“Yeah, that works.”
Jane shut the door behind them, but she heeded the warning in Eric’s ice blue gaze and stayed where he could keep an eye on her through the glass insert. “What’s up?”
“Umm, so, that guy. Your bodyguard. Sam and Rashid and I were talking. You told us you couldn’t give us your new number because he said not to, to just give his office number. But are you sure you trust him?”
“Eric? Of course I do.”
“Just because Clive hired him? I mean, what if Clive didn’t do his research?”
“No. Seriously, Stel, I had no idea you guys were concerned or I would have told you—I’ve known Eric for years.” Which was a slight exaggeration. She’d known him years ago, but not in the intervening time. “We went to college together. I absolutely trust him.”
“Oh. Okay, then.” Stella glanced out to where Eric stood, very obviously watching them. “So, uh, then, if you trust him and you know him . . . is he single?”
And that shocked a laugh out of her. “Talk about a quick turnaround! You don’t trust him; then you want to date him?”
“It’s not that we didn’t trust him. We’re your friends. We wanted to be certain. And as to dating . . . no, he’s not my type for a date. But for a night? Absolutely.”
God. Out of sync once again. Why was it that although she was younger than most people around her, she always felt so much older? And why were her fists clenched at her sides? It wasn’t as if she had rights to Eric’s body. He’d turned her down after all, however nicely. She relaxed her hands, but couldn’t meet Stella’s eyes as she answered. “I don’t really talk to Eric about stuff like that. You’ll have to ask him yourself.” Although she had talked to him. And she wasn’t out of sync with him. After all, he’d proclaimed himself too old for one-night stands.
Stella looked her over as if Jane were under her microscope. “Ah. I didn’t realize it was like that. Good luck. He looks . . . intense.”
What on earth had the other woman seen? Were Jane’s emotions that transparent? She let out a little laugh, ignoring the speculation in the first part of Stella’s reply. “I’ll give you that. He always has been.”
Stella sighed. “Ah, well, it was worth a shot.” She shrugged and went back into the lab.
Jane followed her out immediately. If she stayed in the break room, Eric would come in and ask what they’d been discussing, and no way could she handle answering that.
• • •
ERIC WAITED PATIENTLY to ask about Stella. Her posture during the conversation in the break room, and Jane’s, had intrigued him. At first, the two had seemed almost adversarial. And then the tension had broken and the mood had changed completely. But when she came out, Jane had ignored him in a way she hadn’t since the first day. Whatever had happened, she had no desire to talk about it.
Not that he was going to let a little thing like that stop him. But he did hold his questions until the others had left and he and Jane were alone, waiting for Jake to pick them up. She bit her lip, and pink rose in her cheeks, but she didn’t answer.
“Not something having to do with the case, then?”
After a deep breath, she said, “She wanted to know whether you were available.”
Well, hell. That was the last thing he’d expected. “Available?”
“For sex,” she clarified.
“Yeah, I got that.” He shook his head sharply to clear it. “I hope you told her I wasn’t?”
“I told her she’d have to ask you herself. But she didn’t seem to be willing to go that far.” She blushed again. What had Stella said, exactly?
Before he had a chance to respond, his phone dinged with a text from Jake, who had arrived and was waiting to pick them up. Thank fucking God. He hustled Jane outside and into the SUV with a little less than his usual caution.
In the back of the car, he watched enviously as Jane pulled the rubber band off the tight braid that had bound her hair all day and unwound the whole mass. His fingers itched with the memory of sliding through the silky strands and the desire to do so again. He glanced up and caught Jake’s eyes in the rearview. The man had the balls to grin, as if he could read Eric’s thoughts.
“Do your people work on weekends?” Jane asked after about twenty minutes.
From the front seat, Jake laughed. “Doc, HSE operatives work 24/7/365, except for leap years, in which case they work 366. Which is why I am just an occasional contractor.”
But Eric knew what she was after. “Don’t worry. No one will stop looking for Dani—we don’t keep bankers’ hours. We’ve already found a few interesting hints, and no one can track a loose thread like Nash’s guys.”
Jane sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, and Eric braced himself for whatever might be coming. “Can we stay at your place, at HSE? I want to see the data your people are working with myself, see if anything jumps out at me. You could ask if they’d let me work in the research lab to help them.”
Of course she’d want that. He’d want it, too, in her place. And he couldn’t deny her, despite how uncomfortable the night he’d spent on his own couch thinking about her in his bed had been.
“Not a problem. We can pack up your things and head back tonight if you like. I’ll call Lexie and set it up so we can get access to tech.” And beg her to toss out all the dead stuff in the fridge and restock while he was at it. For which she’d make him pay in a thousand little ways. His boss’s assistant had a cruel streak a mile wide, but she also took care of “her boys.”
“Tara will be pissed,” Jake said. “She was looking forward to not having to answer science-homework questions. And the experiments you showed the kids after dinner the other night were supercool.”
