by Mallory Kane
It was the connection she’d been looking for. Vega came through. There was only one way to interpret that. He’d gotten her dad the job as manager at the Golden Galaxy. The mention of Meadow Gold Corporation implied that Vega was connected with the business.
She looked at the next page and the next. There were a number of meetings scheduled with the corporation, with the Gaming Commission, with other employees who had already been hired, but nothing else about Tito Vega.
She picked up the other notebooks and shuffled through them looking for last year’s. Her dad had said Vega came through. That meant he’d talked to him previously, didn’t it? But when?
She knew it wasn’t after January 1, so she started at December 31 of the previous year and worked backward.
Then on the page for August 23, she found Vega’s name.
Tito Vega—underlined three times—called. re: me as Mgr Golden Galaxy Casino? Waveland. What’s his angle? Prob. 6 mo.- 1 yr. Not holding breath.
Tito Vega had gotten her dad the job at the Golden Galaxy, but why? And what, if anything, did this have to do with her father’s death?
Juliana laid the two day planners on the coffee table, open to the notes about Vega. Then she opened the yearbooks to her class’s pictures. She stared at her dad’s notes, then at the tiny photo of Anthony Vega in her sixth-grade yearbook.
What did it mean that she went to school with Anthony Vega? If anything. She didn’t even know if Anthony was kin to Tito Vega. She picked up her folder with information she’d gathered about Vega and paged through it. There were mentions of his wife and children, but not many. His prominence along the Gulf Coast had developed over the last twenty years or so.
Anthony Vega was in her sixth-grade class but not seventh. She was eleven in the sixth grade, eighteen years ago. Maybe Tito Vega had sent his son to public school until his growing wealth made him able to afford private schools.
But even if that were true, what did it mean? Anything at all? Or was it just coincidence?
She stared at the pages, frowning, concentrating, but no flashes of inspiration came to her.
She wiped her face, then plunged her fingers into her hair. This was so frustrating. She had something here—she knew it! But she couldn’t figure out what she had or what she should do with it. There was a piece of the puzzle missing. Trouble was, not only didn’t she know which piece it was, but she also didn’t even know where in the puzzle it fit.
She needed help. She was out of her league.
Damn it. She needed Dawson.
* * *
JULIANA WOKE UP with a cramp in her leg. Sitting up, she realized she’d fallen asleep on the couch, wrapped in her terry cloth robe. The pages were still spread out on the coffee table, next to her empty chocolate-smeared ice-cream bowl.
She pushed her hair out of her eyes. It had air dried into tangled waves. As she finger combed it, she studied the array of information she’d gathered about Tito Vega. It made no more sense this morning than it had last night.
She blew out an exasperated breath. What she’d realized last night hadn’t changed. She needed Dawson’s help to solve the mystery of how and why Tito Vega was involved in the collapse of the Sky Walk.
She looked at her watch. It was seven-thirty. Too early to call him? He’d probably been up late, talking to the authorities about the fire at his parents’ house.
Tough. She needed her research, which she’d left at his apartment, and she needed to talk to him.
A flutter of apprehension whispered in her chest. She didn’t want to talk to him. He’d lied to her—taken advantage of her. Hurt her.
She reached for her cell phone. Her hand hovered over it. What was she going to say? She needed to sound detached, businesslike. She couldn’t let him know how much he’d hurt her.
She clasped her fingers together. Okay, here goes.
Dawson, I need to see you. I have information that links my father with Tito Vega. Yes, that would work.
She cleared her throat. “Dawson, I need to—” Her hand went to her neck. She sounded like a strangled frog. She got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Her throat felt like the frog had taken up residence there. Taking a sip, she swallowed carefully, then tried again.
“Dawson, I need to see you.” That was better.
Back in the living room, she picked up the phone and dialed Dawson’s number. Taking a deep breath, she blew it out slowly as she listened to the ring.
“Yeah?” Dawson’s voice sounded sleepy, gruff, sexy.
“Dawson, I need—” And then suddenly the frog was back. She swallowed with difficulty.
“Jules? Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said quickly and cleared her throat, but before she could say anything, he lit into her.
“You told me you’d stay put.”
Her temper flared. “You told me that we were on the same side.”
“We are! We both want the truth.”
“You don’t want the truth! You want to keep your dad out of prison.”
He was quiet again. “What do you want, Jules?”
She bit her tongue. No matter whose side he was on, he was the only person she could trust to help her put the puzzle pieces together.
“I need to talk to you. I’ve—I’ve found proof that Vega hired my dad to work at the Golden Galaxy Casino.”
“Vega hired— I don’t understand.”
“I know. Me, either. Somehow all this is connected, but I can’t put it together on my own. And I need my folders.”
He was silent for a beat. “Is that what this is about? You want your little folders back?” he asked. “Well, I’m guessing you must have picked up your car last night, so why don’t you just drive on over here and get them. I’m going to be gone anyway.”
Juliana scraped her teeth across her lower lip. He sounded so harsh. If she didn’t know better, she might think he sounded hurt. But she did know better. She blew out a frustrated breath.
“I wonder if you could make some time for me. I’d appreciate it.”
