by Sara Rosett
As they disembarked at the San Victor stop, a blue and white Polizia Municipale boat whipped by, abruptly reminding her of reality. She was in Venice, but she was far from a tourist. They passed the colonnaded walkway of the Doge’s Palace, a curious mixture of ornate archways, intricate cutouts, and restrained geometric brick patterns. Jack headed for the two towering granite columns, the one on the right topped with a winged lion and the other with a statue of a man. Behind the columns, the small piazzetta opened into the larger piazza of San Marco with its solid, square bell tower dominating the skyline.
“What’s the significance of the statues, do you think?” Jack asked, his head tilting to take in the figures at the top of the columns.
“The one on the right is the Lion of St. Mark, a symbol of the city. The one on the left was the city’s saint until some merchants confiscated the bones of St. Mark in Alexandria. That guy got bumped.” Jack switched his gaze to her and she shrugged. “There was a sidebar about them in one of the guidebooks.”
“At least he still has the top spot on the column,” Jack said and resumed walking.
Zoe caught his arm and steered him to the side. “Bad luck to walk between them,” she explained. “It was the site of executions and other...grisly stuff.”
“Superstitious?” Jack asked.
“I figure we don’t need any more bad luck coming our way. Where to?” Zoe asked when they came to the bell tower, her gaze sweeping from the horses atop the lavish entrance of St. Mark’s Basilica to the cafés positioned at the opposite end of the piazza, their chairs stacked neatly away at this early hour.
“No sightseeing?”
“No,” Zoe said with a sigh. “We have work to do. Besides,” she grinned as she said, “everything is closed right now.”
They delved into the winding streets behind the piazza and walked until they found an open café where the juice was fresh squeezed, and the small brightly colored fruit tarts mixed with flaky pastries filling the display case looked like some sort of incredible, beautiful modern art. Despite the stunning perfection the food presented, Zoe had no compunctions about gobbling it up.
“How are we doing on money?” Zoe asked, dusting away pastry flakes. She’d noticed when Jack paid for the food that his stash of euros was pretty thin.
“We’re getting low—about sixty. I can probably find somewhere to pawn my watch, if we need to,” he said.
Zoe fingered the chain around her neck. Below her neckline, the ring hung heavy against her chest. “There’s my ring, too,” Zoe said. When the divorce was final, she tried to return it to him, but he wouldn’t take it.
Jack’s gaze slipped to the chain at her neck, drifted lower for a second, then lazily moved back up to her face. “Let’s not go to extremes yet.”
She suddenly felt too warm. “So did you find the Street of Dreams—er, I mean, Shops?” Zoe asked.
“It’s on the map. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Venice
Tuesday, 8:37 a.m.
“THIS place looks familiar,” Zoe said forty-five minutes later as she glanced around the campo, a small cobblestoned square lined with shops, cafés, and stately buildings with Moorish windows. “I think I remember that green awning at the restaurant next to the gondolas.”
Jack consulted the map again. “We must have taken the second street, instead of the third.” He sounded a bit frustrated.
“Don’t worry about it,” Zoe said. “Venice is notorious for being a difficult city to navigate. We should probably just ask.”
“We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves.”
“Then we should buy a camera and some clothes in bright colors.” The layer of clouds had burned off as the sun rose and with every minute that passed, there seemed to be exponentially more tourists wandering the city. “It really is a tourist city. It seems like almost everyone here either is a tourist or works in a tourist-related job,” she said as they left the campo, or small piazza, and walked over a small arched bridge to a skinny street lined with shops. “Do you think there’s some pattern to the stores? It seems to be mask, glass, leather, and paper, repeated over and over again,” Zoe said, glancing into the window crammed with gaudy carnival masks in every possible shade.
“No idea,” Jack said, his attention focused on the map. “Take a right here,” he said, “then left. That’s what we did wrong last time.” He nodded down the tunnel-like street and said, “The Street of Shops.” They meandered down the street, matching their pace to the browsing tourists.
