Neither Shane nor Darius looked at me, which was for plausible deniability I was sure, but I couldn’t stop looking at Darius, whose handsomeness had just increased by an exponential of google to the bazillionth power.
“McCallum also replaced the book pull mechanism that opened the panic room door. I was unable to determine the exact placement of the new mechanism, but my best estimation is that it’s a push button set somewhere on the right side of the shelving unit at approximately waist to shoulder height. The new locking mechanism also seems to be made of inferior grade metal, as the weight load is insufficiently supported for silence.”
Shane was taking notes in a small composition notebook, and when he paused to take a sip of his water, she looked up. “What about inside the panic room?” she asked innocently.
“The frame, which we wired to the wall and also attached to the off-site alarm system, is unchanged and remains exactly as it was when the paintings were cut from their stretcher. The computer shows the feeds of the three extra cameras and the new thermals, and the stored feeds show a record of having been copied to an external drive.”
Crap. And … wow. He even checked to see if the recording of Colette’s tan-line-free booty was still there and/or had been copied. He truly was a most noble prince.
“Finally, and anecdotally, Sterling Gray seems to be quite fixated on the return of the missing painting, possibly even dangerously so.” And with that remarkable statement, Darius stood to leave and shot me a final, parting glance that had as much warning as warmth in it.
I quickly stood up too. “I was wondering,” I said pointedly to Shane, “if we could possibly reschedule lunch?”
She looked from me to Darius with a sly smile. “Of course. You have my number. Call me anytime.”
I smiled brightly, including Darius in my gaze. “I definitely will. Thank you for inviting me. It means more to me than you can possibly imagine.”
I gave Shane an impulsive hug and whispered “Thank you” in her ear before turning to Darius. “I’m headed downtown. Can I give you a ride?”
“A ride?” A smile inched its way across his face. “You have a horse?”
43
Darius
“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
Roald Dahl
Anna handed me the extra helmet she carried in the pannier, and when I was seated on the back of her bike with my arms wrapped around her waist and her body pressed against mine, she turned her head to look back at me. “Where to?”
“Your place,” I said instinctively. She searched my eyes for the briefest moment, then pulled her helmet on, started the bike, and drove.
It wasn’t far to her place from the café, but it was long enough for my brain to spin. My reason had clearly fled with the need to keep Anna free from Gray’s traps – hence the manufactured file update with Shane – but now that she knew the dangers, there was no way she would risk her freedom, so I could breathe again. Except my self-control was shattering with every moment I spent pressed against her as she sped through Chicago.
We parked behind the sprawling Victorian loft complex, and I followed Anna up the steps. She continued past her own studio to a private roof garden where potted herbs shared the sunlight with a couple of lounge chairs and a small table.
Anna stood in the sun and put her face up to the heat with closed eyes and a smile. “I love the first days of spring. It feels like the sun is elbowing its way through all the cold and gray saying, ‘Okay, that’s enough tough love. They’ve proven they can survive, now let’s give people a reason to live.’” She opened her eyes and looked over at a tree that reached nearly to the roof. “It’s also the time when the Minpins start to emerge from their homes in the tree to send their little ones out on the backs of the starlings to learn to fly.” She turned to me. “Did you know there are only two Minpin trees in Chicago, and we have one of them?”
I kissed her then, for her Roald Dahl reference and for being free to spout every bit of nonsense that inspired her. Anna’s surprise melted into heat and desire and scent and sound, and the only thing I felt was everything that was her – the whisper of her breath, the touch of her hands as they reached up my back, the scent of wildflowers in her hair, the feeling of her lips tasting, sipping, caressing mine. She fit against me perfectly.
Then she pulled back to look at me. “Why?”
Why kiss her? Because she was the flower to my hummingbird, the island to my storm-tossed ship, and because she was air to a suffocating man.
“Why did you help me?” she repeated.
“Because Gray would’ve trapped you, and you’re meant to be free.”
She studied my face. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“The firm has lawyers, Anna. We can figure out how to help your sister if Gray releases the video.”
She pulled back even further, and then out of my arms entirely. “He won’t release the video when I’ve put the painting back. He’ll still have no proof Colette was involved, or at the very least he’ll know she wasn’t working alone, so he won’t risk the information about the Manet getting out. It’ll be like nuclear arms – no one strikes because we all know we have them.”
When she put the painting back, not if. “You’re still going to do this.” It wasn’t phrased as a question because it wasn’t one. I knew – as soon as she said the words, I knew my compromise was for nothing. It didn’t matter how impossible or dangerous it was, Anna would do what she was going to do, regardless of the cost to her, to her sister and family, or to me.
Understanding seemed to dawn on her face, and she took another step back. “You thought I wouldn’t? You put your job and your integrity on the line to stop me from making another mistake.” Her hands went up as though to ward me away, and I expected an eruption of anger. What I got was something completely different.
“Oh Darius, I’m so sorry.”
