Stalking Steven

by Jenna Bennett

  I told Rachel about the two men and the three young women. Her lips pursed as she listened, and after a second she started clacking on the computer keyboard. “The place belongs to someone called Stella Ivanov. Hence the name, I guess.”

  I nodded.

  “She’s owned it a couple of years. Bought it off a corporation called BGH. Got a good deal on it, too.”

  Good for her.

  Rachel leaned back on the office chair. It creaked. “Let me guess. You’re going there tonight, when they close, to see if you can get a better look at the girls.”

  The thought had crossed my mind. However— “I’m not sure I’ll be able to. It depends on how long this operation at the Arena takes. I have to call Diana next, and see if she wants moral support.”

  Rachel refrained from rolling her eyes, but I could see that she wanted to. “Just tell her you don’t want to miss the excitement, Gina. You don’t have to fib to the person who hired you.”

  I guess I didn’t. But it still seemed more polite to couch the request as me doing her a favor rather than her doing me one.

  “At any rate, I don’t know how long I’ll be there. I guess it depends on what happens. Mendoza is making arrangements, so I guess they’re hoping to catch someone in the act of picking up the money. It could take some time. And I don’t know how late the club stays open.”

  “Later than the Arena,” Rachel said. “My guess is you’ll have time to do both. Unless you plan to get some sleep at some point tonight.”

  I hadn’t really thought about that part of it. I’d been up early this morning. If I went to the Arena, and then to Stella’s to lie in wait and watch when the two Russian men and the three girls left, and then perhaps follow them home, I might be looking at tomorrow night before I got any sleep.

  On the other hand, if I didn’t do it tonight, there was no guarantee I’d get to do it at all. They were there tonight. They might not be there tomorrow. The fact that I’d been there asking questions, on top of Zachary having been there last night, might mean that they’d suspend operations for a while.

  By the time I got there later, they may have closed up shop and left, if it came to that.

  “I think I’d better try,” I told Rachel, and explained my reasoning.

  She nodded. “Would you like me to come along? For company? Or moral support?”

  I blinked. I hadn’t expected her to offer to do that, but it was nice of her. “Are you sure you want to? I’m not paying you to do field work.” Just office administration.

  “You’re not paying me at all right now,” Rachel pointed out. “The only one of us who’s getting paid is Zachary, and he’s in the hospital. If I can help figure out who put him there, I’d like to.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” I said. “Bring binoculars.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Dark clothes. Something you don’t mind getting dirty, or getting ripped. We might be crawling around in the trees.”

  She looked at me. If I haven’t mentioned it, Rachel is about fifteen years older than me, in her mid-fifties, and not skinny.

  “Not in them,” I clarified. “We’re not climbing. Just hanging out under them. Where we can see the back door of the club when theye take the girls out.”

  Rachel nodded. “Give me a call when you’re ready to go. I’ll meet you there.”

  I warned her that it could be late. “Maybe we’ll open late tomorrow. It’s not like anyone’s beating down our doors.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Rachel said, and pushed her chair back. “Take the dog with you.”

  I planned to. She was looking at me expectantly, and wagged her tail hopefully when I turned her way. “Time to go. Car ride.”

  She jumped up, grinning happily, her doggie tongue lolling. “Mendoza gave her to me,” I told Rachel as we all headed for the door.

  “I know. Yesterday morning.”

  “Permanently. Araminta Tucker doesn’t want her. She wanted Edwina taken to the pound. Can you imagine? So Mendoza told me I could keep her.”

  We both watched as Edwina pranced out the door and over to the bare ground under the small tree where she liked to do her business.

  “Better you than me,” Rachel said, and headed for her car. “Call me.”

  I assured her I would, and then I scooped Edwina up and put her in the car so Rachel wouldn’t run over her—or she wouldn’t get spooked by the car coming at her and take off out of the parking lot and down the street. That done, I locked up the office and drove the two of us to the nearest pet store, where I bought food and snacks and another couple of bowls so Edwina could have a set at the office and a set at home.

