“Perhaps neither,” Luke suggested. “From what we’re learning, Ron isn’t much into long-term planning. He seems to go with whatever is most convenient at any given moment and worry about the consequences later. When you were growing up, for some reason he found it satisfying to play the indulgent dad. You weren’t mistaken—he really did enjoy your company. Now that he’s in a different place, he has different needs.”
He really hoped those needs didn’t include trying to kill Kate. She seemed lost in contemplation, and judging from her expression, the memories she was pulling up weren’t happy. Luke decided to distract her with a more practical and less harrowing question than the true nature of Ron’s intentions toward her. “Have you thought about how your father managed to reach you?” he asked. He was puzzled as to how Ron Raven had known where to find his daughter. “Did he call on your cell phone?”
“No, he called on the regular hotel phone. To be honest, when the phone rang, I assumed it was you.”
Luke didn’t much like her answer. Not surprisingly with all she had to cope with, Kate hadn’t yet stopped to consider just how strange it was that her father had known where to reach her. Luke, however, wondered how in hell Ron Raven had known his daughter was spending the night in this specific hotel.
“I’m going to call the operator and see if there’s any way they can tell us where your father’s call originated. Heck, everyone has caller ID these days. Maybe the hotel does, too. We might even learn what alias Ron is using these days.” Luke leaned across the bed and picked up the phone as he spoke.
The operator responded at once. “Good evening, sir. How may I help you?”
“Is there any way you can trace phone calls coming into this hotel?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, sir, our system isn’t set up to provide that service.”
“Your system doesn’t have caller ID?”
“No, sir. Not on the system we use for guest calls.”
“Maybe I could speak to the operator who took the call I’m interested in. How many operators are on duty at this time of night?”
“After 11:00 p.m. we route all phone calls through the front desk. Right now, I’m the only person on duty here.”
“Then maybe you’re the person who can help me. Somebody called room 820 about thirty minutes ago. The guest’s name is Kate Fairfax. Did you put that call through?”
“I must have done, but I’m sorry, sir, I don’t remember anything about it. There have been more calls than usual tonight. To be honest, they’re all a bit of a blur.”
Luke pressed hard, but the desk clerk’s answers remained the same: she didn’t remember the call and there was no way to trace its point of origin without a court order to the phone company. Luke thanked her and hung up, controlling his frustration. He wasn’t surprised that Ron Raven had once again managed to game the system. Although perhaps it didn’t matter much that they couldn’t pinpoint Ron’s exact location. Ron would have covered his ass by calling from a bar, or an airport or some other public place. And wherever he called from, he would have been somewhere else within seconds of hanging up the phone.
While Luke talked to the front desk clerk, Kate had walked through to the bathroom and poured herself a glass of water, but she’d heard their conversation. “My father knew we’d never be able to trace his call,” she said as she walked back into the bedroom.
“I’m afraid so. Even if the hotel had caller ID, Ron probably uses a blocking technique so that nobody can see the number he’s calling from.”
What interested Luke at this precise moment was not the fact that Ron’s call couldn’t be traced but the fact that Ron had known Kate was spending the night in a hotel in Reston. The decision to stay here had been made after they visited the house on Maple Drive, a mere thirty minutes before they checked in. There was only one way Luke could think of for Ron Raven to know where they were: he’d been following them. That unpleasant thought sent another couple of nasty chills chasing down his spine.
“I’m not going to tell Mom or Uncle Paul about Dad calling me,” Kate said. There was more color in her cheeks and she was no longer visibly numb with shock, but she looked so sad Luke ached in sympathy.
He was pretty sure she’d want to revisit that judgment, because her family obviously needed to be in the loop. But he wasn’t going to press the issue tonight. What she needed now was to get some sleep, to be oblivious for a few hours to the fact that her own father had threatened her life, or at the very least her safety.
“There’s no reason to disturb your mother or your uncle tonight,” he said. “In fact, the only thing we need to decide right now is whether we’re going to keep our appointment tomorrow morning with Seth Bedinsky. It’s your call, Kate, and in view of your father’s threats, nobody will be surprised or upset if you decide to back off. If the rest of your family knew the whole story, I’m sure they’d beg you to stop searching.”
“I’m not backing off.” Kate’s voice was low, hard and intense. “I definitely want to keep that appointment with Seth Bedinsky. If my father thinks he can scare me off with threats and spiteful jokes about his own string of broken promises, then he’s about to discover he’s mistaken.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” Luke said softly. He took her hand and held it for a moment against his cheek before turning it over and dropping a deliberately casual kiss in her palm. “Personally, I think it’s past time we found your father and held him accountable. He’ll only cause trouble until we run him to ground.”
“Do they put bigamists in prison?” Kate asked.
“Probably not. But Ron faked his own death, and that’s definitely a crime.”
“If you’d told me six months ago that I’d be quite happy to visualize my father behind bars, I’d have assumed you were crazy.”
“Six months ago, you didn’t know the man your father really is.”
Kate pulled a face. “Ignorance is definitely bliss.”
“Maybe.” The trouble with unfounded bliss, Luke thought, was that truth could intervene and rip away your happiness at any moment, which was exactly what had happened with Ron Raven and his two families.
