“I can’t cook,” Anna explained to Kate, looking entirely untroubled by her lack of ability. “I can’t sew, clean house or grow houseplants, either. My mother is a domestic goddess and she swears I’m a changeling. She wasted years of her life and endured dozens of ruined saucepans trying to teach me to make spaghetti sauce. When I hit thirty, she acknowledged it was a lost cause. She’s convinced my inability to prepare a decent family meal is the major reason I’m not married. Except on the days when she decides it’s because I’m such a lousy housekeeper.”
“I should fill her in on all the other reasons,” Seth murmured, startling Kate, who hadn’t realized he was listening.
Anna didn’t seem in the least offended by Seth’s acerbic comment. She bent down and whispered something into his ear which made him turn bright red. She laughed softly when she saw his blush and rumpled her fingers affectionately through his thinning hair.
Luke had suggested earlier that Seth wanted to sleep with his sister. Watching the two of them, Kate was pretty sure Seth had succeeded in his goal and that Anna was very content with the resulting situation.
Seth swung around on his chair. He glanced at Kate, blinking several times behind his glasses. She suspected he was searching for her name and not finding it. “I’m Kate,” she reminded him, putting him out of his misery. “And this is Luke.”
“Yeah, great. Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get down to business, okay? I understand you have a couple of password-protected files you want me to open.”
“Yes, please.” Kate took the flash drive from her purse and handed it over. “The files we need to open are both on here.”
“Just so I know what I’m getting into, do you have any legal right to be opening these files?”
“It’s possible,” Kate said. “We hadn’t thought about that, to be honest.”
Seth didn’t look happy with her response, so she tried again. “The flash drive was abandoned in an empty house. In addition, we believe it once belonged to my father. Since he’s officially missing, presumed dead, I can’t see how there would be any legal problem with us trying to open those files. The lawyers had us searching through all my father’s other personal papers, so these files shouldn’t be any different just because it’s digital information rather than printed.”
“Great. Glad to hear it.” Seth slotted the drive into a USB port. “It’s always nice to know I’m not breaking the law.” He grinned. “Rare, but nice.”
He worked in silence for less than five minutes, and then gave a satisfied grunt when the first of the files opened. Columns of numbers flashed onto the screen with no headers to explain what they might mean.
“What is it?” Luke asked. “It looks like strings of gibberish.”
Seth gave another grunt before remembering he had to use real words when conversing with pesky nontechies. “The passwords aren’t the only security lock on these files. Your father used an encryption program before he applied his password protocol. The encryption isn’t very elaborate, though. Enough to stop random corporate predators from hacking in and stealing your data but not much more. Still, these programs are marketed as the last word in security, so you have to figure your dad really didn’t want anyone to see this information.”
“Can you decode the files despite the encryption?” Kate asked.
Seth looked up at her, clearly startled by the question. “Of course. As I said, it’s a standard commercial product and I already wrote my own program for rendering the encryption in clear text….” His voice tailed off as he walked over to a shelving unit and searched through a row of filing boxes designed to hold data disks.
He found the one he needed surprisingly fast. For all the coiled wires, stray cables and discarded scraps of paper, Seth apparently had an organizational system that worked. He slipped the small data disk into one of his computer drives.
“This is going to take a few minutes,” he said. He glanced at the screen and read the message. “Seven minutes and change, to be precise.”
Anna turned to Kate. “I really come here for the coffee. Seth has a fancy machine set up in the storeroom and it makes heavenly espressos. Would you like one while we wait?”
“Yes, thank you. That would be great.”
“Luke? You, too?”
“Sure, I could use another shot of caffeine. Do you need help?”
“I’ll take Kate.” Anna turned to her. “If you don’t mind lending a hand?”
“Of course not.” Kate smiled politely, although Anna was pretty transparent in her maneuvering. She wanted to discuss Kate’s relationship with her brother a lot more than she wanted help brewing a few cups of coffee.
Her guess turned out to be correct. Anna might not be able to cook or clean, but she was a whiz with the espresso machine and needed no assistance from Kate or anyone else.
“My brother is in love with you,” she said without preamble, as the first cup hissed and steamed its way to completion.
“No, he really isn’t,” Kate assured her. “We were…dating…but that’s been over for months. Luke is just helping me out on this trip. As a friend, you know? He feels responsible because he’s the one who started off this whole chase when he saw my father in your cousin’s restaurant.”
“All of that may be true. Luke may be helping you out because he feels responsible, and he may be treating you as a friend on this trip. None of that changes the fact that my brother is head over heels in love with you. I know Luke well and his heart is in his eyes each time he looks at you.”
“In this case, though, I’m sure you’re mistaken.” But for the first time, Kate allowed herself to wonder what would happen if Anna were right. If Luke loved her—as opposed to simply desiring her—would she want to get together with him again?