  “Welcome home,” I told her when I put her down in the foyer of the penthouse. “I know you’ve been here before.” Last night, and yesterday morning after Griselda Grimshaw’s murder. “You might remember. Or maybe you were too distraught at the death of your human. But this is your permanent home now. Griselda’s gone, and Araminta doesn’t want you. And I’m not giving you to the pound. So it’s going to be you and me. Here. And at the office. I’ll take good care of you, I promise.”

  Or the best care I knew how, anyway. She was my first dog. She’d just have to deal with any mistakes I made.

  I looked around. “I’m sorry there’s no yard.” Maybe I needed to rethink this penthouse business. I liked living here. It was a nice change from the house in Hillwood, which had so much space I didn’t need, now that there was just me. And besides, it had been nice to take over David’s love nest, snubbing my nose at him, even if he was dead and probably didn’t have any idea what I was doing. But if Edwina needed a yard…

  “We’ll take a walk after I feed you,” I said. “Get some exercise. It’ll be good for both of us.”

  Edwina wagged her little stub of a tail and headed for the living room. In the doorway, she turned and looked at me over her shoulder.

  I lifted the bag of dog food and bowls more securely and followed.

  Chapter 14

  The Gulch, where the penthouse is located, isn’t more than half a dozen blocks from the Arena. Diana rang my doorbell at ten-thirty, and I headed downstairs and got into her car. “Is that it?”

  There was a bag in the backseat. Your standard duffel, with a shoulder strap and a zipper.

  She nodded, her jaw set.

  “A hundred thousand dollars doesn’t take up a lot of space, does it?”

  She glanced at me. “It’s newspaper.”

  Right. “But that’s what a hundred thousand dollars in cash would look like, if it was stuffed into a bag. Right?”

  Diana shrugged. “If we don’t know, I don’t think whoever’s picking it up will.”

  She had a point. “Did Mendoza give it to you?”

  “A uniformed officer dropped it off, with Jaime’s compliments. And the suggestion that I should leave you home tonight.”

  “I hate him,” I said.

  Diana smirked. “Sure you do. Anyway, it was too late. I had already agreed to take you with me.”

  “You could have changed your mind.”

  She shrugged. “I wanted the company. This is weird. And a little scary.”

  It was weird. And a little scary. “Are you worried that Steven’s actually in danger?”

  “Not so much,” Diana admitted, as we took the turn from Twelfth Avenue onto Charlotte, into downtown proper. “There’s no reason to think he’s in danger. Right? He was with the girl willingly.”

  He had been. At least as far as I’d been able to tell.

  “Did Mendoza happen to mention that I got a phone call from Steven in the middle of the night?”

  “No,” Diana said, with a sharp glance at me. “How come you didn’t mention it yourself?”

  “When I saw you this morning, I didn’t know about it.”

  She looked confused, and I added, “It came in on the office phone. I didn’t get it until I got to the office this morning. After I left your house.”

&n
bsp; Outside the window, the State Capitol building went by on the left. Diana signaled to turn right on Fifth. “And you didn’t think to call and tell me?”

  “I called Mendoza,” I said.

  “Mendoza isn’t married to Steven!”

  Again, she had a point. “I’m sorry. After we’re done here, we can go up there and I’ll let you listen to it. It isn’t very long. Just a few sentences. He said he’d recognized me yesterday—two days ago now—and that you must be worried. And that he wanted me to tell you something. But before he could get it out, someone came in and caught him. The girl, I guess. He said ‘Nothing,’ and hung up. I assume she asked him what he was doing.”

  Diana’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Did she hurt him?”

  “Not that I could hear,” I said. “He didn’t sound scared of her. Just like he didn’t want her to know that he’d been trying to get a message to you.”