I couldn’t process what that meant. “You’re sorry?”
“What you believe in is so important to you, and I’m just not worth the damage to your integrity or your identity.”
She turned away. “Don’t ever sell out.” Her voice broke, and I could hear the tears in it. “You’re too good, and I’ll only take you down.”
“Anna,” I began, wishing I could go back to kissing on the roof deck.
“I’ll take you back to work,” she said without meeting my eyes.
“I’ll call a car,” I said dully. I stopped in front of her and lifted her chin so she’d look me in the eyes. “I couldn’t bear it if they catch you.”
She closed her eyes. “I know.” Then she opened them again. “That’s why you should go.”
44
Anna
“Everyone knows dinosaurs couldn’t read, and look what happened to them.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
I spent the evening with the floor plans to the Gray mansion, acquired when Colette dated Gray’s architect, and the night stumbling from stress dream to night sweats to more stress dreams, until I finally dragged myself to the shower to wash the stink of fear from my skin, which swirled down the drain like viscous snot. I had a plan – not as good or thorough as the one that had gotten me into this mess – but the details I didn’t know kept sliding parts of the plan around like slippery eels that I couldn’t quite catch.
I spent a few hours with Colette going through the timeline of how she was going to get Sterling out of the house. A call to a P.I. I knew in Boston confirmed that Markham Gray was at his office there and had a full schedule of meetings planned for the next two days, and a visit to Sparky put the finishing touches on my kit. I avoided all thoughts of the look of betrayal on Darius’s face and focused instead on the gift of the information he’d given me about the current state of Gray’s security. I knew how heavy the price tag had been for him, and I treasured it.
Finally, it was time.
I’d modified my tube harness to fit the supplies I’d pa
cked and wore it outside a black bodysuit. I left my leather coat and helmet in the pannier of my motorcycle, which was parked in the alley one building over from Gray’s mansion, and then lurked my way around to the back of Gray’s property.
This was a trickier approach, but the extra cameras made it necessary. I checked my watch – Colette would be at the front door at nine p.m. to pick Sterling up for a late supper club seating. I had twenty minutes to make it to the third floor. I pulled the black silk balaclava down over my face, tucked my hair under the collar of my body suit, pulled up my big girl I can do this panties, and started to climb. My route over the wall and to the back of the mansion was designed to pick my way around camera views and skirt the edges of anything that could be seen from the house.
When no alarms heralded my presence, I started up the wall using window ledges and door frames as hand and foot holds. Gray’s mansion wasn’t a particularly difficult brick building to climb – I’d climbed worse – but there were two tough bits that required a bigger jump than I usually did without a harness. To find the courage for the first jump, I pictured my sister’s naked butt on a billboard, which wasn’t actually helpful because laughter isn’t generally conducive to landing well. My instinct to be like Honor, my D&D rogue, kicked in and saved me from a two-story fall, and I took a few seconds to calm the adrenaline jitters.
As motivation for my second jump, I pictured Darius on his boat, looking relaxed and happy. The peace that flooded me at the thought of his happiness was more centering than all the yoga breathing I’d ever done, and I landed the jump perfectly.
“Just like Honor,” I whispered to myself, and I would have patted myself on the back if death hadn’t been on the line. From there it was a fairly easy grab for the small Juliet balcony that led to the third floor landing. I sent a silent thank you to the original architect of the house for his or her love of Shakespeare, hauled myself up over the railing, and crouched down next to the door to work on the lock.
I checked my watch again – five minutes to go until Colette rang the doorbell. I slid the lock-picks out from the runner’s belt I wore around my waist and went to work. When I was sixteen I’d taught myself how to break into combination locks because it was something Honor would know how to do, and from there, I mastered using lock picks on a variety of household locks. The mechanism on this door wasn’t the easiest, by any means, but it also wasn’t the hardest, and I heard the telltale click of the tumblers opening within three-and-a-half minutes. I put the picks away, pulled on my grippy gloves, and waited.
Forty-five seconds later by my watch, the doorbell rang. I crouched further into the corner of the balcony and waited to see if Sterling passed by. He didn’t, which meant he’d been on one of the two lower floors. A moment after the faint sound of an electronic snick, I opened the door and slipped inside. Ten seconds later, the system informed the house that it had re-armed, and I waited one full minute more, listening to the sounds of silence.
Okay, I inhaled, time to do this. The third floor landing was a blind spot, and the main staircase used motion sensor tech. The bannister was fair game though, so I used grippy gloves and climbing shoes to slow my backward slide down. On the second floor landing I was careful to avoid the steps as I pulled off my harness and removed all the contents except the fake Manet.
This was the part I’d worked out with Sparky to protect me from the thermal imaging sensors in the hallway. With his tech geekery and my fundamental weirdness, we’d put together the perfect, well perfectly ridiculous, plan.