She heard his sigh through the phone. “Fine, but I’m busy this morning. I’ve got to go with Mom and Dad to sign their statements about the fire and see if the police found any evidence on the bottle or in the driveway.”
Juliana’s heart sank. She’d expected him to sound defensive, even chagrined. But he sounded angry. She was the one who had a right to be angry, not him. How dare he make her feel defensive?
But she was also the one who needed him. So she’d take what she could get. “All right. This afternoon, then? Two o’clock?”
There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone. “I’ll call you. I’m not sure when I’ll be done.”
Later than two o’clock? She couldn’t sit here that long without losing her mind. She took a deep breath, prepared to yell at him that this was the first piece of real evidence they had. That it had to be Vega who was behind the Molotov cocktails. But she bit her tongue, stopping the retort. If she antagonized him, he might not agree to see her at all. After all, she’d practically thrown him out of his own apartment.
“Okay,” she said, trying to mask her disappointment. “Please call me as soon as you can. This is important.”
“Yeah,” Dawson said, but she could tell he’d already stopped listening to her.
“Bye,” she said, but he’d already broken the connection.
She set the phone on the coffee table and stared at it. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock in the morning and Dawson had just ruined her entire day. She was going to have to sit here until after two o’clock, when he decided he had time to talk to her.
She looked at the sheets of paper spread out on her coffee table and shook her head. She couldn’t even think. She needed a cup of coffee. She sighed and rubbed her eyes, then picked up the remote control.
She turned on the TV to the local news and listened as she headed into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. By the time she
’d poured herself a cup, she heard the news anchor mention the Golden Galaxy. She hurried back into her living room and turned up the volume.
“Planned to begin today. The mayor of Waveland said that he hoped the rain would be gone by tomorrow, so that the demolition could begin. He stated his belief that cleaning up the debris from the collapsed Sky Walk would not only remove an eyesore and a dangerous temptation for children from the town, but it would also help the families of the six people killed in the tragic accident to heal.”
Today was Monday! With everything that had happened, Juliana had lost track of the days. Today was the day that demolition was supposed to begin on the Sky Walk. She walked to the window and opened the blinds. Rain was pouring down in sheets. No wonder it was delayed.
She picked up her coffee cup and sipped as she changed stations, looking for more local news, but the morning programs had started. She’d probably have to wait until noon to hear anything else about the schedule for tearing down the casino.
She sat back against the couch cushions, drinking her coffee and thinking about the casino. Soon the mass of cables and steel beams that had killed her father would be gone. Thank goodness she’d gotten his things.
His things. Everything but the day planner was still in her purse. Had it only been three days ago—Friday—that she’d gone to the casino to get them? She shuddered as she thought of the steel beam that had almost hit them.
She set her coffee cup down and dug into her purse again. There was the photo album and the few sheets of paper Dawson had found stuck behind the file drawer. She set them aside and continued digging. Where were the pen set and the ring?
A little more digging turned up the pen set, but she couldn’t find the ring. She felt along the bottom of the purse but it didn’t seem to be there. She started to turn her purse upside down. Then she remembered. She’d been holding it when Dawson had grabbed her and flung her to the floor inside the supply closet. She must have dropped it.
Still, just to be sure, she dumped her purse and sifted through everything. No ring.
It had to still be on the floor of the office. She walked over to the window again and peered out. Still raining, though not as hard as before. She looked at her watch. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock. Dawson wouldn’t call her until after two. She had more than three hours to kill.
She loaded all her stuff back into her purse and grabbed her raincoat. She had to find her dad’s wedding ring. If she didn’t do it today, it might be lost forever.
Chapter Sixteen
Dawson looked at his watch again as he turned into the parking lot at Juliana’s apartment complex. He’d tried to call her a couple of times already, to let her know that he’d finished with his parents early, but she hadn’t answered her phone.
He drove slowly up and down the rows of cars, listening to the slap-slap of his windshield wipers and squinting against the colorless haze created by the falling rain. He didn’t see her car anywhere. He activated his Bluetooth.
“Dial name,” he said as he circled around and pulled into a parking space close to the front door of her apartment building.
“Please say the name,” the annoyingly patient, yet cheerful, voice begged him.
“Jules.”
“Dialing Jules.”
Her cell phone rang seven times before it went to voice mail. “Jules, it’s one-thirty. Call me,” he said before cutting the connection and turning off the car. It was the third message he’d left.
Why wasn’t she answering? The phone wasn’t going directly to voice mail, so it wasn’t turned off or out of juice.
Then his phone rang. He looked at the display. Not Jules. Mack.
“Mack,” he said. “What you got for me?”
“You’ve got to give me a raise for this.”
“For what?”
“The secretary I just spent a great mini-vacation with? The secretary to the vice president for finance.”
“Yeah?” Dawson pushed. He didn’t have time to hear about Mack’s escapades. “Give me the short version. I’ve got a situation here.”
“Right,” Mack replied, suddenly all business. “One of Heidi’s jobs is payroll.”
“Heidi,” Dawson broke in. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Heidi. Anyway, the checks for Bayside Industries are drawn on a bank in the Caymans.”