  “Why didn’t he just call me? Instead of you?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “He didn’t want to deal with you directly? You’d ask questions he didn’t want to answer? Or maybe he just didn’t want to talk to anyone in person. I wondered why he’d called the office in the middle of the night—it was around one in the morning when the call came in. He had to know nobody would be there. And Mendoza said that maybe that was the point. He wanted to leave a message, not talk to a real person. If he’d called either of us on our cell phones, we would have picked up. Even if it was the middle of the night. Especially you.”

  Diana nodded. Her hands had relaxed on the wheel again. Up ahead, we could see the plaza in front of the Arena, and the barricades blocking Fifth Avenue to vehicular traffic south of Broadway.

  “Maybe we should have called a cab,” I said. “It’s going to be hard to find somewhere to park.”

  “Jaime said to pull behind the barricade.” She drove across the intersection and straight up to it.

  The uniformed cop on duty took a couple of steps toward the car, his mouth opening. He was getting ready to tell us to beat it, I’m sure. Diana rolled down her window. She didn’t even have to speak. The young man took one look at her and nodded. “Just a second, ma’am.” He hustled to pull the barricade out of the way so Diana could drive through and up to the curb. A car that tried to sneak in behind us was summarily waved off, and left with an irritated blast of the horn.

  Diana cut the engine and sat for a second without speaking or moving. The dashboard clock showed that we still had some time to spare before eleven, so I didn’t push her to move more quickly. We’d still get inside by the deadline. As for what happened after that…

  “Have you gotten any further instructions about this?” I asked. If she had, she hadn’t told me about them. And the note this morning had been vague. Just ‘bring the money to the Arena,’ but nothing about what to do with it once it got there.

  She shook her head. “I guess we just walk in with the bag and see what happens.”

  I guessed so. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” Diana said. “But I don’t think I’ll be any more ready if we sit here for another five minutes. Let’s just get it over with.”

  My feelings exactly. I opened my door and got out. Diana did the same, and reached into the back seat for the duffel bag. The young cop had stepped back to guard the barricade again, but he gave us a nod as we headed inside.

  The guard on the door didn’t ask us if we had tickets, he just swung the door open and let us into the building. With my newfound PI skills, I deduced that he was probably another cop—this one undercover in a Bridgestone Arena uniform—and he was expecting us. Diana gave him a pleasant smile, and we headed across the lobby just as the doors to the interior opened.

  It was like opening the flood gates on Percy Priest Lake and letting the water burst over the dam. They frothed out, a mass of people in team colors. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A surging mass of humanity aiming for the doors to the outside.

  I moved a little closer to Diana and looped my arm through hers, keeping the duffel bag between us. In this kind of crush, it would be only too easy to snatch it out of her hand and melt into the crowd before she even realized the bag was gone. And I was damned if I’d let whoever was behind this get away without giving us a good look at his or her face. Even if there was nothing but newspaper in the bag.

  Mendoza’s face floated out of the crowd. He was scanning, and for a second, he met my eyes straight on. I almost forgot that I wasn’t supposed to know him; it was only at the last second that I remembered that he didn’t want me to give any indication that I knew who he was. But he was close to us. Maybe he’d realized, as I had, that snatching the bag in the melee as everyone was fighting their way to the exits, had been the plan all along.

  Another familiar face floated out of the crowd, just in front of me. It took a second of frowning concentration before I was able to put a name with it. “Ms. Tucker? What are you doing here?”

  She looked up at me. Standing, she was even smaller than she’d appeared yesterday, sitting cross-legged on her couch. Hardly more than five feet, if that. Both Diana and I towered over her.

  She must have had the same problem I had, in placing a familiar face in unfamiliar surroundings, because she looked from me to Diana and back to me for a second before she said, “I like hockey.”

  I knew that. Or I guess I’d known it. She’d been watching a hockey game on TV yesterday, when I’d knocked on her door. If I hadn’t been so distracted by all the people, and the noise, and the seriousness of the situation, I would have remembered that.

