Payback

by Jasmine Cresswell

  “I’m sorry. I have to get home.” At this precise moment, Kate wasn’t up to sitting through a lecture on the wonders of civic life in the Chicago area.

  “But the waiter just brought our desserts!” Will’s smile wavered between pained and exasperated. “There’s nothing you can do for your friend or his family right at this moment, so we might as well finish our meal, don’t you think?”

  Will couldn’t help being an idiot, Kate reflected, and she should control her impatience. It was her own fault for having agreed to go out with him when she’d spent most of their previous date with her teeth gritted so that she wouldn’t accidentally tell him what she really thought about ninety percent of the stuff he rambled on about.

  “I guess I would really prefer to skip dessert,” she said. “Sorry, but I’m just not in the mood for making small talk right now. Maybe they could put your chocolate cake in a box to take home?”

  “Of course,” Will said stiffly. “If you feel you must leave, I’ll make the arrangements.” It was now his turn to grit his teeth. They definitely needed to stop seeing each other or they’d both be paying a fortune for restorative dental work.

  Kate gave a giant sigh of relief when Will dropped her off at her front door and they survived the parting without either one of them being actively rude to the other. She said good-night, thanked God she would never have to see him again and walked into her narrow row house, eager for the rush of comfort and solace that usually greeted her the moment she unlocked her front door.

  Tonight there was no solace to be had. Her bright living room looked jarringly out of synch with her bleak mood and she paced between the sunporch and the kitchen, not sure what she wanted to do, or even why the news of George’s death had struck her so hard.

  She would have to let her mother know what had happened, assuming Paul didn’t make the call. But not tonight. Avery had never actually met George Klein, so she would be sorry to hear of his death, but it would be an impersonal sort of grief. It would be pointless to ruin her mother’s night simply to quell her own feeling of restlessness. Maybe she was acquiring an unhealthy touch of her uncle’s overprotective attitude, Kate reflected ruefully, but her mother had gone through so much, the desire to shield her was bound to be strong.

  Luke, on the other hand, had known George quite well and needed to be told the news. The relationship between the two men had been based on professional services, but Kate had sensed they genuinely liked each other, in addition to admiring each other’s business skills. Luke ought to be told what had happened before he heard some garbled TV version of the murder.

  It was barely nine-thirty and Luke would almost certainly still be at work. If he was at Luciano’s, he would be a mere fifteen-minute drive away. Even if he was at one of his other restaurants, it would take her no more than half an hour to get there at this time on a Saturday night.

  Kate dialed the number for Luciano’s and got lucky on her first attempt. According to the hostess, Luke had been there all evening and had not yet left for the night.

  “Would you tell him that Kate Fairfax needs to see him urgently? I’ll be there in twenty minutes or less. Please ask him to wait for me.”

  Unlike her visit last week, this time Luke didn’t keep her hanging around in the lobby. The hostess apparently had instructions to bring Kate straight to him as soon as she arrived. Once again, Luke had decided to meet her in his office off the main kitchen. The tiny room was just as stark here as at Luciano’s II or at Trattoria in Oakbrook. Tonight, though, she barely noticed the austerity.

  “Hello, Kate.” Luke sounded somber but not unfriendly, although he didn’t step out from behind the barrier of his desk.

  “You must be wondering why I’ve come. I’m sorry, Luke, but I have bad news—”

  “Is it about George Klein?”

  “Yes.” She saw the sadness in his eyes. “You’ve already heard, then.”

  “That he’s been murdered? Yes, I heard.”

  “I’m so sorry, Luke. I hoped to get here before you caught the reports on TV.”

  “I appreciate your efforts, but I didn’t see the news on TV. Your uncle called a few minutes ago.” He expelled a jagged breath. “I’m still in shock.”

  “Me, too. I know it’s a cliché, but George seemed so alive when we saw him on Tuesday. I can’t visualize him dead.” She realized she was on the verge of tears and swallowed hard. “I can’t stop thinking about his wife and kids.”

  “George and his wife had a great marriage. She’s a special-ed teacher and he was so proud of her.” Luke cleared his throat. “I’ve been trying to decide if the fact they were so happily married makes her loss better or worse.”

  “Worse in the short term, I’m sure, but maybe better in the long run?”

  “God, I hope so.”

  Kate hoped so, too. “George’s children are just little, aren’t they?” The photos she’d seen in his office were haunting her. In the wake of her father’s disappearance, she had become all too good at imagining other people’s grief. The boys had looked so happy—and so heart-breakingly young. Their sorrow gnawed at her.

  “They’re in middle school,” Luke said. “I’m afraid that’s an especially bad age to lose a parent.”

  She shivered. “God, yes, old enough to know what’s happened and too young to understand why.”

  “They would never be old enough to understand why their father had to die in a parking garage at O’Hare airport. There’s no rational explanation for something so cruel.” Luke swung away from her, running his hands through his hair. “Jesus, I hope they find the guys who did this soon.”

  The murderer had probably been a drug addict, Kate thought. It seemed obscene that so much grief might have been caused by some crackhead who needed a fix. She wrapped her arms around her body, craving warmth she was unable to find. She had barely known George Klein and yet the horror of his death lurked in every mental corner.