Zoe stopped in front of an alcove set into the stucco wall. “It’s the Madonna,” she said, excitedly. “From Connor’s pictures.” Inside the pointed arch, the flat-featured mother and child looked serenely at one another. A note, a candle, and a few dried flowers rested on the ledge of the small shrine.
“Are you sure?” Jack asked.
“Yes. It’s the same pose and the same background—dark blue with stars. Connor was definitely here.”
They continued down the street, and even at their slow pace, they almost missed the small sign, a plaque sent into the wall beside a doorway. “Wait,” Zoe said, catching Jack’s sleeve. “There it is, Murano Glassworks,” she said coming to a stop in front of a window with several glass vases and exquisite glass sculptures on display. The interior of the shop was dark.
“Open at ten,” Jack said, reading the card behind the iron bars covering the glass door.
They paced back the way they’d come and Jack pointed to a small sign for the Hotel Art Deco.
Jack stuck his head in the empty reception area. There was a wooden desk with baroque engravings atop a worn red Oriental rug, two small bentwood chairs in front of the desk, and a row of cubbyholes on the wall behind it. “No computer. Either they only keep paper records or they use a laptop that isn’t here,” Jack said. “I guess we’ll have to ask.” His tone conveyed that he’d rather be snooping through computer records.
He made a move to go inside, but Zoe said, “Let’s get a picture of Connor. He may not have used his name. We can ask if anyone remembers him. I bet we can find an Internet café.”
They returned to the street. “Sounds good. There’s only about ten rooms, so hopefully someone will remember him.”
After more walking, they found an open Internet café and used some of their dwindling euros to buy an hour’s worth of Internet. Zoe went directly to the sites of the Dallas newspapers. She swallowed and shot a glance at Jack. They were front-page news. “I’d hoped that the story would have faded,” Zoe said. Jack just shook his head as he said, “There’s one with a picture of Connor. Print that and I’ll pick it up at the front.”
Biting her lower lip, Zoe skimmed through the article, then let out a whoosh of breath. “Nothing new,” she informed Jack when he returned. Then read aloud, “The pair was last seen in Las Vegas. Local and federal law enforcement officials are coordinating their investigation and urge anyone with information to contact them.” She turned to Jack. “Then what happened at our hotel in Naples? They knew we were there.”
“Maybe they’re not releasing that detail,” Jack said. Zoe switched to Italian news, opened a window on a translation program and began searching news from Naples. Jack, who had been hovering over her shoulder, sighed and pulled up a chair. “What? We have time,” Zoe said. “The store doesn’t open for another half hour and we paid for the whole hour of Internet access.” She paged through several lines of results, then clicked on a story about an incident at a hotel in the Via Chiaia area. The translation wasn’t flawless, but she got the gist of the article. She twisted toward Jack. “Someone called the police and reported a bomb at the hotel in Room 12.”
Jack gave the article a considering look. “That could be what the police released to the media.”
“You mean that may not be what happened? Why would they lie? Why would they do that?”
“Maybe that’s what they were asked to do. We’ve been a l
ot more relaxed this morning because we think they don’t know where we are. Maybe that’s what they want us to think. We let our guard down, they’ll catch us unaware.”
Zoe glanced at the window, almost expecting to see uniformed men closing in on them. But there was no one there except a short, sixtyish Italian woman puffing away on a cigarette as she walked her Corgi and a delivery guy pushing a cart full of boxes.
“Or maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe we got caught up in some crank call,” Jack said.
“I don’t believe that,” Zoe said.
“Me either.”
“Okay, one more site,” she said as she went to Jenny Singletarry’s blog. She’d broken the story about the sighting of them in Vegas. Maybe she had something else. The page loaded with a picture of Connor smiling roguishly, his eyes twinkling under his blond hair. The title of the article was “Con Man.”