The answer was blindingly obvious: of course she would. She was determined not to get involved again because she didn’t believe Luke had ever loved her. Lusted for her and admired her professional talents, yes. But loved her in a make a commitment, buy a house, have babies kind of way? Until now, she’d been pretty sure the answer to all those questions was a resounding no. And despite Anna’s confidence in her ability to read her brother’s emotions, Kate doubted if a mere sister, however close, was a reliable judge of whether or not a man was in love. Maybe there really was a gleam in Luke’s eyes when he looked at her. But there was little chance that Anna could distinguish between a spark of lust and the glow of true love.
Anna deftly switched out cups, refilled the basket with fresh coffee and pressed the lever. Then she looked up, her gaze troubled as she met Kate’s eyes. “Are you going to hurt him, Kate?”
“I already did hurt him,” she admitted. “We hurt each other. A lot.” The truth was that her split from Luke, followed so rapidly by the news of her father’s disappearance, had sent her into an emotional tailspin from which she was still recovering. As for Luke, whether or not his deeper feelings had been involved during their affair, she knew his pride had been devastated by her sexual encounter with Michael Rourke. She’d counted on that in starting the affair.
She’d regretted that particular act of vengeance almost from the moment she accepted one of Michael’s persistent invitations to join him for dinner. She’d really regretted it by the time she ended up in Michael’s bed. Even so, the pain of her relationship with Luke had become so overwhelming toward the end that she’d deliberately chosen to stay on a path she’d recognized from the beginning as viciously destructive.
Since she had never seen or spoken to Michael after Luke found the two of them in bed, she had never confirmed her suspicion that Michael had set the whole situation up, with every intention of having Luke discover them together. For all Michael’s success in his career, Kate guessed he was jealous of his so-called best buddy. He had struck her as especially jealous of Luke’s ability to attract women and then to keep them as friends once the sexual liaison ended. Michael had wanted to be sure that at least this one relationship ende
d in disaster, and she had been regrettably willing to help him along.
Luke had walked into Michael’s bedroom, brought to his friend’s penthouse condo in the middle of the night for reasons that had never been clear to Kate. The resulting nightmare played out at lightning speed. Kate retreated to the bathroom before Luke could say anything. Once there, she’d thrown up as if she’d caught some virulent, deadly virus. She was splashing her face with cold water, trying to control her nausea, when she heard the slamming of the front door. Luke had left the condo less than five minutes after finding her in bed with his soon-to-be-ex best friend.
The sound of the door slamming had vibrated throughout her entire being, drumming the message that she and Luke were over. Done. Finished. And that, presumably, was what she’d wanted. Why else had she been in Michael’s bed? Funny that success could feel so very much like the most terrible sort of failure. She’d leaned against the coolness of the tiled wall and wondered if hearts really could break. At that moment, it seemed entirely possible the answer in her case was yes. Her heart had felt poised on the verge of exploding from sheer misery, but eventually she’d recovered enough to get dressed, call a cab and get herself home.
None of this was information she planned to share with Luke’s sister, however, not even in censored form. Kate busied herself grinding some more beans and waited to speak until she was sure she could keep her voice steady.
“You needn’t worry, Anna. Luke and I are both too smart to get involved again. We have a lot in common, professionally speaking, so the first time around we were in over our heads before we quite realized what was happening. This time, we’re all too aware that it takes more than great sex and a shared profession to make a relationship.”
“Does it? Great sex and a shared interest in science are what Seth and I have going for us, and it seems pretty terrific to me.”
“I expect you trust him, too.”
“Of course.”
“Luke doesn’t trust me.”
“Why? Does he have cause to distrust you?”
Kate drew in a deep breath. Luke had warned her that his family asked what they wanted to know, but she wasn’t used to blunt discussions like this. Her own family was masterful at keeping a collective stiff upper lip, and painfully inadequate at expressing deep feelings. She felt exposed just listening to Anna’s questions, let alone answering them.
To Kate’s overwhelming relief, Luke stuck his head around the door and she was granted a reprieve from interrogation. There was too much going on in her life right now and she wasn’t ready to confront difficult questions about her feelings for Luke. Everything that had happened over the past couple of weeks in regard to her father had been guaranteed to knock her off balance, which made this an especially unwise moment to start wondering if her old relationship with Luke could be resurrected in a new and less hurtful form. Any answers she came up with were likely to be dangerously skewed by emotional overload.
“Is the coffee ready?” Luke asked. “Seth’s almost done decoding the first file.”
“And we’re done, too. Good timing. Here’s your coffee. Black, one sugar.” Anna handed him a cup and passed another one to Kate. “Help yourself to sugar if you want it, Kate. If you take cream, Seth has the real stuff in the minifridge over there.”
“No, I’ll drink it black. Thank you.” Kate carried her coffee and Seth’s back into the office. Seth took the cup with a distracted mumble, possibly meant to be interpreted as thanks. He pointed to the computer screen where the decryption program had just finished working its magic. File RR21 was now revealed as a document thirty pages long, divided into five separate subfiles, each one headed with a different name: Russo Enterprises, Romney Enterprises, Rausch Enterprises, Reinhard Enterprises and finally Roanoke Enterprises.
“It’s printing out now.” Seth jerked his head toward a large printer that was spewing out pages at a fast clip. “Why don’t you start reading those pages while I get to work on the other file.”
