chest. Geez, he felt good.
“I had to move fast, once your name popped up. I couldn’t contact you, Sundance. Your cell and work phones were tapped, and you were being watched.”
“Because of that crazy note in Marie’s day planner.”
“Right. The Bureau has been surveilling Emile for over a year now—we’d suspected he was behind the original theft of the diamonds, but they never resurfaced until Marie took them from him.”
“Why in the hell would all of you people be so fired up over diamonds? I mean, sure, a million is a lot, but really—”
“They’re not exactly your typical diamonds,” he interrupted, “and they’re worth millions. Many millions.”
She stood completely still, stupefied. “I think you just broke my brain.”
Reggie mulled over her plan as she sat in her car while her cameraman, DJ, grabbed a few minutes of B-roll of the crowd and the burned-out car. She had already found two people to confirm that Bobbie Faye was alive after the explosion, though there were too many variations of how she’d left the scene, and with whom, to know which story was correct. It was amazing what people were willing to do to be a “star” on TV—they’d tell her stuff they’d never mention to the police. Reggie was glad Bobbie Faye was alive—the nutcase was worth more alive to her than dead right now.
She gazed at a small photo she had of her four-year-old son, Nathan, pinned to the back of her visor: he was laughing as he reeled in his very first fish, a bream half the size of a Twinkie. She’d have sworn it was a ten-pounder from the sheer joy in his eyes. His dad stood off in the background on his cell phone, completely oblivious to his son’s elation.
It felt like acid eating away at her heart to know that her asshole ex only fought for custody of Nathan because he knew she wanted him. He’d traded in his aggressive, active wife and her regular investigative beats—which conflicted with his intense desire to hide his clients’ illegal activities—for wife number three, a far more passive model whose great ambition was to make sure her highlights were kept up consistently. Harold used custody of Nathan as a way to hold Reggie in check. She couldn’t reveal his little detours beyond the law (particularly when he was skimming off his partner’s accounts) for fear he’d sail off to some island with her son, forever. He had the money and the bastard gene to do it, which is why she simply had to even the playing field.
A playing field that was going to change with this story. Reggie could smell victory. Usually, Reggie, like the rest of the media, was on the sidelines, a little behind the Bobbie Faye action curve, and not quite fast enough to get exclusives, which were the currency of rising in the business. Anyone who could get an exclusive on Bobbie Faye, who could catch her on camera in the midst of one of her exploits, would be on national TV. No one had gotten Bobbie Faye making a statement, midcarnage. And if the reporter who got Bobbie Faye on camera also happened to catch her in the middle of a crime? Well, national news desk, look out, because Reggie had a plan to get both of those things.
She watched DJ saunter back to her car, which meant he’d probably gotten a few shots of some skimpily clad hot twenty-somethings that he knew would make it on the air. He winked and shot her his wicked smile. She wished she’d taken him up on his offer to off her ex when it would have helped. Instead, she’d waited too long, thinking she’d spring the evidence of her husband’s affair on him and that would break his pre-nup, but she should have known a sneaky bastard like Harold would have a judge on the payroll and she’d end up with nothing.
DJ climbed inside the car and gave her a big sloppy kiss. They headed back to the station so he could upload his tape while she did a little recon to finish their plan.
Aiden watched Sean roll dice through his knuckles, a sure sign he was agitated. Robbie’s face flushed with concentration over his computer as he typed in commands, listened on a headset, and then frantically typed in more.
“Still no’ gettin’ anythin’?” he asked.
“Not a fuckin’ thing,” Robbie answered. “Not even residual sound, like it fell off.”
“Probably in the explosion,” Mollie offered, and Robbie threw her a grateful glance.
Sean had spent a great deal of money tracking the diamonds when they’d disappeared on him a couple of years ago when Emile stole them out from under him. At least, Sean believed it to be Emile, but had never known for sure. Until now. Sean wasn’t going to be very happy. Sean didn’t take failure very well, which usually meant the employee in question got a bullet. In fact, he was humming the “Dear Liza” song, and Aiden couldn’t help but think of the way he’d altered the lyrics, ending with:
There’s a hole in his bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
There’s a hole, well just fuckit, put a tag on his toe.
“There!” Robbie said, pointing at the screen. “The GPS is up again. She moves, we got her.” Sean quit humming and smiled.
Bobbie Faye stood still in the circle of Trevor’s arms. The multimillion-dollar figure of the vast worth of the diamonds ricocheted through her ragged mind, demolishing the few cells left standing. She sighed.
“So you’re not really here to rescue me, are you?”
He leaned back and held her gaze. “You want me to believe that just because I showed up, you’d have abdicated helping your family?”
“I mighta,” she fibbed.
“Yeah, Sundance, and then after that, you’d be strapping on a pink tutu and ballet slippers and dancing to Mozart.”
“Jerk,” she said, but he’d made her smile. “Let me guess: the FBI thinks it’s possible I’m involved because of that note, and so does everyone else. So the Feds think I’m supposed to be working with you while I’m pretending to be scared of you while I’m working for the people who want me to find the diamonds and the people who don’t want me to find the diamonds, all of whom seem to fall into the ‘shoot first, oh, look, something shiny’ school of logic.”
