The thought made Riley’s breath catch. It made her go weak at the knees.
If they killed Jeff, would they . . . ?
Get a grip.
The best and only thing she could do for Emma now was keep a cool head.
Since there was already a squad car in the driveway, the cab parked on the grassy verge in front of the house. The neighborhood was awake by this hour, with people out walking their dogs and picking up their newspapers and getting into their cars on their way to work. The sun was still only a little way above the horizon, pale in the cloudless blue sky. The heat was already oppressive. Somebody nearby was out cutting grass: the scent of fresh-mown grass and the growl of a lawn mower hung in the air. Around here, people got their outside chores done early to beat the heat.
Finn had said he would be watching her, and she had no doubt that he was, but she couldn’t see him.
Conscious of what she must look like to anyone interested enough to watch her cross the yard—that would be just about everyone in sight; the Cowans were big news these days—Riley kept her head high and took long strides toward the small brick house.
She even waved at the cops in the squad car, who looked her up and down as she passed and who, when she waved, waved abashedly back.
If there’d been a news crew around, and thank God there didn’t seem to be one, she would have been expecting to have her image heading home, wearing what was clearly an evening dress on a bright, shiny Saturday morning, flashed all over the nation as a perky announcer chirped something like “Riley Cowan takes the Walk of Shame!”
Ordinarily she would have railed inwardly about her life as a tabloid headline, but she didn’t have time as she entered the house and fear and dread immediately replaced annoyed embarrassment. As soon as she closed the door and the cool shadows of the living room swallowed her up, she heard faint sounds that could only be Margaret moving around at the end of the hall where the bedrooms were located. The smell of coffee was further confirmation that she had miscalculated: Margaret had been up for at least a little while.
“Emma?” Margaret called. The worry in her voice told Riley that she had discovered Emma’s absence. Her voice sharpened, grew louder. “Emma?”
Riley hurried into the hallway.
She had been right: Margaret was standing in Emma’s open doorway, one hand on the knob as she looked toward the top of the hall in response to the sounds of Riley’s approach.
Seeing some of the tension leave Margaret’s face as she spotted her killed Riley. The last thing Margaret would be expecting to hear was Riley’s terrible news.
“Riley.” Margaret sounded relieved. She was wearing white slacks and a navy blouse, and Riley guessed that she’d gotten dressed and put coffee on before checking on Emma. “Emma’s not in her room.”
“I know.” Riley reached her and took Margaret’s hand. It was thin but felt warm, and it returned her grip affectionately. Then Margaret’s eyes flickered over her face. At what she saw there she frowned.
“Are you just now getting in?” Margaret asked.
A knot formed in Riley’s chest.
“Come here,” she said, and drew Margaret into the bathroom.
“What’s wrong?” Margaret’s voice rose fearfully as Riley closed the door behind them, turned on the tap full blast, and then gently pushed her down on the closed toilet seat and crouched in front of her. Margaret stared at her with wide-eyed horror. “My God, what’s happened?”
As gently as she could, Riley told her everything. By the time she finished, Margaret was whimpering like a wounded animal and rocking back and forth with her head in her hands. Riley’s heart ached. Margaret’s pain tore at her insides. She wanted to whimper herself.
Margaret’s head came up. Her eyes were wild. “That money. That cursed money. It killed Jeff. Now it might kill Emma. Oh, please, I can’t lose Emma, too.” The cry sounded as though it came straight from her heart.
Riley took her hands, which were cold now and trembling, and gripped them tightly. “I know. I told you what we’re going to do. All you have to do is keep it together. We’ll get Emma back.”
Even though she could see the older woman was in no place to hear it, Riley kept talking and walked Margaret meticulously through her plan, going over what she intended to do until she was sure the other woman understood. She’d fine-tuned it so that Margaret was required to do nothing more than keep her mouth shut about what they’d done, because she’d known that in the aftermath of hearing about Emma, Margaret would be barely able to function.
Clearly, she’d been right.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t just tell them?” Margaret’s voice shook. “Just give them the money, and tell them, and be done?”
“Until we get Emma back, if we’re going to give it to anybody, it’s going to be to whoever has her,” Riley reminded her. “If we tell the FBI, the government will take control of the money, and it’ll be up to the government whether or not to trade it for Emma. And they’ll suspect us of being involved in taking it, or at least of knowing where it was all along and not reporting it, which is probably obstruction of justice. And then—I took that ten million dollars, and you withdrew thirty thousand of it. We’ll probably go to prison.”
“I don’t care about that,” Margaret said fiercely. Tears glimmered in her eyes. “All I care about is getting Emma back safely.”
“I know.” Her own eyes welling up, Riley hugged her. “That’s all I care about, too. But I really think this is the best way. Remember, the FBI could find Emma at any time. They know how to deal with kidnappings. Emma won’t be harmed.”
At least, she prayed not. And Finn had said that Emma wouldn’t be. But Riley knew perfectly well that there was no way to be sure. Still, that was the last thing Margaret needed to hear at the moment.