Eighteen
K ate and Luke drew up chairs and began to read. Each six-page document provided details of a potential deal where stock would be exchanged for an infusion of cash, making five profiles and five potential deals in all. The five companies were located in the general vicinity of Washington, D.C.: three in the densely populated suburbs of northern Virginia, and two in Maryland.
The first sheet for each subfile provided basic information, such as the company address and phone number, along with the names of the principal officers. The next three pages contained financial data, together with Ron’s concise personal assessment of that individual company’s strengths and weaknesses.
All five companies appeared to be modestly sized and family owned, and each had new products they were trying to bring to the market. The products varied widely, from a medical gadget aimed at making life easier for aging baby boomers to an environmentally friendly insect repellent and a collection of upscale-looking furniture that could be ordered from a catalog or Web site and put together by home owners with nothing more than a screwdriver and small wrench.
This last company was the one which had garnered the most favorable comments from Ron. A deal for his financial support seemed imminent. The company, Millbank Woodworks, had been inherited by the current president from his grandfather. The new president was having a tough time persuading the banks to take his ideas seriously, probably because he’d barely turned twenty-five.
Her father had always been especially good at spotting twentysomethings with guts, drive, ambition and a great business plan, Kate mused. That was exactly the category Luke had fallen into, and her father’s investment in Luciano’s had doubled in value within three years. Millbank Woodworks was in the mold of many previous success stories.
The fifth sheet in each section was headed More Contact Information and provided names, extension phone numbers, e-mail addresses and informal bios for each person that Ron had dealt with at that specific company. The bios listed educational backgrounds and professional achievements, but the emphasis seemed to be on personal data. Spouses or significant others were always listed, along with notations such as Recently divorced or Avoids talking about his partner. The number of children, favorite restaurants and hobbies were also listed, as well as one-sentence reminders of what had been discussed in addition to business.
Fanatic supporter of Ohio State Football, one typical comment read. Another comment was highlighted in red: Warning!!! Don’t forget Brad was born in Casper, Wyoming. Presumably, with less than half a million people living in the entire state of Wyoming, Ron was afraid the usual six degrees of separation might be decreased to two or three. The exclamation points were most likely a reminder to himself never to say anything that would enable Brad to connect his potential business partner to the Flying W ranch and the town of Thatch, Wyoming.
Her father had come up with a system that avoided almost any chance of arousing suspicion in the minds of his clients, Kate reflected. He had notes about every danger point. After a lifetime of living as a bigamist, he must be an expert at compartmentalizing his relationships so that he never slipped up and said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
The final sheet of each subfile was a photograph of a middle-aged man, each labeled with a name. Robert Russo, Richard Romney, Raymond Rausch, Ralph Reinhard and Ramsey Roanoke stared unsmilingly into the camera. The shots were full face, with no attempt to flatter.
Kate realized at once that all five names shared initials with her father, and that they must be pseudonyms, but she actually wasted a few seconds wondering how her father had managed to recruit five middle-aged men willing to work as fronts for him before she did a double take and realized that she was looking at five pictures of Ron Raven.
“My God, these photos are all of my father,” she said to Luke, staring at the shot of black-haired, black-eyed Robert Russo. “I wouldn’t have recognized him in any of them! What’s the purpose of including them in the files, do you think?”
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br /> Luke picked up the photo of gray-haired, gray-eyed Richard Romney and compared it with the other four. “I think he must have wanted a quick and easy reminder of exactly how he looked when he dealt with each company. When absolutely everything about your life is a lie, you might need a few concrete physical reminders to help you keep straight which set of lies you told to which set of people. Ron doesn’t want to arrange a meeting in the guise of one of his fake characters and realize too late that he’s left home without his brown contacts, or his black toupee or whatever.”
That made sense, Kate supposed, although the vision of her father as a quick-change scam artist did nothing to quell the renewed queasiness in the pit of her stomach. “I suppose he has to use disguises if he wants to build up a successful business again. There was so much TV coverage of his disappearance that he couldn’t just turn up looking like Ron Raven. The risk of being recognized would be too high.”
“He’s certainly taken care of that problem,” Luke commented. “But I wonder why he has a different disguise for each company.”
“The business world is surprisingly small,” Kate suggested. “I guess he doesn’t want the CEO of Millbank Woodworks to talk to the CEO of Senior Empowerment at the local chamber of commerce dinner and realize that they’re both being financed by the same man. Dad can’t afford to build a reputation anymore. If he wants to stay hidden, each deal he makes will have to be a one-off.”
“Makes sense,” Luke conceded. “Although it begs the question as to why he wasn’t disguised the night I spotted him in Cousin Bruno’s restaurant.”
“Those disguises can’t be comfortable. Besides, what my father seems to have done is to live his private life as Stewart Jones, and conduct his business life under various pseudonyms, with disguises to match.” Kate stared at a photo where, in addition to donning a curly brown toupee, her father had substantially padded his waistline and added a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. The disguise was effective enough that if she had seen him in this outfit in real life, she doubted if she would have recognized him.
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