by Kay Hooper
“You don’t want to kill me, Adam.”
“That’s up to you. But I’ll sure as hell turn your ass in.”
Max groaned. “Might as well kill me. You know they will.”
“That,” Adam said, “is not my problem.”
“Wait! I have something that might be worth listening to.”
“I doubt it.”
“I swear, Adam!”
“Then let’s hear it.”
Cagey, Max said, “You’ll let me go? Give me a head start before you call out the dogs? That’s all I’m asking, Adam.”
“That depends on what you have to say, Max.”
“I say kill him,” Nicholas offered, supremely indifferent. “If you let him go, he’ll just turn up somewhere else and pull another stunt like today.”
“No, I won’t, I swear.”
“But you want to get even, Max,” Adam reminded him. “I ruined your life, remember?”
“Yeah, but if you let me go now, you’ll sort of be giving it back to me. And I’d appreciate that, Adam. We’d be all square.”
“Now, do you really expect me to believe that?”
“I wish you would,” Max said earnestly.
Nicholas let out a short laugh, which Adam knew was more amused than it sounded. It sounded derisive, and Max flinched.
“Adam, I swear I’ll get out of your life and stay out. I swear.”
“Let’s hear what you have to say, Max.” Max cleared his throat. “If you could let go of me, it’d be easier.”
“No.”
“Well, okay. I just thought—”
Adam tightened his fingers for a moment, then eased off. “Max, pretend you’re talking for your life. Because you are.”
“Right. Right. You know I’ve sort of been watching you. Not every day, just sometimes.”
Adam merely nodded, not admitting that Max’s greatest talent—an ability to blend into his surroundings—had prevented Adam from noticing the surveillance.
“Well, I saw something else while I was watching you.”
Nicholas barked suddenly, “Spit it out, goddammit!”
Max jumped. “Okay! Somebody else has been following you. I saw two different guys at different times.”
“Following just me?”
“Well—you and the girl.”
Adam stared at him. “Who were they?”
“One looked like a crook,” Max answered. “Scruffy as hell. The other one … I dunno. Too polished to be a crook or a cop. Maybe a spook. Hard to say. They stayed well back. Knew what they were doing, both of them. It didn’t look like a hit, Adam, honest. Surveillance.”
Adam glanced at Nicholas, then looked back at Max. “What did the polished one look like?”
“Well, big, blond. Built sort of like you. As a matter of fact, he reminded me of you a bit. Way he moved, I guess, like he wouldn’t have made a sound. I never got a good look at his face, Adam, he kept to the shadows mostly.”
“Okay, Max. You just bought yourself a head start. Twenty-four hours. Got it? Twenty-four hours and you better be out of here.” He let go of Max’s throat and stepped back.
“I’m leaving right now, Adam, I swear.” Max didn’t even bother to straighten his crumpled shirt. He sidled away from Adam and studiously avoided Nick’s gaze as he hurried out the door Nick held open for him.
Adam flexed his hands, which were in even worse shape than they’d been earlier, and went to one of the stained sinks to hold them under cold running water.
Closing the door behind Max, Nicholas thumbed the safety on and put the gun inside the waistband of his pants at the small of his back, where it was concealed by his jacket. “I told you to let me,” he said.
“You were more effective just standing there holding that gun.”
“Do you think Max is on his way out of town?”
“I think so, but I’ll stay alert just in case he has a brave moment.”
“He’d be less trouble all around if you turned him in, Adam.”
“I know. But he’s right. They’d kill him.”
“Which is, as you said, not your problem.”
Adam shrugged. Changing the subject, he said, “I’m surprised nobody came banging on the door while we were in here.”
“I’m not. Every soul in the bar saw us drag Max back here. Nobody was going to risk getting in the middle of that. Not in a place like this.”
“I suppose.” Adam dried his hands gingerly on a paper towel. “The scruffy one’s Simon, right?”
“Nobody’d ever call him polished, so we can assume so.”
“Then who the hell is the other one?”
“You never saw him?”
“No. I saw Simon, but I was looking for him.” He tossed the paper towel toward an overflowing trash can and turned to stare at Nicholas. “Goddammit, I was hoping it was just Max. Just me.”
Nicholas shook his head. “The odds always favored Rachel being a target, you know that.”
“I’m not liking the odds very much, Nick. That explosion was meant to kill her, not frighten her. I told you about the timer. The police don’t have a clue, but I recognized it. It’s the same kind of thing Walsh used before. Designed to leave nothing alive.”
“Then we’ll have courtroom evidence against him. If I can maneuver him into the net.”
“I just don’t get his motive for going after Rachel. Even if he did owe Duncan five million, there’s no way she could have gone after it. She doesn’t know what we suspect, doesn’t even know who the JW in her father’s notebook is. So how does she threaten him? How could he even imagine that she could threaten him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit. Let’s get out of here.” Adam didn’t say anything else until they’d made their way back through the bar and into Nicholas’s car.
It was nearly midnight; it had taken them hours to find Max.
