by Taylor Smith
Just before turning the corner for the gates, Hannah risked one last glance back at the crowd waiting outside the secure area. Her heart skipped. There. A man she recognized. Or did she?
He had nothing with him—no carry-on bag, no duty-free booze, Mexican blankets or contraband Cuban cigars. The tanned and sunburned tourists in the airport all wore skimpy vacation wear, the men in tees or cotton polos. Her guy looked young enough to be one of the college kids on spring break, but something about his stance said he was no holidaymaker. His jacket was loose fitting, not unlike the one she herself used to conceal the gun she was packing. His eyes behind pitch-black shades were impossible to see, but every fiber of her being said he was checking departing passengers—especially the American women. Ogling babes in general? Or hunting for one in particular?
“Señora, please!” the airline manager shouted. “We are delaying the flight. We must run.”
Fine by her. They flew, dodging waiting passengers and the souvenir kiosks making a last-ditch bid for tourist dollars. The attendant at the gate ripped her boarding pass and threw the stub back at her. Hannah stormed down the jetway.
By the time she dropped into her seat, the doors were closed and the plane’s engines were revving. She stuffed her backpack under the seat ahead of her, buckled herself in, and only allowed herself to breathe when the plane began to roll backward. Even then, she wasn’t sure she’d made it until the engines roared and the plane lifted off, bound for Los Angeles. For home.
Kyle Liggett’s face was a grim mask as he walked back to the car. On the runway beyond the terminal, Gladding saw an Alaska Air Boeing 737 lift off the ground, engines roaring. He knew what his man would say as he climbed behind the wheel.
“She made it onto the flight.”
They’d been so close. Gladding’s informant at the airline had called him back the instant her computer terminal told her the Nicks woman had shown up to claim her ticket for the early morning flight to L.A.—too late, the ticket agent said. Final call for the flight had come and gone, and the doors were closing. There was no way she’d get through the long line at security in time.
At that moment, the arms dealer and his associate had just been pulling up to the terminal. Liggett had leapt out of the vehicle and sprinted in, charged with waylaying her and getting her back to the car, one way or another.
“Why didn’t you stop her?” Gladding demanded now.
“She pulled a supervisor off the line and convinced him to hold the flight.”
“What about the security check? You should have been able to catch her there.”
“He walked her around it. I don’t know why they let her through, but they did. Short of shooting her, I didn’t see what there was to be done about it.”
“Did she have the canvas?”
“I don’t think so. All she had was a small backpack. It wouldn’t have fit inside. Although…” Liggett pondered.
“What?”
“Maybe she took it out of the frame and rolled it up?”
Gladding looked aghast. “If she did, I’ll shoot her myself.” He drummed his well-manicured fingers on his knees. “And Ackerman? Did you see him?”
“Nope.”
Gladding slumped. Where was his damn painting? If she hadn’t left it at the villa and she hadn’t carried it back, then she must have left it with someone she trusted. It had to be Ackerman. Why else would he have chosen this particular moment to vanish?
“Let’s go,” he told Liggett curtly, a plan formulating in his mind.
Sixteen
The sleek Mercedes purred along the coastal highway back toward Gladding’s in-town apartment building. In the backseat, he sulked and plotted, his small hands drawn into tight fists. The days were sliding out of control, colliding with his well-laid plans.
This Nicks woman who’d been hired to carry down his painting had become a liability. It was bad enough that that fool Sergio had tried to hijack the painting, but when she’d gotten past that problem, why hadn’t she tried to fulfill her contract and deliver the piece? And if she wasn’t able to do that, wouldn’t a responsible courier simply have returned the consignment to the sender? Yet Liggett was certain she hadn’t had it with her.
She seemed remarkably resourceful, this courier. Was it possible that Gladding’s erstwhile colleagues in the intelligence community had gotten to her? They were determined to distance themselves from him after shamelessly using him for years when it suited their purposes. Now, he was a liability. If they had their way, he would be imprisoned or, better still, dead. After all, he knew where the bodies were buried—literally, in a couple of cases. He possessed career-terminating information that influential people would not want revealed.
If she had been operating down here with the help of the intelligence boys, who would she have turned to when she ran into trouble? None other than his old friend Don Ackerman, Gladding realized.
Liggett pulled into a reserved space in the underground parking lot of the exclusive low-rise apartment building. When he reached to kill the ignition, Gladding stopped him with a word.
“No. I have something else I need you to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Find Ackerman. I don’t care how you do it. Just find him. Call me when you have him.”
Liggett glanced over his shoulder and nodded as Gladding climbed out of the car.
The bump of the landing startled her awake. Hannah’s hand shot instinctively toward the weapon at her back, but then she glanced out the window and saw the landmark Jetson-style modern building at the center of Los Angeles International Airport. She was home. A warm wave of relief flooded her body.