  In the wake of her father’s disappearance she’d become reasonably adept at analyzing her own emotions, and she recognized that her reaction to George’s murder was too intense for the degree of their acquaintance. She’d met the man only once, and their conversation had focused strictly on business. Somewhere along the line, though, her feelings toward him must have become entangled in her chaotic feelings about her father. George’s murder seemed to have triggered buried feelings from the trauma of those dreadful days following Ron’s disappearance. Old pain was taking on a new form.

  Luke turned around again, but this time he guarded his expression. In the old days he would never have hidden his feelings from her, and Kate found herself regretting the loss of openness. Tonight she craved honesty, not politeness used as a deliberate barrier to keep her at a distance from his sadness.

  “Thank you for coming in person to tell me about George.” His smile underlined the formality of his attitude. She yearned for one of his real, honest smiles. “I appreciate the thought, Kate. It was kind of you.”

  It was a dismissal, but Kate discovered she wasn’t ready to be dismissed. “I’ve decided to go to Virginia next week,” she said. Until the words were spoken, she had no idea she’d been planning any such thing. Oddly, her restlessness quieted as soon as she verbalized the commitment.

  “Somebody needs to pick up the investigation where George was forced to leave off,” she said. “I want that person to be me, not just another detective picked at random from the Yellow Pages.”

  Luke’s expression remained frozen into a decent imitation of a marble statue. “What, exactly, are you planning to investigate, Kate? As far as I can tell, George Klein’s last report suggests there are no serious leads left to pursue.”

  “I disagree. I realize there’s no point in going back to the Mercedes dealership, but there are dozens of other stores in the same plaza as the Sunrise boutique. Who knows if somebody might recognize my father in one of those stores?”

  “It’s a very long shot. Not to mention the fact that y
ou’d probably encounter a fair degree of hostility from most of the clerks.”

  She shrugged, becoming more determined in the face of Luke’s opposition, mild as it was. “The store clerks can’t do anything worse than refuse to help me, and the stakes are high. I’m trying to find out if my father is alive and in hiding, or murdered and floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It seems to me that’s worth the cost of a plane ticket and a couple of days off work.”

  Luke hesitated for a moment, then walked over to his desk. Without speaking, he swiveled his laptop around so that she could see the screen. It was open to a travel Web site, with a grid showing times and prices of planes flying from Chicago into Washington’s Dulles airport. A flight for Sunday morning was highlighted.

  She blinked. “I don’t understand. How did you know I was going to Washington?”

  “I didn’t know. I’d already decided to go there myself.” Luke shrugged, as if deprecating his own decision. “George’s death somehow makes me even more determined to get some answers about what I saw in my cousin’s restaurant.”

  “It’s kind of you to make the effort, but there’s no need—”

  “There’s every need. I’m the one who claims to have seen Ron Raven. I should be the one to track him down.”

  “I’m truly appreciative of your offer to help, Luke, but tracking down Stewart Jones is my job, not yours.”

  Luke’s expression finally relaxed into wry amusement. “Look, Kate, we can waste time fighting about who has more right to traipse around Herndon being ignored by salesclerks, or we could quit arguing and agree to go together.”

  God help her, she was tempted. Kate mentally listed a dozen reasons why it would be insane to spend any more time than she had to in Luke’s company. Being with him was like eating chocolate fudge torte: great while you were doing it, hideous when you had to get rid of the extra pounds.

  “This is a really busy season for both of us,” she said, making a final play for common sense. “It’s not smart for two of us to take time off work when the holidays are just around the corner. You know how crazy November gets in our business.”

  He didn’t reason with her, just caught her gaze and held it captive. “Don’t use work as an excuse, Kate. Let’s at least be honest with each other, since honesty seems to be in short supply when anyone tries to deal with Ron Raven and his legacy.”

  “Okay, then, here’s the honest reason we should fly solo. We cause each other pain when we’re together.”

  “We used to, back in March, but we’ve both moved on since then. Surely to God we can behave like civilized human beings for a couple of days.”

  “Can we?” The question revealed far more about the state of her emotions than she cared to have on display.

  “Of course we can. The truth is, we’ll be more effective if we work as a team. I really care about proving the man I saw in Bruno’s restaurant was Ron Raven. You really care about finding out if your father is alive. That’s a winning combination.” His voice softened. “Come with me. Please.”

  She clearly suffered from a severe and debilitating mental illness, one that made her behave like a drooling idiot whenever she spent too much time in Luke Savarini’s company. There was no other way to explain the fact that she said yes. She would go with him to Virginia, and not at some distant point in the future, either. She actually agreed to fly out tomorrow, before the trail leading to Stewart Jones went stone cold.

  Mentally listing all the e-mails she would have to send before crawling into bed to catch a few hours’ sleep, Kate left Luke confirming their plane reservations and hurried home. She carefully ignored the small inner voice telling her that she’d done some pretty dumb things in the past year, but that agreeing to investigate something as emotionally fraught as her father’s disappearance with Luke Savarini had to be right up there among the very dumbest. It was astonishing how good it felt to be doing something so incredibly, certifiably stupid.