“Anyway, about the meeting with Seth,” he said. “I called my sister after I got back to the room from dinner, and we’re supposed to be seeing him tomorrow morning at nine-thirty. Seth’s office is in Georgetown, on Q Street, so we need to be out of here by eight-thirty. Will you set your alarm or would you like me to wake you?”
Kate didn’t respond directly. She patted her hips and registered that she was wearing pants that had no pockets. “I forgot to grab my room key when I came to talk to you. I can’t get back into my room.”
“I’ll go down to the front desk and pick up a duplicate for you.” Luke hoped the receptionist wouldn’t demand that Kate request the key in person.
“Could I…do you think…would you mind if I slept here with you tonight?” Kate turned away from him, apparently finding it easier to talk to the wall. “If I go back to my own room, I’m afraid I’ll lie awake all night waiting for the phone to ring again.” She swung around to face him, her cheeks flushed. “I understand if you’d prefer not to have me here with you. I know it’s an imposition.”
“Of course you can sleep with me.” Luke winced, but somehow—God knows how—managed a smile. He wondered if there could be a better definition of torment than the prospect of having Katie in his bed when he was obligated to keep his hands entirely away from every part of her.
“Thank you.” She tried to return his smile, but she couldn’t hold on to it. “This isn’t a good night to be alone.”
“Fortunately, there’s no need for you to be alone.” Luke turned back the covers on the king-size bed and Kate climbed in. She flipped over onto her stomach, her favorite sleeping position, and Luke’s gut twisted into a tight, heavy knot. Between anger at Ron Raven and suppressed desire for Katie, his stomach—not to mention various other portions of his anatomy—seemed destined to have a long a
nd uncomfortable night.
He followed her into bed, careful to avoid touching her. Kate reached out and took his hand, twining her fingers through his. He knew there wasn’t an ounce of sexual invitation in the gesture; she was simply searching for the comfort of human contact.
He squeezed her fingers. “Good night, Kate. Try to sleep now.” Excellent advice. For his part, he had about as much chance of sleeping as of levitating three feet above the bed.
“Good night, Luke. I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for being so kind.”
Her voice was husky and definitely sleepy. The aftermath of shock was taking a toll. Luke hoped like hell that Saint Peter was watching and had his heavenly ledger for recording noble deeds wide open to the page marked Luke Savarini. By the time this night was over, he would have earned at least a dozen gold stars.
Seventeen
“W hy do you keep checking the rearview mirror?” Kate asked.
“I’m trying to see if we’re being followed.” Luke turned his gaze back to the road ahead. “Since it’s Monday morning and there are approximately ten thousand other vehicles traveling on the same stretch of road, it’s tough to decide.”
“Who do you think is tailing us? My father?” Last night the issue of how her father had known where to find her hadn’t crossed Kate’s mind. This morning, almost as soon as she woke up, she’d realized the only way Ron could have known where to call her was if he’d been following them the previous afternoon.
“I guess we have to accept the possibility,” Luke conceded. “Either Ron was tailing us in person yesterday or he hired a surrogate. I can’t figure out any other way he could have known where to call, can you?”
“No. We only chose the hotel a few minutes before we booked in. Nobody knew where we would be.” The image of her father pursuing them as they made the rounds of the print shop and the villa on Maple Drive left Kate feeling nauseated. She not only hated to imagine herself under surveillance, she was cross that neither she nor Luke had noticed their tail.
In some ways, their amateur status had worked to their disadvantage, Kate acknowledged. She and Luke had enthusiasm, but in the same way plenty of good home cooks would nevertheless be lost in a commercial kitchen, an investigator such as George Klein would have had his own valuable repertoire of tricks of the detective trade. George would have noticed if he’d been followed for an entire afternoon, whereas she and Luke had been blithely unaware. The possible risk hadn’t occurred to either of them until after the damage had been done.
Luke glanced once more into his rearview mirror and then shook his head in frustration. “If anyone is tailing us this morning, I’m damned if I can spot the vehicle.”
She snapped out of her melancholy, diverted by memories of past outings with Luke. His sedate driving habits had amused her when they were dating, partly because they had always struck her as so out of character.
“It’s no surprise you can’t spot the tail,” she said with mock severity. “As usual, you’re driving like my great-aunt Jessica.”
“So speaks the woman who drives like she’s channeling Sam Hornish.”
“I wish! In the meantime, you need to switch lanes a few times, do a U-turn, zigzag through the intersection and watch to see who follows.”
“Great plan,” Luke said. “Except for the minor fact that we’re in the middle of three lanes of traffic, all inching toward the Potomac at approximately fifteen miles an hour. Zigging and zagging are only slightly less possible at the moment than sprouting wings and flying.”
“Don’t be defeatist. Think Matt Damon and The Bourne Identity. Now, that’s how you shake a tail.”
“Matt Damon was smart enough to use stunt drivers and his producers cleared the city before they filmed those car chases. We, on the other hand, are sitting in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic. And do you see that cop car over there, just longing to pounce?”
She rolled her eyes. “You always did have a tendency to get hung up on minor technical details.”