  Araminta Tucker glanced over her shoulder. “I thought I saw that handsome Detective Mendoza earlier.”

  She probably had. “Maybe he likes hockey too,” I said lightly. “Ms. Tucker, this is my friend Diana Morton. Diana, Araminta Tucker.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Diana said automatically, her eyes still scanning the crowd, and then the name seemed to register. “I’m sorry… Araminta Tucker? You own the house my husband rented in Crieve Hall?”

  Araminta nodded. “Yes, dear. He called me off a notice I posted at the university. Said he was looking for a place for his daughter.”

  “Steven doesn’t have a daughter,” Diana said.

  Araminta looked at her, bright bird eyes shining. “So your friend told me.”

  “Mendoza said he stopped by earlier today to show you the drawing of the girl,” I said. “What did you think of the likeness?”

  She smiled. “Oh, very good. That’s just what she looked like.”

  Good to know. At least we had that going for us. A good likeness. If she was here, and came close enough to us that we could see her, we’d recognize her.

  Probably.

  “We should let you go,” I said. “It’s late, and you have a long drive home.” Had she driven here herself? Or maybe the retirement community had a shuttle that took the old people to where they needed to go when they needed to go there? “Oh, and if you happen to see Mendoza again, just pretend you don’t know him.”

  Her eyes danced. “How exciting! Is this a sting?”

  “Between you and me,” I said, “we’re hoping that the Russian girl will be here, and we can catch her.”

  “Oh, dear!” She looked around, her brows furrowed. “I’d better get home, so I won’t be detained.”

  Since there was no way on earth anyone—especially Mendoza—would mistake her for a tall, blond, twenty-year-old Russian stripper, I didn’t think she was in any danger. But if anything happened, I wanted her out of the way, too. So I nodded. “Good luck, Ms. Tucker. Drive carefully.”

  She scurried off toward the exit, her yellow and navy team jersey blending with the crowd.

  It was starting to thin out a little by now. Or at least the crush wasn’t such that I was afraid of being knocked to the ground and trampled underfoot if I lost my balance. It was also easier to see each individual face, now that there weren’t so many of them. Diana and I both scanned the lobby. Th
e duffel bag still hung between us. I could feel it knocking against my leg occasionally, as someone bumped into it.

  A minute passed. The lobby emptied out some more. I loosened my death grip on Diana’s arm and took a step to the side, to give us both some breathing room.

  “I’m still holding the bag,” Diana said.

  I nodded. “I don’t know what happened. I didn’t see her, did you?”

  She shook her head. “I’d have told you if I had.”

  And I hadn’t seen Steven, either. Not that I’d really thought he was behind this, but there had been the possibility. More likely that it was the girl, but not impossible that it was Steven.

  “What do we do now?”

  I looked around. “Wait for the lobby to clear out all the way, I guess. And wait for Mendoza to show up and tell us what to do.”

  Diana nodded. We remained in place while the remnants of the crowd filed past on both sides. A few people gave us curious sideways looks, but nobody said anything. And nobody made a move toward the bag.

  Finally Mendoza appeared in front of us. “Nothing?”

  We both shook our heads. “I still have the bag,” Diana said, lifting it.

  “Nobody tried to grab it,” I added. “Nobody slipped either of us a note telling us to put it down somewhere. And we didn’t see the girl. Or Steven.”

  Mendoza put his hands on his hips. Like most of the crowd, he looked like a fan of our local hockey team. Yellow and blue jersey, faded jeans, sneakers.

  It was only the second time in my life I’d seen him in anything but a suit—the other time was when he’d shown up in the middle of the night because the house in Hillwood was on fire—and he was just as appealing in casual civvies as in his usual designer suits. Maybe even a tiny bit more appealing. There’s something very nice about a good-looking man in a pair of faded jeans.

  However, at the moment, this good-looking man was scowling.

  “This might have been a diversionary tactic.” He glanced at Diana. “Maybe someone wanted you out of your house for a while.”