“I was thinking about that. If she’s interested, I could probably set her up with people who’d get a kick out of talking about their fields of study with a bunch of kids and designing experiments that would appeal to them. Despite our rigid reputations, a lot of scientists are quite creative and enjoy teaching, especially the kind of teaching that doesn’t require grading papers. You’d have to coordinate it, and most of the grad students wouldn’t have cars, so you’d either have to pick them up or pay for transportation, but if you’re interested I could round up candidates.”
“That’s quite an offer,” Jake said. “Don’t make it unless you mean it, because Tara will be all over it. We don’t send them to school, as I am sure she told you, because they’re not with us long and being the new kid is hard enough without being a foster on top of it, but we like to think they get a more complete education at our place anyway. The courts try to ensure they’re going back to better situations than they left, and we try to ensure they’re better prepared, both mentally and emotionally, to deal with those situations. Falling behind in school wouldn’t serve them well.”
“It’s really admirable what you guys do.”
Eric agreed, but the fact that—despite all the turmoil in her own life and her fears for her friend—Jane had still found a way to pitch in, and to create a plan to do so in the future, impressed him even more.
They turned off the highway, and Jake cursed under his breath.
“Problem?” Eric asked.
“Two cars back. If that’s a real county cop car, I’ll eat my hat.”
“But it’s broad daylight,” Jane objected.
“Yup. That’s why they’re going for the ruse this time. All passersby will see is a woman getting arrested.” He took a sharp right, then a left, and Jane was thrown into Eric. He held her against his side with one arm, drawing his gun with the other. Behind them, a siren’s distinctive, ululating wail warned they’d not lost their pursuers.
“This doesn’t make any fucking sense. They’re trying too hard and not hard enough at the same damned time.”
Jake grunted agreement even as he cut through a parking lot and down a side street.
“This is the wrong neighborhood for a chase. Too many parks, too many kids, too many chances I could hurt someone. I’m going to double-back and see if I can’t get back on the highway.” Eric could hear the frustration in his tone and understood: if Jane hadn’t been with them, they could have confronted their hunters. Now they couldn’t even safely outrun them.
Jane spoke from her crouched position. “If you do, go back to the city. I don’t want to lead them anywhere near Tara or the children.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t get on the highway with sirens blaring. That would draw attention from the actual county police. We’ll lose them.”
“No. Please, Jake. I wouldn’t forgive myself if anything happened to them.” She started to push herself up, but Eric put his hand on her shoulder and held her in place as the car swerved down a narrow road and out, then cut sharply left.
“We won’t go to the farm. I promise.”
“Hang on,” Jake warned. A second later, they took a full U on two wheels. Another minute and they were back on the highway, merging with only a few angry horns to mark their entrance.
They went almost twenty miles north before turning around and heading back south, and it wasn’t until then that Eric began to relax. He called Nash and filled him in.
“I’ll be here when you get here,” Nash said. “Ask Jake to stay, too, if he can, rather than just dropping you off. This job has gone sideways, and I don’t like it.”
“No shit. We should be there in about an hour.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
• • •
AS THEY ROLLED into the underground garage, Jane straightened from her position slumped against Eric. After he’d helped her up from her cramped position at the end of the crazy chase, she’d never made it back over to her side of the backseat. Eventually, Eric had holstered his gun, taken out his cell phone, and begun making phone calls. But the arm he’d dropped across her shoulders after determining they’d shaken their pursuers hadn’t strayed. If anything, he held her even closer as he talked to Nash, then Lexie.
And now she would be meeting Harper himself. She’d searched out information about him on the Internet the first night Eric had stayed with her, but what she found had done little to sate her curiosity.
In fact, the few pieces of verifiable information and rafts of speculation only piqued her interest. The man would have had to have lived five lifetimes to have done everything people attributed to him.
They took the elevator up to the main office, where Lexie sat behind a large, curve-fronted desk of mahogany and black lacquer with a granite top. Her fingers with their scarlet tips were tapping a mile a minute across the keyboard. She gave them the barest glance when they stepped out, holding up one finger briefly as an order to stay before returning to her work with a frown. A minute or two later, she finished and took the time to examine them more closely.
“Well. Aren’t you the motley crew. Nash is up on seven and will be down shortly. He’ll meet us in Conference Two.” She led the way down a short hallway past one big room that looked to Jane as if it could easily accommodate twenty people around its heavy oval table to a considerably smaller one. She piled some papers at the head of the rectangular table, then took a seat to the right of what Jane figured would be Nash’s place.
“Coffee, anyone?” Eric asked, moving to the machine on the wet bar at the far end of the room where a pod brewer sat.
“Count me in. Make it strong,” Jake said.
“Decaf for me,” said Lexie.
“I’ll just have water,” Jane said as she pulled a smoothly rolling, ergonomically correct chair from the table and sat down. She’d always considered Clive’s office well appointed, but maybe Nash Harper did have the kind of money the websites said he did, because this was one hell of a setup.
Eric brought everyone their drinks, then settled next to Jane while Jake took the seat next to Lexie.