“You forgot the facial and highlights with Francesca.”
“If she waves fingernail polish at me, I’d better get a pass for shooting her.”
He smiled, and started brushing the debris from her hair, taking a moment to examine the cut on her forehead. She probably looked like some sort of horror movie victim, since he paled a little bit. He dragged her to the adjoining bathroom and she flinched at her reflection: she looked like a battered rag doll on crack—a metric buttload worse than one of those “before” shots on those makeover beauty shows. If there was a World of Fug Ugly, she was its president. Her hair had tangled from the motorcycle ride, and there was dried blood on her forehead and cheek, scrapes on her arm, ground-in asphalt and dirt stained her shirt from where she’d landed on the bridge.
He dug around in the cabinets, brought out a washcloth, then wet it and went to work on her.
“If y’all have been watching Em
ile for a year—how are you here? You were busy working for Vincent.” The wonderfully now-dead asshole who’d kidnapped her brother.
He wiped her face clean. “My cover as a mercenary was never blown—no one outside the Bureau besides you and Cam know who I am.”
“So you just happened to be available for this mess?” When he studiously focused on her arms, she made the connection. “You told them to watch me!”
“No,” he said, finishing the other arm. “I told them to let me know if you were in any danger. I thought someone might try to go after you, thinking you still had the tiara.” Her mom’s tiara—the rusted piece of crown that her great-great-great-great-grandfather, who happened to be Lafitte, had made for his daughter and that had been handed down through the generations. The one that turned out to be pretty damned valuable after all.
“And so the Bureau called you in to help?”
There was a pause, and when he didn’t answer, she tapped his shoulder, and raised an eyebrow.
“When I heard they were going to use you as bait, I didn’t exactly give them a choice.”
She watched him, remembering their one movie date, a Western they didn’t get to see the end of because he got marching orders to get back to Quantico that night. Then there had been all of those hot phone calls, but she’d never really let herself hope that maybe there was more between them than just chemistry. Okay, maybe she’d hoped, a little, that there would be something more. If she’d had a clue he cared—with the connection she felt to him—she’d have begged, borrowed, or stolen a ride to Virginia.
Pizza.
That image popped into her head. She stared into his sincere expression as he ran the cloth down her scraped arms, and she thought how going out for pizza would have been a terrific second date. There was a cozy little mom-and-pop place she knew, funky and fun. Casual enough to relax and get to know each other, not too “hang out at your place, automatic sex” casual, though. She could have dressed up in something sexy. He would look great in whatever he showed up in. He’d have opened a door for her and insisted on doing so even when she rolled her eyes at him. It would have been really amazing. There probably would have been a stunningly hot goodnight kiss.
“I hope the FBI has some sort of Universal Platinum Card,” she said, her voice choked on the emotion, overwhelmed, and she stepped away from him, “because you’re paying for whatever blows up.”
“You find the diamonds, we’ll pick up the charges,” he answered, matching her light tone while studying her, frowning at her abrupt withdrawal. “Although it would be nice if we left the state intact.”
She went back to the bedroom, heading for the dresser drawers, intent on rummaging. “It’s not like I plan these things.”
“God help us if you did.”
John climbed back into the van, which he’d parked down the street from the seller’s house. Otto was on the phone to the buyer, babbling in Italian, which John hated, since he didn’t understand a word. When Otto arched an eyebrow, John said, “She’s still inside.”
Otto said something else, listened, and then hung up. “Buyer say he make no more promises to seller. Bobbie Faye woman needs to not come out.”
John pulled out his sniper rifle, handed it to Otto. “Here. If she’s smart, she’ll stay out from in front of the window.” He opened the van door.
Otto frowned at the rifle. “But I am not so good as you. You should do this.”
“Ain’t gonna help one fuckin’ bit if she don’t step in front of a window. I got me an idea. You just make sure she don’t come out of the house.”
With that, John ran off toward the new development. He definitely had a great idea.
Ten
The master bedroom turned out to be devoid of a single freaking clue. No big neon sign with an arrow saying, “Diamonds this way, stupid.” Emile’s deadline loomed as Bobbie Faye and Trevor climbed to the third floor, an airy workshop with sunlight streaming in from a bank of windows overlooking the new section of the development.
Bobbie Faye had never seen so much junk piled in one spot. Not even Ce Ce’s haphazard arrangement matched this heap of crap. Overturned boxes of supplies looked as if they’d been rummaged through and the contents spilled now all over the little floor space not taken up by massive work tables. More boxes were crammed underneath. From the look of the jars and bowls on the table, Marie made her textiles out of anything odd, from the natural (leaves encased in polymer) to the surreal (Hoses? Seriously?), to shiny beads and faux gems. Bobbie Faye reached for an iridescent red purse and drew back when it pricked her.
“Ow!” She looked closer. It was made of hundreds of little stiletto heels, all of them apparently razor sharp. “Who the fuck would want to carry this around? You’d have to have your own paramedic on tap.”
Trevor pointed at a framed photo of an eight-page layout in InStyle magazine where the hottest young TV actress sported a purse just like it in blue.