I picked up my T. rex costume from among my supplies on the floor and put it on. Then I attached a portable backpacking heater to the pump and inflated the costume with ninety-eight degree air. It would make me sweat, but would also effectively create a body heat signature in the shape of a T. rex. I sauntered down the hall, in full view of the thermal cameras, like the dino-badass I was.
Finding the hidden latch for the panic room door just under the Agatha Christie shelf was only a challenge because the T. rex had stupid little T. rex arms with the reach of a house lizard, which meant I had to unzip the front, causing a momentary pressure loss. I managed to find the latch before the whole thing deflated, so my size and body shape camouflage retained some of its value. Once inside the panic room, I closed the door behind me and quickly shed Rexie so I could go to work.
I flipped the computer screen on and checked the cameras for movement. There was none, so I kept the exterior camera angles onscreen and pulled out the portable stretcher Sparky had made for me. It was quick and easy to build, and he’d even installed a clamping system that allowed the Manet to be stretched over it without staples.
Phase two involved the extraction tool he’d designed. First it cut through the original wood stretcher to create smaller pieces, and then I used it to carefully pull the pieces free from the outer frame without triggering the alarm. This process took some strength and the precision of a large scale game of Operation, but I’d been practicing since the day Sparky had made it for me.
Retrieving the old stretcher was a vital part of the nuclear arms part of the plan. I believed my intrigue-loving aunt could have hidden something inside the edges of the fake Manet when she painted them, something that could either implicate Gray or exonerate my mom, and I was taking it for insurance.
Once the broken stretcher with the attached edges of two paintings was folded up and put into the tube, I placed the newly stretched Manet into the old frame, stuck it to the wall with Command strips for support, and checked the monitor one last time.
Something moved in the image of the south side of the house, and I froze. The cameras to the south were aimed at the garages, and if a resident of the mansion came home, that’s the direction they’d come from. I stared at the screen for a long moment, but the frame remained empty of anything on two legs or four, so I quickly donned my tube harness and then Rexie, which I re-inflated with hot air. I was ready to make my escape.
My plan was to climb back up the stair bannister to the third floor, wait for the alarm system to disengage when Sterling got home, and slip out the back before anyone was the wiser. It was a decent plan with a sixty-four percent chance of complete success, a twenty percent chance of at least partial injury, and a sixteen percent chance of catastrophic failure. Unfortunately, I realized I was in sixteen percent territory the second my dino-badass-self stepped out of the panic room door.
“There is a gun pointed at your head, and the police are on their way. Put your hands up or I’ll shoot.”
The whole thing would have been hilarious, except for all the reasons it wasn’t. I genuinely tried to put my hands up, but all I could do was watch the tiny T. rex arms strain to break free of their minuscule range of motion and hope whoever was holding the gun would double over in hysterics instead of shooting me.
“Actually,” said a voice that inspired the very best kind of chills, “perhaps we should let the dinosaur have a word.”
45
Darius
“Some of the best moments in life are the ones you can’t tell anyone about.”
Darius Masoud
The expression on Sterling Gray’s face when Anna turned around and he realized he held a gun on a T. rex was almost funnier than the T. rex herself.
The T. rex said something unintelligible behind the sound of the pump, and then took a step toward Sterling.
He raised his gun a little higher and took a step back at the same moment Shane stepped into the hallway behind him. I held my hand up and said calmly, “Sterling, the dinosaur is going to remove the costume so she can speak. Please lower your gun.”
“She?” he asked, still twitchy and tense.
“Mr. Gray, please do as my partner asks. We both have weapons, and the T. rex,” Shane had to work to keep her voice from breaking, “is unarmed … as it were.”
I was less successful, and a chuckle escaped before I could catch it, which set Shane off into sputtering laughter. She had to lower her gun an
d put her hands on her knees to catch her breath, and that was what finally got to Sterling.
He lowered his gun and tried for stern, but couldn’t quite remove all the suppressed laughter from his voice. “What the hell is a dinosaur doing in my house?”
Anna mumbled something unintelligible again, and I gestured for her to unzip her suit.
She shut the pump off, unzipped the front of the suit, and her black balaclava’d face finally emerged. “Hot,” she gasped, ripping the balaclava off to reveal her beautiful face covered with a sheen of sweat.
Sterling couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “You! But I just left you at the club.”
Anna glared at him. “You left Colette behind at the club? What’d you do, slip out the back and leave her with the bill? Where’d you learn your manners, a kennel?” she spat angrily.
“You’re not Colette,” Sterling said uncertainly. Granted it was dark in the hallway, but I’d been able to tell the sisters apart within an instant of meeting Colette.
Anna sighed and her anger dissipated. “I’m not. Please tell me she’s fine.”
“She’s fine. I told her that something didn’t agree with my stomach, but that I’d be back.” Sterling seemed to lose his edge as the discussion turned to such inanities. “You’re her sister,” he finally said.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in my house?”
She compressed her lips together for a moment, then finally spoke through clenched teeth. “Returning something. Are the police really on their way?”
Code of Honor Page 26