“This man—” Margaret said, and Riley knew that she was referring to Finn. Riley had told her that the FBI agent who’d come to her rescue after the attack on her at her apartment was the one she had called in the aftermath of Emma’s kidnapping “—is he competent? Do you trust him?”
The first question she could answer unreservedly, the second was more complicated. But there was only one answer she could give Margaret to both.
“Yes and yes.”
“All right.” Margaret still trembled from head to foot, but she sat up and visibly tried to pull herself together. “Bill is coming, you say? And I can tell him about Emma being kidnapped, but I’m not supposed to tell him that we already found the money or—or anything like that.”
“That’s right. You can tell him everything except that,” Riley said. She released Margaret’s hands and stood up. “I have to get ready to go. Do you want to wait in the living room for Bill?”
Margaret took a deep breath and nodded.
Riley left her on the couch with a shawl around her shoulders, a cup of coffee and a muffin on the table beside her, and a program Margaret liked playing on the TV. Then she hurried to do what she needed to do.
Quickly and carefully, she told herself.
First, she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves from the kitchen. Then she extracted George’s black book from Emma’s painting, and took it into Jeff’s bedroom. Looking around the familiar room made her stomach tighten with grief, but there was no time for anything except the task at hand. Loading the machine with fresh paper from an unopened package beneath the desk, she used the copying function on the printer to copy each page in George’s book. Jeff had brought the printer from George’s Oakwood office with him when they’d moved into this house, which was what had given her the idea of how to circumvent the problem with the fingerprints. The copied pages wouldn’t have any fingerprints on them because she was wearing gloves, and if anyone bothered and was able to trace them back to a copying machine it would be to one that George would have had access to. No one would find her and Margaret’s fingerprints on the original black book.
Once that was done, she grabbed a cigarette lighter from a
drawer in Jeff’s desk, set George’s black book alight, and dropped it in the brass incense burner that Jeff had used for God knew what purposes to burn. She never would have suspected that one day she’d bless her ex-husband for keeping his drug paraphernalia handy.
The faintly rubbery smell worried her a little—she wanted to leave no trace of what she was doing—but there was nothing she could do to mask it. Fortunately the smoke detector was at the other end of the hall.
While the book burned she grabbed the SIM card from its hiding place and replaced the one in her phone with it. It was a simple procedure: pull one out and click the other one into its place.
She was multitasking—clicking through everything she could access on Jeff’s phone while making a dash for the bathroom, where she dumped the fine black ash that had been George’s little book down the toilet and flushed it away—when she made the first disturbing discovery.
Two emails had been sent to Jeff on the day he died from an account she’d never seen before. Of course, Jeff, being Jeff, had lots of contacts she didn’t know about, and the fact that she didn’t recognize the account wasn’t what alarmed her.
One message, sent at 5:17 p.m., read, Hi from Paris, no greeting, no signature, and the other one, sent at 5:23 p.m., read We’ll always have Paris.
Reading them, Riley froze in the act of turning on the water in the sink. All kinds of alarm bells went off in her mind.
Hours after receiving the two emails, Jeff had died.
Jeff had read them, but he hadn’t earmarked them in any way. He hadn’t saved them. He hadn’t forwarded them.
He hadn’t told her about them.
He obviously had not picked up on the message, because that he would have told her. But she did, immediately.
The emails seemed to be clear references to Emma’s painting.
In other words, to the location of George’s black book.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Who had sent them? George? But she didn’t think he had access to email in prison. Certainly not unsupervised email. And she was pretty sure that any account from the prison would be labeled as such.
So who? She couldn’t begin to hazard a guess.
But if someone had known about them, would that have been enough to, to use Finn’s words, stir the pot?
The mere thought was enough to make Riley’s nerves tighten.
Should she delete them? she wondered feverishly. Would they provide Finn or whoever went over the material from the SIM card with enough information to tell them where George had hidden his black book, which was in essence his map to the money? Could they possibly lead investigators to Margaret and her?
Riley thought hard about that as she left the bathroom with the now clean and dry incense burner.
Unless someone knew specifically about Emma’s painting, she didn’t see how those emails could lead back to it.
“Riley? Is everything all right?” Margaret called anxiously. Her voice was unsteady, and Riley had little doubt that she was hanging on to her composure by her fingernails.
“Everything’s fine!” Riley called back, and, pocketing her phone for the moment, went into Jeff’s room. Margaret needed someone to be with her, and Riley felt bad for leaving her alone when she was in such distress, but there was nothing else she could do. She had to move as quickly as possible. Things would go far more smoothly if she finished everything she needed to do before, say, Bill arrived, or before so much time had passed that Finn started wondering what she was doing.
Putting the incense burner back in place, she picked up the copied pages and folded them into as small a square as possible.
Then she headed back for the kitchen.
“Can I get you some fresh coffee?” Riley called as she passed the doorway to the living room. Margaret was sitting where she had left her, huddled on the brown couch, the coffee and muffin untouched beside her. The TV was on, but Margaret had turned the volume down so that Riley could barely hear it in the kitchen. She was as sure as it was possible to be of anything that Margaret was not actually watching it.