A moment later, the door opened to admit a lean and wiry man with short salt-and-pepper hair and sharp gray eyes. A silver guitar pick dangled from his ear. If she hadn’t read about it on the Net, the jewelry would have surprised her, for otherwise there was nothing decorative about him: he wore a T-shirt, jeans, and work boots.
“Nash Harper,” he said, holding out a hand. “Good to meet you, Dr. Evans.”
“Jane, please.” She shook his hand. “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done, everything your people have done.”
He just grinned at her, revealing strikingly white teeth, and shook his head. “No thanks needed. This is what we do. And your case is an interesting one, which makes a big difference.”
“How so?”
Nash moved to the seat Lexie had left for him and sat, shuffling through the papers on the table. Lexie herself passed legal pads and pens to Jane, Eric, and Jake.
“Let’s go over the timeline quickly,” Nash said. “Your boss called me Sunday afternoon around three to request I send someone for a Monday morning meeting. I got the basics from him at that point—who you were, why he thought you might need protection. From there, I did my own research, both on him and on you, and asked Eric to take the job.
“The next morning, Eric was already on the job when you were attacked. Your attackers did not, in fact, try to kill you. They tried to kidnap you. It was a small, contained operation, designed to be quick and dirty. If Eric had not been there, they could have grabbed you and been gone without a trace relatively easily. They’d scoped the area out in advance, knew there was a loading zone on that block, stole commercial plates for the van so it could sit there. They deemed that a better option than taking you from your home, which would have been my choice. That’s one puzzle.
“Monday night’s abduction attempt employed a very different tactic. They came in hard and loud. There are reasons to do that. For example, if people hear a small crack of breaking glass in their neighborhood, they might look out the window to see whether there’s something going on. On the other hand, if they hear gunshots or explosions, they are apt to hide out, not help out. But they only sent a couple of guys despite their earlier failure. Any halfway decent crew would assume that you had protection. They might not have known from the morning—Eric could have been a good Samaritan, not a paid protector—but they should have realized that after you were attacked once, you’d be more careful and might have hired protection. So, assuming they’re well funded, which today’s fake cop car indicates they are, why not send a half dozen men? Why take chances?”
Jane looked around the table, but no one spoke up.
“Before tonight,” Harper said, “we were working on the assumption that whoever was doing this didn’t have the resources necessary for a large-scale op. Those are the leads we followed. Hiring a two-man team—even one with flashbangs and firepower—isn’t difficult. With tonight’s attack, we’ve had to change our profile, concentrate on people who can put together a fake police car, uniforms, the whole shebang in short order. And who aren’t afraid to go after you when you have serious protection.”
“What kind of people can do that?”
Harper answered with a question of his own. “Eric tells me the missing woman, Daniela Peralta, was your friend.”
“She is.”
“Do you know her brother, too?”
“No.” Dani had never wanted to talk about Alvaro, saying only that he’d had to go back to Argentina because she couldn’t keep him out of trouble. “I met Dani when she interviewed at AHI, but by the time we became friends, he’d left New York.”
“So you’d be surprised that he returned to the city with her after Christmas?”
“What?” But it made sense. For the past couple of months, Dani had become more reticent, inviting Jane out far less frequently. “Was he living w
ith her again? Does he have any ideas about her disappearance?”
“I’m sure he does.” Those shrewd eyes never left her face. “Three days before Dani—or whoever had access to her e-mail account—sent that e-mail about going home for a family emergency, Alvaro stopped showing up for work.”
“Oh, my God.” Jane’s stomach cramped. “They took him to make her cooperate.”
“That would be my guess. If you want a scientist to work in your lab, you can’t physically harm her. Breaking her fingers defeats the purpose. And torture clouds the mind. No, you need a different kind of leverage. Threats against loved ones have a proven track record.”
Her stomach lurched. Oh God, Dani.
“Jane.” Eric put a hand on her knee, calming her, drawing her attention. “This doesn’t change anything. In fact, since they have him and she’s likely to be giving them anything they ask for, they have no reason to hurt her.”
“But she’s not getting it done. Or they wouldn’t need me.”
“No,” said Lexie, “but you’re more apt to do their bidding if they threaten her, so that’s another safety net for her.”
“We’ve had people working this from all directions,” Nash assured her. “And when Eric called saying you wanted to help, I told tech to start putting together a data package for you. Working under the assumption that the reason both you and Dani were targeted is that someone is developing a drug similar to AHI’s, we pulled articles and patent applications related to schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions . . . anything we thought might be relevant. But as good as my researchers are, this isn’t their area of expertise and there’s a lot of data. Sorting the important from the irrelevant takes time.”
Finally, a way she could contribute. “I can sort that easily if you can research the few I flag.”
Lexie smiled. “They’re still putting together the data. I’ll give you keys to the seventh floor, which is research and tech, and the tenth, which is the apartment, so you can come and go as you need to. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at eight thirty, if that works for you, and introduce you to the research department.”
Mind Games Page 7