As Nicholas started the car, Adam said suddenly, “My jacket.”
“You haven’t been wearing one.”
“I left it at Rachel’s.” He paused, then repeated hollowly, “I left it at Rachel’s.”
Wednesday morning was bright and sunny, so Adam wasn’t too surprised when Fiona told him Rachel was out in the garden. But he was surprised when the housekeeper politely showed him as far as the sunroom.
Either Fiona was mellowing toward him, or she was having a really good day.
Adam didn’t push his luck by questioning. He just thanked her and went on into the garden in search of Rachel.
He found her near the center, sitting on a teak bench as she gazed absently into a koi pond, where bright flashes of color spoke of active fish. Adam paused for a moment before announcing himself, watching her. She looked none the worse for her close call the day before, but her long-sleeved silk blouse hid both the abrasion on her arm and most of the elastic bandage wound about her sprained wrist.
Even as he watched, she lifted that wrist and used her right hand to massage it gently, wincing.
“Are you going to tell Rachel she wasn’t the target?”
“I don’t think so. We know she’s still in danger. She needs to believe it too. If I tell her that car was aimed at me, she’ll go back to doubting that explosion was meant for her. She won’t see any reason to be cautious.”
“And explaining why you were a target would lead to so many questions, wouldn’t it, Adam?”
Questions. God.
Adam walked slowly to Rachel and said, “Good morning.”
She looked up at him, and the wariness in her eyes went through him like a bullet. “Hi. I didn’t know if you were coming by.”
“I didn’t even get the chance to say good-bye yesterday, much less make plans. You were obviously in good hands with Fiona and Darby.”
“Yes, I was.”
She hadn’t invited him to sit down, but he did anyway, in a chair at a right angle to her bench. “How are you?”
“Okay. A little sore.” She glanced at his hands and frowned
. “I didn’t know your hands were that bad.”
“They look worse than they feel.” Since he had iced them the night before, there was little swelling. But they were sore from numerous abrasions and bruises, and still stiff as hell.
“I know you were protecting me when we hit the pavement. Otherwise, I’d be a real mess.”
“Rachel—”
“I just want to thank you. I have to.” Once again it was said mechanically, with more resolution than anything else.
He drew a breath. “You found the notebook, didn’t you? In my jacket?”
She was staring at the fish, her profile still. “Yes.”
“Rachel, I saw it in the bottom drawer of your father’s desk just before we left the house yesterday. I was going to tell you about it.”
“Were you?”
“Of course I was.”
“All right.”
That wariness again. It tore at him.
“Rachel, you said you trusted me.”
“And you told me it might be better for both of us if I didn’t trust so quickly.”
“I was wrong. You have to trust someone. Trust me. You have to know I’m not trying to hurt you.”
She turned her head and looked at him for a long while. Her eyes remained wary. “I believe you’ve saved my life twice. How can I not trust you?”
Adam wished it weren’t a question. He reached over and covered her hands with one of his. “Rachel, I shouldn’t have taken the notebook and not told you about it. I’m sorry. But, I swear, with everything that happened later, I simply forgot all about it.”
“All right. Did you look in the notebook, Adam?” Her voice was steady.
“Just a glance. Numbers. And what looked like some kind of code.”
“His own private code. He taught it to me when I was a child, and we used it in notes to each other. It was a kind of game. I still use it myself whenever I need to take notes.”
“You can read the entries?”
Rachel nodded. “Yes.”
“And?”
“And it’s what we’ve been looking for, Adam. It’s the journal Dad kept detailing his private loans. The recipients are identified.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
If Mercy expected things to be different between her and Nicholas after the greater intimacy of Monday night, she was not disappointed. But she was disappointed—and frustrated—to find that the difference did not appear to be a positive one.
She had a strong feeling that Nick was cautiously withdrawing, that he regretted even the tiny step they had taken from a casual relationship to something closer.
He’d been gone when she woke up the previous morning—which had given her the chance to stop by Rachel’s— and he’d busied himself for most of the day in his office, not even taking a break for lunch. Then Adam Delafield had stalked into the bank, looking as if he wanted to take something major apart with his bare hands, and they had left together just moments later.
Mercy didn’t find out about Rachel’s latest brush with death until she had called her last evening. Rachel had sounded shaky enough, so Mercy didn’t mention Adam’s arrival at the bank or his subsequent disappearance with Nicholas.
But she wondered. Jesus, what was going on?
And when Nicholas showed up at his usual early hour today, she wondered even more. He was perfectly pleasant as he greeted the few staff members there so early, then shut himself in his office once again. The lights on Mercy’s phone told her he was on his private line for much of the morning, and when she ventured to stick her head into his office once and ask if he wanted coffee, she was waved off with no more than an absent smile.
She had an uneasy hunch that he and Adam had gone hunting the driver of a black car last night, though she had no way of knowing whether they had been successful. And while it relieved her to believe neither of them wanted to hurt Rachel, she couldn’t get past the idea that both men knew a lot more about the situation than they were willing to admit—at least to the women in their lives.