Customs was a fast walk-through. Outside the terminal, she inhaled deeply, the city’s habitual smog a welcome perfume. She sprinted across the road to the parking structure where she’d left the Prius.
Forty minutes later, she entered her condo, shoes, shirts, skirt and undies marking a trail from door to bathroom. She stood under the showerhead until the hot water ran to cold, tree huggers be damned.
Then, a towel wrapped around her head, she dialed Rebecca’s number. It went to voice mail.
“I’m back, Becs, and I have to tell you, I’m not a happy camper. We need to talk. Call me when you get this message.”
She hung up, stripped off the towel and slid between the sheets, thinking that it would be better if she told Rebecca in person that she’d left August Koon’s painting behind. She’d probably have to run back up to the gallery in Malibu.
It was the last thought she had for several hours.
William Teagarden was back at the Gladding villa with Peña, but the police captain seemed remarkably unfocused. He’d actually sat down at the bullet-ridden grand piano and begun serenading the last couple of crime scene technicians on-site with cabaret renditions of old Sinatra tunes. He was a pretty decent pianist, and his voice wasn’t half-bad either, but it seemed to Teagarden like an odd time to fool around.
Peña’s fascination with the piano, however, gave him free rein to comb through the villa, looking for clues—although not to the identity of the murderers, whose victims were now in the Puerto Vallarta morgue. He was hunting for something that might tell him what had happened to The Night Café.
He rifled through every closet and drawer, then examined the laptop the cops had left on Gladding’s desk. It was an oversight the boys from Scotland Yard wouldn’t have made, but it didn’t tell him much. Most of the document and e-mail files were password protected. Someone with better computer skills might have been able to break in, but he himself was a dinosaur. It was all he could do to manage his own e-mail account, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that it had become the preferred way of communicating for many of his current clients, he wouldn’t have bothered with that.
The fax machine was a little more helpful. As he scrolled through the list of recent faxes received, he found a number with a Los Angeles area code. The machine allowed him to print a duplicate of
the message received from that number. It was from the owner of an art gallery in Malibu, confirming the shipment of a painting by August Koon. The delivery had been set for the previous day.
Teagarden frowned. He’d heard that artist’s name somewhere. He went back to the laptop and logged into an Internet search engine. August Koon, it seemed, was a contemporary painter living in Los Angeles. Photographs of some of his work meant nothing to Teagarden, but something about the painter’s name niggled.
He logged off the Internet, folded the fax and slipped it into his pocket. Then, he went to look for Peña. The music had stopped, and he had no idea how long ago. He found Peña basking in a padded chair out on the veranda. A blue peacock was strolling across the lawn. Peña waved his arms to startle the bird, and it opened its tail to a rainbow swirl of color.
The captain grinned. “He’s very beautiful, no?”
“Aye, that he is,” Teagarden agreed.
“So, Señor Teagarden. My men are finished here. Is there anything else you would like to see?”
“I’d like to see that missing van Gogh, but it doesn’t seem to be here. Any word on Mr. Gladding’s whereabouts?”
“Nada. But I am not surprised. Men like Gladding have places where they can lie low when trouble comes. I would imagine that he is very far away by now.”
Teagarden nodded. “You’re probably right, and I’ve taken up too much of your time. I think I should be on my way, too.”
“Where will you go next?”
“The painting was stolen in Los Angeles, so I suppose I’ll head back there.” The fax in his pocket also suggested that L.A. was his best bet, but he declined to mention that to Peña. “There are a couple of flights this afternoon. I should be able to get a seat on one. Do you think someone could drop me at the airport?”
Peña got to his feet. “Most certainly. I will do it myself.”
Access Denied.
Travis Spielman glared at his computer screen. All San Diego–related files were down. He was still working on getting the new data network up and running, but the southern tier of the system continued to be frozen out. He’d called his director in Washington again this morning, but all she knew was that something was going down and they had to wait. She’d let him know when the access ban was lifted.
Spielman had no choice but to work around it. With Hannah still AWOL, he was dying to try to run a search of Moises Gladding once more, but after yesterday’s scare, he didn’t dare risk it for fear someone would want to know why he was so interested in a red-flagged file.
He picked up the phone and dialed home. Ruben answered on the third ring. Mellie was crying softly in the background.
“What’s wrong with the baby?”
Ruben cooed to her. Spielman could picture his partner bobbing her on his hip. He’d have her laughing again in no time, he knew. “We were doing our physio, weren’t we, sweetie?”
Daily physiotherapy was a critical part of Melanie’s care. Otherwise, her cerebral palsy would lock up her muscles, risking serious deformity to her limbs. The more flexible they could keep her, the better her chances of leading a close-to-normal life, and maybe even learning to walk eventually. Ruben, an athlete himself, was a wizard at taking her through her daily physio routine.