  Twelve

  T he early-morning plane heading from O’Hare to Dulles was crammed with passengers despite the fact that it was a Sunday. From Luke’s point of view, the jam-packed plane was fortunate since it meant that Kate got seated three rows ahead of him. He was deeply grateful for the forced separation. Last night, flying to D.C. together had seemed a reasonable plan. This morning, he realized he must have lost brain function for a crucial few minutes. In the bright light of morning, he couldn’t produce a single reason why he had willingly submitted himself to the torment of spending two whole days in Kate’s company.

  She had arrived at the airport gate looking like every man’s dream of sexual fulfillment gift-wrapped in tight jeans and a soft cream sweater. By expending a six-month supply of willpower, Luke managed not to drool. He even managed to haul his gaze away from her perfect breasts a crucial couple of seconds before she came to a halt in front of him. At which point he realized that staring into her spectacular blue eyes wasn’t much of an improvement in terms of lust-control.

  In the end, he mumbled a greeting with his eyes fixed grimly on a spot somewhere to the left of her ear. That meant he only had to cope with a peripheral glimpse of her, combined with the teasing allure of her perfume. She was wearing some light and haunting scent that reminded him of hillside flowers in the Tuscan village where his great-grandparents had lived. He wanted to bury his face in the crook of her neck and draw deep, intoxicating breaths. Instead, he muttered something about needing to buy a book before takeoff and retreated to lick his wounds at the nearest kiosk.

  Once they boarded the plane, he could only see the top of her head, thank God. But instead of using the respite to plan tactics and strategy for finding Stewart Jones in the short time he could afford to take off work, he wasted the two-hour flight torturing himself by recalling every time he could remember that the two of them had ever had sex. His memory in this regard seemed to be crystal clear and highly specific. What’s more, it seemed they had had mind-blowing sex on a hell of a lot of occasions. By the time they landed, he was completely aroused and nursing a correspondingly foul mood.

  They picked up the rental car with a blessed lack of hassle, which meant that he was just able to restrain himself from snapping the head off the unsuspecting guy standing behind the counter. Kate, on her best behavior, agreed that he should drive since he was more familiar with the roads around D.C. than she was. At least that compelled him to keep his eyes away from her and on the road. Luke ordered himself to count his blessings.

  He’d printed out MapQuest directions to the Reston Town Shopping Center where Sunrise was located and Kate volunteered to navigate if needed. He thanked her effusively. They were both being so damn polite they were almost guaranteed to explode from the strain before the day was over.

  “Do you think we should start by questioning the Sunrise people?” Kate asked as they neared their exit from the Dulles toll road. “I know George already interviewed them, but it’s the one store we know for sure that Stewart Jones shopped at. It also might give us a chance to get the details of our pitch polished before we move on to fresh territory.”

  “Good point. As for what story we spin, my suggestion is to stick as close to the truth as possible.”

  “Admit up front that we were the clients who sent George Klein to question them last week, you mean?”

  “Yes.” Luke swerved to avoid a kamikaze cab driver, a forcible reminder that Washington might be a smaller town than Chicago, but traffic in this area obeyed none of the mild-mannered, Midwestern rules of his home town. “We should explain that we hired George to search for your father and that he was killed in an accident over the weekend. The fact that you’re looking for such a close family member might engage the store clerks’ sympathies.”

  “And make them more willing to go over the same ground.” Kate nodded her agreement. “Should we tell them George was murdered, do you think? My guess is that we shouldn’t.”

  “I agree, definitely not. You and I both know that George’s death had nothi
ng to do with his search for Ron Raven, but if we tell people he was murdered, they might decide they would be safer keeping quiet—even if by some chance they actually know something.” Luke was relieved they seemed able to discuss their mission for the day without subnotes of tension erupting to the surface and causing problems. Maybe they were going to rub through these two days without disaster after all. His mood lifted a few notches at the prospect.

  Reston was a busy shopping area, they discovered a few minutes later, and parking was at a premium. Crowds thronged the upscale shopping plaza where Sunrise was located, bustling in and out of cafés and stores that lined three sides of a cobbled square. A giant bookstore anchored one arm, and a big chain restaurant on the other had a constant stream of people arriving for brunch. From their spruced-up clothes, it looked as if several of them had just come from church services.

  “If they have this many people shopping here every day, there isn’t much chance that anyone is going to remember a customer from two weeks ago.” Kate surveyed the busy plaza with disfavor. “And look, there are tons of office buildings on the opposite side of the road, so it’s probably just as busy during the week.”

  Luke had to agree. A regular customer would be remembered, of course. But if Ron Raven was determined to hide, he wasn’t likely to make the mistake of returning often to the same store. Kate’s gloomy expression suggested she’d already arrived at the same depressing conclusion.

  Sunrise turned out to be one of the smaller stores in the plaza, tucked away in a corner well removed from the main road. When they went in, there was only a single clerk on duty and two customers waiting to be served. The fact that the clerk was busy gave them a welcome chance to look around and get their bearings.