“I wonder how many bandages they had to airbrush out of that?”
There were dozens more framed photos of celebrities, politicians, and even a couple of world leaders, all sporting Marie’s textiles, or standing before a piece of her sculptural art. Bobbie Faye had known her as Weird Aunt Marie who was always stopping to pick up some oddball item from the ground whenever they were over at the family home. Marie, who hadn’t met a flea market she didn’t love, in spite of being married to one of the wealthiest men in the state. She’d never thought of her aunt as famous, as someone who had a life, an art.
“I’ll bet a lot of that went away when Emile’s money dried up,” she mused out loud and Trevor followed her gaze down the length of the photo wall. “It takes real money to run this kind of business—there’s no profit for years, and to get invited to the right parties, you have to have the right connections. She must’ve gotten desperate.”
Beneath those photos, a nightmare of a desk where a snowdrift of random paperwork threatened to avalanche: calendars, invoices, business cards, receipts, postcards, flyers, advertisements for her upcoming shows, newspaper clippings reviewing shows, ticket stubs from old movies, phone numbers and incoherent scribbling, random abbreviations.
“How in the hell would y’all know if the diamonds weren’t here? It’d take forever to go through this.”
“They’re not your normal diamonds—they’re tagged with a radioactive isotope. We scanned the house and we can tell that they were here, but they’re not here now.” He glanced around the room. “Are you sure this is where you want to start?”
She nodded, weaving through the junk to the desk. “Marie could be a thousand places right now, especially with the help of her . . . my . . . family. I’m assuming y’all are already tracking everything like bank accounts and travel?” She looked up from the paperwork and he nodded. “And I know Marie. Well, I used to know Marie. She’s clever. Whenever they’d play cards or board games when I was little, everyone wanted Marie on their team because she’d win. She was smart enough to get the diamonds from her husband, and that couldn’t have been easy. But she’s also kinda sloppy.”
“I hadn’t noticed. So you’re looking for?”
“I don’t know. Some idea of where she’s been, where she’s going. I know we could go out and interrogate all of her friends—”
“The Bureau has every friend and relative’s credit card tagged. We’re watching every place on her calendar.”
Bobbie Faye leafed through posters for upcoming shows; in some of the photos of the work Marie was going to showcase, she’d taken her textiles (her purses, shoes) and turned them into sculptures. Way to repurpose there, Aunt Marie. If something doesn’t sell, stick it in a pile and call it art. Bobbie Faye was soooo going to use that strategy for her next garage sale.
“And we could rip apart everything she ever made or sold—” She put her hand up to stop him. “I know. You’re already on it. But if I were Marie? No way in hell would I put those diamonds somewhere I couldn’t personally check, to ma
ke sure they’re safe. Emile has tentacles into too many banks. She wouldn’t trust a safety deposit box. And she sure as hell wouldn’t trust our family.”
She sifted through the dome of papers, shoving some stuff in her purse ’til it was overflowing. She separated out some of the items and made a “look through more thoroughly” pile. It was hard to focus since Trevor stood very close, helping, but bumping into her as she threaded her way around the stacks of samples at their feet. Marie had left the air conditioner off when she decided to disappear, and the third floor plus the whole “heat rising” thing, plus the June temperatures, had turned the workshop into an oven. The heat made her feel light-headed and soft, like she was melting into the floor. Or maybe that was Trevor’s presence, his sudden reappearance doing that to her, confusing her.
He’d barely been in her life when he’d disappeared. She’d resigned herself to the fact that he wasn’t coming back. Except here he was, brushing against her, concentrating on stacks of papers, reaching around her and how in the hell could two adrenaline junkies like them even think about dating? Okay, she’d thought about dating. A lot. “Dating” being that euphemism for “lots of hot monkey sex” because geez, look at the man.
“You okay?” he asked, and she realized her focus had gone fuzzy, staring at him. She looked down to what she held in her hand: rice husks. Pre-drying, just-harvested rice husks. She had had an important thought about them, but whatever she’d been thinking flitted back out again, dissolving in the suffocating heat with the rest of her.
Bobbie Faye crossed to the window, desperate for some ventilation. She fought to yank it open and instantly regretted the jangle and vibration of noise from the construction site across the street and the dust the moving machines kicked up that coated her mouth as she inhaled. Trevor stepped up behind her a second later and tugged the window back down, his arms on either side of her, and she bit the inside of her lip to keep from leaning back into him.
And then there was the tiniest of a “plink” sound, almost inaudible, barely registering as separate from the construction noise. It was as if someone had tossed a rock at the window. A tiny sound, really, something she shouldn’t have heard, except that the window directly in front of her forehead spider-webbed. Wasn’t that odd? Someone had thrown a rock three stories up, and then, oh, look, there was another one and she marveled for a moment at how a piece of glass had managed not to break altogether. There was a part of her brain that wanted to congratulate the contractor, or maybe the window manufacturer, for building a window of such sure and strong design that it could withstand a rock. Instead, she was hitting the floor, underneath Trevor as he yelled something she couldn’t hear because maybe the blood was rushing to her head or maybe she was screaming. (It was a toss-up.)
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