“I was just wondering if you and Mellie have spotted that little rabbit today?”
“Rabbit?” Ruben puzzled. “Oh! The rabbit! No, we haven’t been out yet. We got kind of a late start. But you know, we’re going for a run in a few minutes. Maybe we’ll look for the rabbit when we do.”
“I’d be interested to know if you see it.”
“No problem. We’ll call and let you know, won’t we, baby?”
Sure enough, Spielman heard Mellie giggle. Ruben was a wonder.
He hung up the phone and wandered over to the window, pressing his forehead against the glass, watching tiny pedestrians far below pass under the flowering arches of purple blossoms on the jacarandas lining Wilshire Boulevard.
Hannah was out there. Somewhere.
Kyle Liggett sat at a corner table in The Blue Gecko. He had his baseball cap pulled low, but there was little chance of being recognized here, among the tourists and hard drinkers who populated the place. He sipped his Dos Equis beer and flipped the pages of a local English language newspaper.
Ackerman had shown up a short while earlier looking unshaven and miserable, snapping at the waiters, answering the gibes of the regulars with bad-tempered grunts.
Somebody got out on the wrong side of the bed, Liggett thought. But which bed were you in, Donny-boy? Because it wasn’t your own. We were there.
They would know soon enough. He’d parked in the alleyway out back, and he was just waiting for the right moment to get Ackerman alone. Then, the old spook would tell them everything they wanted to know. Liggett would make sure of that.
He might be a baby-face, but he knew something about interrogation. It was a skill set Moises Gladding appreciated in him. He’d worked for Gladding a few times before. Not long ago, Gladding had taken him along to West Africa to deal with a man who’d double-crossed him. Gladding had sat by, impassive, while Liggett worked the man over, just to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation. He might have thought confession would earn him a reprieve, but of course, it hadn’t. When Gladding gave the nod, Liggett had snapped the man’s neck.
Ackerman told one of the waiters to take over the bar and he headed through a beaded curtain to a room out back. This was the moment Liggett had been waiting for. While the barman had his back turned, he sidled over to the curtain and slipped through. Ackerman was talking to the cook, berating him for failing to buy some ingredient. Pimentos? Peppers? Liggett couldn’t catch the Spanish. But Ackerman threw a wad of bills at the man and pushed him out the back door.
“And you make sure you’re back in five minutes, comprende?” he bellowed.
Perfect.
When Ackerman turned back around, he didn’t see Liggett for a moment. But then, Liggett hissed. The other man looked startled. Liggett held his fingers to his lips. “Let’s go for a walk,” he murmured.
“Oh, for chrissake,” Ackerman muttered. “Sure. Fine. Whatever. Anyone else want a piece of me?”
They left through the alley door. Liggett patted Ackerman down to make sure he wasn’t carrying, then pushed him into the backseat of the Mercedes. He’d set the child locks so that once closed, the back doors couldn’t be opened until he was ready to let him out.
On the way over to Gladding’s place, Ackerman did his best to find out where they were going, but Liggett maintained stony silence. The best way to unnerve an opponent, he’d learned, was to remain inscrutable. He might be young, but his skills were definitely improving. He might work for Moises Gladding now, but one day soon, he would take that son of a bitch down and run his own show.
Ackerman came to again in a cavernous room with a concrete floor—a warehouse? A hangar of some sort? Hard to say. He had no idea where he was, or why he was there. Hell, he could hardly remember who he was.
His head was ringing and every inch of his body ached. He tried to itemize where the pain was localized, but it was so widespread that trying to pin it down just made his head hurt more. Instead, he tried to itemize what he could.
He squirmed but didn’t manage to move much. He was bound to a chair with plastic ties. The restraints cut into his wrists, but they were the least of his problems. He turned his head and squinted through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. Sure enough, there was Moises Gladding, leaning against his fancy Mercedes. Ackerman frowned. Was that his own green Barracuda parked a couple of stalls over from the Merc? How had it gotten here?
He continued down the checklist of what he knew.
The man who’d taken him from The Blue Gecko had made a phone call as he drove. When he pulled into an underground parking lot, Gladding had been waiting for them. The driver had opened the rear door of the Mercedes, but before Ackerman was halfway out, the little cre
ep had brought his gun down hard on the back of his head. The last thing Ackerman remembered was his face hitting the concrete floor.
When he’d come to, he’d been bound to the chair. And then, the fun had begun.
The memory of the past few hours came back with sensations of pain in every quadrant of his body. Gladding’s thug, the most cold-blooded little prick Ackerman had ever run into, had seemed to enjoy practicing the art of inflicting agony. Gladding, meantime, had stood by, impassive, posing the occasional question, then nodding at the kid when he didn’t like the answer, unleashing another round of torture.