And despite telling Nicholas she didn’t mean to meddle in his private affairs, she couldn’t just sit by and wait for him to deign to tell her what was going on.
If he ever did.
Not that she had any intention of following him again. No, that wouldn’t get her anywhere. Besides, Mercy’s strength wasn’t in TV-private-eye tactics, as Nicholas had so mockingly called them.
Her strength was in finances.
If this involved Nicholas, Adam, and Rachel, then the common denominator was obviously Duncan Grant. And what Nicholas either didn’t know or chose to ignore was Mercy’s familiarity with most areas of Duncan’s life.
Since she had been executive assistant to the senior partner of the bank for five years, Mercy not only had all the computer access codes to bank records, but also access to at least some of Duncan’s private records. And none of that had been cleared from the computer because Mercy had not yet been told to do so.
Nicholas wasn’t the only one who could be secretive.
Mercy made sure Leigh and the rest of the staff were occupied, then shut herself in her own office and got down to work.
If there were answers in numbers, she’d find them. Sooner or later.
“He kept pretty complete notes,” Rachel said.
On the other side of her father’s desk in the visitor’s chair, Adam said, “Oh? How complete?”
Rachel looked at him for a moment, then began to read aloud from the small black notebook open on the blotter before her. “‘He strikes me as a fine young man with an exceptionally bright future ahead of him. The betrayal of his former employers coupled with his unjust imprisonment has left him wary and disinclined to believe anyone would help him without expecting something in return. I also believe he has placed himself in dangerous situations since he was released from prison several months ago, possibly in an attempt to exert control over his life, but more probably because his own experience left him with a keen understanding of cruelty and injustice.’”
Adam was looking down at his hands. “I had no idea he had given me so much thought.”
“Was he right? About the dangerous situations?”
Adam finally met her gaze, and smiled faintly. “Let’s just say I could have taken fewer chances along the way.”
Rachel nodded, accepting that for the moment. She was more relieved than she wanted to show that Duncan Grant had indeed lent Adam Delafield all that money five years ago, that he had recorded the loan and his impressions of the man in his notebook. But even with that reassurance, the wariness she felt toward Adam wouldn’t quite go away.
He was hiding something. Every time he looked at her, she could feel that intensity in him, and though she wasn’t sure what it meant, she had the uneasy feeling that Adam definitely wanted something of her. That he had always wanted something of her.
She just didn’t know what that was.
Returning her attention to the notebook, she said, “I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with most of this. All the loans except these last three have been repaid. We have to start there, don’t we?”
“I’d say so.”
“Okay.” She drew forward a legal pad, turned to the right page in the notebook, and spoke aloud as she began translating the notes onto the legal pad. “RS, lent a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, is—Robert Sherman. He’s apparently from Kansas City, where he has a small graphics design business. His partner left him in the lurch, and that’s why he needed the cash to reinvest in the business, get some new equipment and whatnot. According to his notes, Dad gave him the money—outright.”
That surprised Adam. “Outright? No repayment?”
“No. He told Sherman that when he was a success in years to come, to pass on the favor.” Rachel looked at Adam with a slight frown. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d done that more than once with some of the smaller amounts. I’ll have to check on that later. In the m
eantime …”
She found the next entry that interested them. “LM, lent one and a half million, is Lori Mitchell. She lives in a small town in Oregon, where the loan helped her start her own newspaper. Seems her father had known Dad, and that’s why she turned to him for help when the local banks refused her loan application. The loan from Dad isn’t due to be repaid for another three years. That may be why she hasn’t contacted me—if she even knows Dad was killed. He notes here that he told her to concentrate on getting her paper going and not waste time keeping in touch with him.”
“Oregon,” Adam said. “We can check, just to make sure she’s where she’s supposed to be. But I think we can probably cross her off the list.”
Rachel made a note, then turned a couple of pages of the notebook and began translating again. “JW, lent five million dollars, is—Jordan Walsh. It says he lives in D.C.” She glanced up at Adam. “Close enough.”
“I’d say so. What does it say in Duncan’s notes?”
“Let’s see…. The money was lent to start a business, though what kind isn’t mentioned. Dad was hesitant, but he was asked as a personal favor to lend the money.”
“Asked by whom?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“What does it say exactly, Rachel?”
She glanced at him again, then slowly translated aloud, “Walsh is very persuasive, and the company he means to start could help countless people. Still, I’m not entirely convinced this is the best way to finance his efforts. But as a personal favor to an old friend, I am willing to take the risk.’” She looked at Adam. “That’s it.”
“Nothing more?”
“Not here.” She thumbed through the remaining pages slowly. “I don’t see his name come up again.”
“When is the loan to be repaid?”
“Doesn’t say. But …”
“What?”
“Dad transferred the money to Walsh just a couple of months before he and Mom were killed. It was the last loan he made.”
“And one of the largest.”
“Yes.”
Adam frowned. “Then I’d say we need to find out a bit more about Jordan Walsh.”