Zoe read aloud, “Connor Freeman appeared to be a partner in a small business start-up that had beaten the odds in the sometimes brutal green industry sector, but his murder reveals that he was more con man than anything else, and his business was more a house of cards than a solid investment. A man with a shady past, he’d spent most of his life in Las Vegas, running small time scams...” Zoe quickly ran through the list of known scams Connor had pulled to the next section.
“Questions remain as to why Freeman moved his scams to Dallas and whether or not his business partner was also his partner in the GRS con, which bilked money from companies and investors, promising green recycling options, but then disposed of the products in the cheapest—and least green—way possible. Bogus press releases and chatter on trading message boards pushed the stock price up until it collapsed. Investors, who are left with huge losses after the stock bottomed out, are fearful that they will never see the return on investment they were promised.”
Zoe swiveled toward Jack. “Could that be true? That GRS was a front? That’s what she’s saying, right?”
Jack closed his eyes for a few seconds. “I don’t see how it’s possible. I checked everything. I approved everything. I talked with our clients, the presidents of those companies. And our contacts overseas...I spoke to them, too.”
“She has a long list of sources,” Zoe said, reluctantly. The fine print, complete with lots of links was almost as long as the story. “And, Connor did have two sets of books,” Zoe said, slowly. “I don’t suppose it’s crazy to think he could set things up to make it look like you had clients when you didn’t.”
Jack ran his hand down over his mouth as he shook his head. “Most of them were very hard to get in touch with. I’d call them; they’d call back and leave a message. I wrote it off...time zones, they were busy people. It was all fake,” he said quietly. “A mirage.”
“Not all of it,” Zoe said, pointing to a paragraph. “It says there were some legitimate contracts and some recycling was done as promised last year, but then everything else...”
“Our explosive growth, our amazing rise, that was phony.” Jack blew out a breath and shook his head. “It was engineered to make it seem like we were a good investment. Connor was always all about the stock. He wasn’t too interested in what we actually did, just the stock price.”
Jack said something under his breath, and Zoe gripped his arm. “You’re not the first one to be conned and, apparently, he was really good at conning people. I never suspected he did this. I knew he was a jerk. I had him pegged on that one, but the rest...I had no idea. He’d fooled a lot of people. I’m beginning to see why someone wanted to kill him.”
Jack didn’t reply. His face was tight and angry as he scrolled through the article again. Zoe knew he was mentally beating himself up over the mistakes he’d made. She decided to leave him alone. Instead, she concentrated on sorting out her thoughts. Things had been moving so fast that she’d barely had time to process everything that had happened. This was the first chance she’d had to catch her breath and think.
“So, first, we assumed Connor’s death was somehow related to your old job and the incident with Francesca, but Costa is deep in hiding somewhere. Retired and living the good life, probably taking senior bus trips and doing water aerobics at the local Y, at least according to two people who have connections and would know if he was involved. So we scratch him off the list and move on. You don’t have any other possible personal enemies—right?”
Jack gave a little half laugh. “God, I hope not.”
“Good. Okay, then back to Connor. Maybe all this is centered on Connor, and you just got caught up in it. Maybe one of the companies....”
“Unfortunately, it appears that we only had about three true clients according to this,” Jack said throwing his hand at the computer in disgust.
“Did any of the people who ran the companies seem like the type who’d...do something drastic if they found out about the fraud?”
“No, these are legitimate businesspeople we’re talking about. They’re into profit and loss, stock ratios, stuff like that. And lawyers,” he added. “They’d sue us before they’d try to kill us.”
Zoe leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Then one of the investors?”
Jack focused on the table. “I don’t think so, mostly because of the timing.” He angled the keyboard toward him and brought up a financial website. He typed in the code for GRS stock and looked at the last few weeks. “No, everything looked great, spectacular even, right up until the day Connor was murdered. Our stock was rising steadily, goosed on by fake press releases,” Jack said, running his hand over his mouth.