“They’re in Switzerland, and their payroll comes from the Caymans?” Dawson asked.
“Yeah, but that’s not all. She got the wrong checks once. They were for a corporation based in Waveland, Mississippi.”
Dawson straightened in his seat. Anticipation burned along his nerve endings. “What corporation?”
Mack paused for effect. “Meadow Gold.”
A chill ran down Dawson’s spine. “You’re telling me that Meadow Gold and Bayside Industries use the same bank in the Caymans?”
“Not just the same bank, boss. The same account.”
Dawson was afraid to breathe. He didn’t want to ask the next question. Didn’t want the answer to be no. “Do you have proof?”
“You’d better believe it. I have photocopies in my hot little hands.”
“Photocopies?”
“When it happened, Heidi got worried that if the bank could make that kind of mistake, something might happen one day that might implicate her. She never wanted to handle payroll in the first place. So when the checks came in, she photocopied all of them plus the envelope and put them in a personal safe-deposit box, along with photocopies of Bayside Industries checks and their envelope. She also wrote out a statement about what happened and had it notarized.”
“You’ve got copies of all of that?”
“Yep. And I should be back there by tomorrow morning.”
“Call me when you touch down.”
He hung up. He had the connection between Meadow Gold and Bayside Industries. The missing piece that connected Tito Vega with Meadow Gold, the company that funded the Golden Galaxy Casino. Was he one step closer to proving that Vega ordered Knoblock to skimp on the Sky Walk? He didn’t know. But the papers Mack was bringing back should be enough to get a court order to open those Cayman Island bank records.
He’d parked while talking to Mack. Now he vaulted up the steps to her apartment two at a time and banged on her door. “Jules?” he called. “Juliana? Open up. It’s me. I’ve been trying to call you.”
Nothing. He held his breath and listened. He could hear the TV. She must be home. Why wasn’t she answering? With worry twisting his insides, he took his phone out and dialed her number. Within a second, he heard it ringing—from inside the apartment. If she was in there, something was wrong.
“Jules!” he shouted, banging on the door.
“Hey!” a man said from behind him. Dawson whirled. A middle-aged unshaven man in a white sleeveless undershirt stuck his nose out from the apartment directly opposite Juliana’s. “Shut up out here. I’m trying to sleep.”
Inclining his head a fraction of an inch, Dawson turned back to Juliana’s door. The man cursed and slammed his door.
He held up his key chain and chose the brightest, newest key. Thank God he’d ducked out and had a copy of Juliana’s key made while she was in the hospital. If he kicked the door in, the neighbor would probably call the police. He inserted the key into the lock and turned the knob. Stepping into her living room, he closed the door behind him. “Jules?” he called, but he knew without checking that she wasn’t there. The apartment felt empty.
He looked around for the remote, prepared to turn the TV off, but if Juliana—budding private investigator—came home and didn’t hear it, she might think someone had broken into her apartment. So he left it on.
He surveyed the living room. School yearbooks and loose papers were spread out on the coffee table, along with a pile of small notebooks. A coffee cup was sitting precariously on the edge of the table. He picked it up. It was cold. He frowned and hit redial on his phone. When he heard her ring, he followed the sound and found her
phone stuck between two couch cushions. He picked it up and pocketed it.
Damn it. She knew better than to leave without checking that she had her phone. Wherever she was, she didn’t have a way to call for help. He didn’t like that one bit.
Hoping that leaving the TV on meant she was on a quick errand and would be back in a few minutes, he sat down on the couch. Until she came back or he figured out where she was, he might as well do something productive. He did his best to ignore his instinct, which was telling him that she’d taken off on her own to check out whatever she’d called him about.
He looked at the books and papers spread out on the coffee table. The proof she’d mentioned that Tito Vega and her father were connected?
Without moving them, a habit he’d cultivated for his job, he studied the open books. As he’d first thought, they were yearbooks—old ones. The first one was open to the first-grade class photos. His eyes automatically skimmed the names until he came to the Cs. There she was. Caprese.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered. Juliana was skinny and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. A huge gap-toothed grin stretched her mouth and her dark eyes danced with mischief. Dawson smiled and touched the picture. Then he shook his head and turned to the second yearbook.
It was open to the sixth-grade class photos. There was Juliana again. Her smile wasn’t as natural or as mischievous, and her hair hung down to her shoulders. She had on eye makeup and lipstick and she looked like what she was—a little girl playing dress-up. He remembered her telling him that her mother had died when she was a toddler and her father had raised her.
Somewhere between sixth grade and now, she’d figured out how strikingly beautiful she was, and had learned how to make the most of her many assets.
Dawson blinked and realized the sixth-grade picture was a blur. He’d drifted off into a daydream about Juliana’s long black hair and snapping dark eyes.
He rubbed a hand down his face, then slid the third yearbook out from under the second one. He compared the dates. This was Juliana’s seventh-grade yearbook.
He paged through it until he found the seventh-grade class photos and there she was. Her eye makeup—if she had any on—was subtly applied and she didn’t have on lipstick. Much better, he thought.