“That, and there’s also my odd dislike of contemplating life from inside a jail cell.”
“I’d bail you out.” She grinned. “Probably.”
“You’re all heart. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She thought how amazing it was that Luke could make her laugh about the possibility of being followed, especially after what had happened last night. “So what’s your plan for shaking our tail, if any?”
“You’ll consider it boringly low-key. I suggest we park the car a couple of blocks away from Seth Bedinsky’s office and then proceed on foot. That way, it should be easier to make sure we’re not being followed. We can dodge in and out of a few buildings if you’re experiencing an extreme need for drama.”
“Dodging in and out of buildings doesn’t exactly meet my standards for high drama.” She gave his arm an affectionate squeeze. “Face it, Luke, you’re a repressed, law-abiding citizen at heart.”
“Damn right.” He was untroubled by her accusation. Without taking his eyes from the road, he reached out and covered her hand with his. For all that they were both making light of the situation, he was aware of how emotionally fragile she felt. It was no fun driving in heavy traffic, wondering if your father was pursuing you with murder on his mind.
“Why do you think he called me last night?” Kate asked, giving voice to the question that had haunted her dreams. “Until he called, we had no clue he was still somewhere in this general area. For all we knew to the contrary, he might really have decided to start a new life in Australia. My father may be a risk-taker, but why did he call unless it was absolutely essential to warn me off? Do you think we’re getting too close for his comfort?”
“I wish.” Luke sighed as they drew to a halt behind a truck belching black exhaust fumes. “The truth is, though, that Ron didn’t actually reveal very much.”
“He revealed that he’d been following us through northern Virginia! That seems major to me.”
Luke shook his head. “He didn’t reveal anything about his location at the time of the call. In fact, he didn’t even reveal that he’d been in Reston earlier in the day.”
“Because he could have hired somebody to follow us, you mean?”
“Right. And even if he personally tailed us all afternoon, six or seven hours passed between the time we checked into the hotel and Ron’s call to you at midnight. During those six or seven hours, he could have driven five hundred miles from Virginia in any direction. Alternatively, Dulles airport is less than thirty minutes from the hotel and has flights taking off to cities around the world. When Ron spoke to you, he could have been five minutes away from boarding a flight to China for all we know.”
“Still, his phone call proved he’s alive, so he must have had a reason for making it. And I can’t figure out what that reason might be.”
“We’re overanalyzing again,” Luke said. “My best guess is that we should take the phone call strictly at face value. He told you to stop looking for him and that’s what the call was about. He’s given up on pretending to be dead but he still doesn’t want to be found, and on the slight chance you could succeed in tracking him, he hoped to frighten you into quitting.”
“What about the other part of the message he delivered? The part where he informed me I’d regret it if by any chance we did manage to find him. Are we supposed to take that at face value, too?”
The traffic slowed to a standstill and Luke turned his gaze from the car ahead long enough to look searchingly at her. “Now that you’ve slept on it, do you still believe Ron threatened to kill you?”
“I don’t know.” Now that it was morning, and the sun was shining on a normal, everyday scene of people hurrying to work, it seemed overdramatic to believe that her father had been threatening murder. After all, he might have been warning her that she’d regret finding him because he was involved with another woman, or for a dozen relatively benign reasons she didn’t have enough information to grasp. And yet, if she replayed his word
s in her head, the overtones of menace were still present. Sleep had not removed any of the sting from her memory. She still believed her father had been threatening to physically harm her.
She forced herself to speak lightly because if she allowed her emotions full play, she might easily find herself paralyzed by a mixture of fear and rage. “As far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on exactly what my father was threatening. But let’s just say I’d like to make damn sure we aren’t followed before we go into Seth Bedinsky’s offices.”
They parked the car two blocks away from Q Street and then dodged and wove their way to Seth Bedinsky’s office, arriving there with some degree of confidence that nobody had pursued them. Seth turned out to be the quintessential techie nerd. He was a short man, a little on the plump side, with thinning hair and rimless glasses. His baggy khakis and white shirt looked as if they had been pulled from the dryer after days of lying there untended, guaranteeing maximum wrinkles.
Apparently humans didn’t rate much higher than clothes in Seth’s grand scheme of things. He greeted them with an abstracted air, as if his attention had only reluctantly been pulled from the half-dozen computer monitors that lined his wall-length desk. Only when his gaze lighted on Anna did his eyes come fully into focus.
Luke’s sister looked nothing like the way Kate had imagined her. Anna was dark, petite and vivacious, with clear olive skin and brown eyes. Only the bright intelligence of her expression reminded Kate of Luke.
“I’m delighted to meet you,” Anna said, shaking Kate’s hand. “My brother told me the two of you were dating for a while, but he forgot to mention that you’re drop-dead gorgeous.” She smiled, somehow managing to sound entirely sincere while delivering the extravagant compliment.
“And Katie makes the world’s best chocolate fudge cake, too.” Luke wrapped a surprisingly possessive arm around her shoulders. “Not to mention the most exquisite raspberry torte, and croissants so light they melt in your mouth. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” He gave his sister a teasing grin. “That should really intimidate you, Annie.”
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