“According to the article on that blog, Connor spent quite a bit of time on financial message boards talking the stock up, too.”
“Right, but the stock price didn’t begin to fall until after Connor died. It looks like it’s bottomed out,” he paused and swallowed as if it were painful for him to even say the rest of the sentence, “at seventeen cents. Even if an investor suspected something, the stock didn’t go down until after Connor died. No, I don’t think it was a disgruntled investor.”
“And killing Connor and framing you wouldn’t solve the problem of their lost investment,” Zoe said.
“That’s the other portion of this equation—the money. Where is it?”
Zoe spread her hands. “I don’t know the first thing about tracking missing money.”
Jack said, “I’m sure the FBI is tracking that. If there’s a way to find out where it went, they’ll uncover it.”
“So that leaves us with...no money and no suspects?” Zoe said, a feeling of gloom sweeping over her.
“About right.”
“There has to be a reason for all this. It wasn’t random,” Zoe said, straightening her back, determination returning. “We still don’t know what Connor was doing here in Venice. Let’s run that down and see what we find out. Maybe that will answer our questions.”
“It’s all we have left.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I’LL be fine,” Zoe said, placing her hand firmly on Jack’s shoulder as he rose to follow. She pushed him back down into the chair at the café table. “Only one of us should go. Two people will stand out more, and it’s better if she only sees one of us. That way, if the police question her later...if they track down where we went, she’ll only have seen me.”
“If you’re not back in five minutes, I’m coming in.”
“Fine. Just don’t be early.”
Zoe squared her shoulders and tried not to look anxious as she crossed the campo to the hotel on The Street of Shops. She gripped the photo in her hand and stepped into the tiny room that served as the hotel lobby. A woman in her twenties with a beaky nose and frizzy golden hair in a halo around her head sat behind the desk.
“Boun giorno. English?” Zoe asked.
Zoe thought the young woman’s sharp nod didn’t bode well for potential information gathering. Zoe held out the picture of Connor, but the woman kept her clasped hands together on the desk. She see
med to be all business.
“Have you seen this man? He’s gone. Just up and left,” Zoe said. It was true. Connor was gone. He wasn’t ever coming back.
The woman looked at the picture for a long moment, her lips clamped together. Zoe had to get something from this woman, she thought, quickly looking over the desk. There was now a laptop among the papers and, if she knew Jack, his next suggestion would be to get a look at the laptop. Zoe didn’t want to do that—look what had happened last time they’d tried to look at someone’s computer. Surely, she could convince this woman to help her? The blond had unclasped her hands and was now tapping a pen against a stack of papers impatiently.
“I’m sorry to take up your time, but if you could help me out, I’d really appreciate it.” Still no change in her facial expression. Zoe was seriously beginning to wonder if the woman spoke English at all. “He was supposed to be somewhere else, but I found his travel plans, and he’s been here—a lot.” She stumbled on, thinking of everything that had happened in the last few days, she let the horror of finding a dead body, the questioning by the police and the feds, the thought that Jack was dead, the fear that had raced through her when Stubby Guy shot at her...she let her emotions surface and felt her throat go scratchy and her vision blur slightly. She sniffed, trying to get herself back under control. She couldn’t completely lose it here in front of this cold stranger.
“You should sit,” the woman said as she yanked opened a sticky drawer, pulled several tissues out, and handed them to Zoe.
As Zoe leaned forward to sit down, the ring she wore on the chain slipped over the neckline of her shirt and swung free. Zoe took the tissue and wiped her eyes while the woman stared at the ring for a moment. Then she abruptly held out her hand for the picture. Zoe handed it over.
“Because I hate cheating bastards, I will help you,” she said. She gave the picture a quick glance. “Yes. He was here. Several times. Signore Johnson. He comes, stays in Room Eight, always alone. He does not meet anyone here or bring back anyone,” she said, and Zoe was surprised to see a trace of compassion in her face. “That is all I know.”