“No. Thank you,” Margaret responded with dignity. Margaret’s good manners were as natural to her as breathing, but under the circumstances they broke Riley’s heart all over again. Even while she was clearly in anguish, Jeff’s mother was class to her bones. “Riley, what—”
The sound of the front door opening caused Margaret to break off and sent a rush of alarm through Riley.
Who—?
“Bill,” Margaret said in a thankful tone, alleviating most of Riley’s fear. Her only concern about the new arrival was what she needed to get done before Bill came in search of her. She quickened her step as Bill answered Margaret with, “My dear, what is it?”
Margaret said something that Riley didn’t catch because she was too busy easing a pewter urn off the top of a cabinet, where it stood sentry over a fern and a clay figure Jeff had made in elementary school. The urn contained the cremated remains of Horatio, the family’s beloved Scottie, who had passed away some six months before George was arrested. George would have had access to it, and to her knowledge no one had bothered it since it had been placed on top of the cabinet. As a hiding place for the copied pages, it would work.
Unscrewing the lid, she dropped the pages in among the ashes, muttered, “Sorry, Horatio,” screwed the lid back on, and replaced the urn.
Her work done, Riley had just stripped off the rubber gloves and tossed them in the trash when, as she had predicted, Bill came into the kitchen.
“Margaret told me what’s happened.” Bill frowned at her as she walked toward him with a quick nod of greeting. His usually florid face was pale. “She said you’re working with the FBI on it.”
“Yes.” Riley stopped to put her hand on his arm. It was Saturday morning, and Bill was still dressed like he was going into the office, in a suit and tie. “That agent who helped me after I was attacked: I called him right afterwards. He’s waiting for me now.”
“What’s that taxicab doing out there?”
“It’s possible the house is under surveillance. The agent didn’t want me to be seen with him, just in case. We’re going to meet up somewhere else.”
“Margaret says you’re going to visit George.”
“Yes. I’m going to see if I can get him to tell me where the money is. If I can, then we’ll follow the kidnappers’ instructions when they call.”
“What if George won’t tell you? What if he’s telling the truth, and the money’s spent?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Holy moley.” Bill shook his head. “Just—holy moley.”
“I have to get changed.” Acutely conscious of the passage of time and Finn waiting for her, Riley gave his arm a pat and moved past him. “I’m going to be gone overnight. Stay with Margaret, will you please?”
“Of course I will.”
Riley went into Jeff’s room, changed into a yellow sundress from the suitcase she’d never gotten around to unpacking, zipped the suitcase up, and, pulling it behind her, left the room.
“You be careful,” Margaret murmured as Riley hugged her good-bye. “And call me.”
“I will,” Riley promised, and went out the door.
In the cab on the way to her rendezvous with Finn, Riley was starting to take Jeff’s SIM card out of her phone and replace it with her own when she remembered something: she never had taken a good look at those pictures Jeff had snapped right before he died.
Glancing out the window to gauge where they were in relation to the strip mall, she realized that she didn’t have much time. Clicking on the photos, she looked at the first one that came up, which would have been the last one Jeff had taken: two men, walking toward the camera, deep in the shadows of night. They were wearing baseball caps and windbreakers—given the heat, that was suspicious right there. Their faces were indistinct because of the darkness, but Riley was pretty certain that she
didn’t know them. The second picture was of the same two men a little farther away. Of course, it would have been taken before the other one.
The thought that she might be looking at Jeff’s murderers as they closed in on him made her palms grow damp.
She was suddenly glad that Finn would be seeing these pictures.
Then she clicked on the third picture. It, too, had been taken not long before Jeff died, and it, too, was of a man wrapped in darkness.
Her heart skipped a beat.
There was no mistaking this man’s identity: it was Finn.
— CHAPTER —
TWENTY-TWO
She looked like a sunbeam, was the stupid-ass thought that first assailed Finn as he watched Riley slide out of the taxi and come walking across the asphalt toward him. Bright yellow dress, vivid red hair—no wonder that, for a moment there, it was like she was all he could see. The taxi took off—she must have paid the driver before getting out. He would have gotten out of the car to relieve her of her suitcase but caution prevailed. The word was that she wasn’t under surveillance by Emma’s kidnappers, but the word had been wrong before, and anyway Emma’s kidnappers weren’t the only players in the game.
It was better all around if anyone who might be watching never got a chance to get a good look at him. Not many people in the business knew who he was, but all it took was one photo and a lucky hit with facial recognition software and his identity, along with the Agency’s interest and involvement, would be all over the international spook community about as quick as somebody could click a mouse.
Anyway, Riley was handling her suitcase just fine. For all her slender build, there was nothing fragile about her. The gauzy dress with its sleeveless, figure-molding top and long, flowy skirt was superfeminine, as were her strappy high heels. With her ivory skin and delicate features and banging body, she was super-feminine.
Good thing he was becoming too well acquainted with her to be fooled.
This magnolia-by-way-of-the-Steel-Belt had cast-iron balls.
She was looking right at him. Her expression was unfriendly. Her luscious, full-lipped, kiss-me mouth was . . . downright grim.
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