by Elise Noble
And that wasn’t the only stunt Rafael had pulled. Yesterday, he’d challenged me to a shooting match, and the arsehole swapped my ammo for blanks. Lesson learned: always load my own gun, or at least check the magazine.
“How about the rest of your training? The non-physical stuff?”
“I can swear in Spanish, and I’m never eating salad again.”
It was far too easy to switch the rocket—or arugula, as Sofia kept calling it—for water hemlock, or the spinach for belladonna.
Emmy laughed. She knew exactly who’d been giving me lessons.
“I hate to tell you this, but Fia could just as easily slip ricin into your mac and cheese.”
“In that case, I’m gonna buy all my food from McDonald’s from now on.”
“Good luck with that. You’ll have to get it past Toby first.”
“I’m training to be a spy. Sneaking junk food past a nutritionist should be easy.”
“You think? He’s got a sixth sense when it comes to saturated fat.”
“Can I at least go out for dinner with Hallie one evening? I know I’m meant to be studying, but I can do extra the next day.”
“One night a week, as long as the work gets done.”
“Will there be a test?”
“Sure. I’m gonna drop you off in Uruapan with no money and no passport and let you find your way home.”
Was Emmy joking? I hoped so, but I had a worrying feeling she was serious. And I already knew from Carmen that Uruapan was a hotspot in the Mexican drug war. Rival cartels had been taking it in turns to behead people and leave the corpses strewn around the city.
“Did you have to do that?”
“I got dumped in Acapulco.”
Shit.
“It’ll be a very quick meal. No alcohol whatsoever.”
“You’ve been spending time with Hallie, then?”
“She’s been staying here while her roommate’s away. We’ve been looking at cold cases together.”
“Really?”
“Just over dinner in the evenings. Don’t worry, I haven’t been skiving off all the other stuff. But it beats watching TV while I eat.”
“What cases have you been looking at?”
Emmy added another weight to the stack and lay back on the bench. Fuck, she was pressing a hundred and ninety pounds. I could only do a hundred and ten. Plus she managed to talk while she did it rather than sucking in air like an asthmatic.
“The murder of Jaden Haan, the kidnapping of Mila Carmody, and the Emerald theft.”
“The girlfriend killed Jaden. We’ve just never been able to prove it. And Emerald, huh? Find anything new?”
I had to agree with her on the Haan case. The girlfriend was as cold as liquid nitrogen. I’d watched videos of her police interviews, and she gave me the creeps.
“Not new, exactly. We just talked over all the evidence.”
“And?”
I laid out the first theory we’d come up with. “There are two FBI agents we couldn’t find out much about—Alaric’s old boss and another guy. What if one of them was in cahoots with a member of the boat crew and gave them the combination so they could get an identical briefcase? Or another colleague who didn’t have the combination could have told them what the briefcase looked like, and they could have jammed the lock on the fake so it would open with any number? We were going to ask Ravi if that’s possible, but he hasn’t been here.”
“Even if it was possible, they couldn’t have been sure they’d have the opportunity to swap the briefcases.”
“The report said the boat was a scalloper rented for cash and Alaric had to climb a ladder up the side. Why that type of boat? If they’d brought a yacht, he could just have jumped onto the platform thingy at the back. I looked at pictures.”
Emmy lowered the weights and propped herself up on her elbows, barely breathing hard.
“Or he could have asked them to drop the rope and then used it to strap the briefcase to his back. It just so happened that he didn’t.”
“They could have refused to drop the rope.”
“Which would have aroused suspicions. We’d have backed off.”
“Okay, so maybe it was Alaric himself. He had the means, the motive, and the opportunity.”
“What motive?”
“Money. Doesn’t everyone want to be rich?”
“Alaric was already rich.”
“The file said he earned, like, seventy thousand dollars a year.”
To someone like me, that was a hell of a lot of cash, but I still wouldn’t class him as rich. There was a big difference between seventy grand and ten million.
“Putting aside the fact that Alaric’s never cared about wealth, if his parents hadn’t disowned him over the Emerald debacle, he’d be in line to inherit fifty million bucks.”
“Oh.” Fifty million. Wow. “Guess that blows that theory out of the water.”
Emmy lay back and started her next set. “Yeah, it does.”
“So that only leaves one option.”
“Which is?”
“The money was stolen from your house.”
“I thought you said you’d read the file?”
“I did.”
“So you’ll know how tight that place is buttoned up. CCTV, movement sensors, contact sensors, pressure sensors.”
“What if there was a power cut? You were, ahem…”
“Fucking?”
“Yes, that. Would you even have noticed?”
“Firstly, we have a backup power supply, and secondly, I like to leave a light on so I can see who I’m doing.”
“Okay, so what about the tunnels?”
The weights clattered back onto the stack, and Emmy knifed up to a seated position. “Who told you about the tunnels?”
Uh-oh. I hadn’t realised they were meant to be some massive secret.
“Does it matter?”
“Bradley? Alex? Luke?” A pause, and boy was that stare intense. Her eyes were the oddest colour. More violet than blue. “So, it was Luke. You need to work on your poker face, sweetheart.”
“Me and Hallie were asking about the previous break-in, okay? He didn’t just volunteer the information.” I liked Luke. Apart from Hallie, he was the only other person at Riverley who seemed vaguely normal. I didn’t want to get him into trouble. “Don’t have a go at him. Please?”
“I’ll just remind him about the importance of discretion.”
“Fine.” As long as she didn’t hurt him. “But what if that’s the answer to the mystery?”
“It isn’t.”
“But—”
“The tunnels run between the two main houses, the garage, and the guest house. The entrances are hidden, and the buildings themselves are alarmed, just the same as Little Riverley. So yes, someone could have theoretically snuck into my house through the tunnels, but they’d still have had to breach the perimeter first. Think of it as one massive unit rather than four separate structures. It’s all part of the same system. If one part’s armed, it’s all armed.”
“What if they turned off the alarm in one of the other buildings?”
“They’d have been on camera going inside, and there’d have been a record of the deactivation. Plus they’d have had to sneak past me. And again, no motive.”
“One person had a motive.”
“Go on.”
“Black.”
Emmy snorted as she stood. “Puh-lease. You seriously think he did it?”
“I’m objective enough to see the way he acts around Alaric. Jealous doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
“You’re saying I’m not objective when it comes to doing my job?”
“Yes.”
Oh, Emmy didn’t like that, not one little bit. I half thought she might take a swing at me, but somebody needed to say those words. Hallie had already told me she wasn’t going there. Emmy took a step closer, then seemed to catch herself, and the fire in her eyes turned to ice. I swear the irises actually went bluer.
“You’re wrong. Black wasn’t even in Virginia that day.” She stalked towards the door, then turned. “Where’s Rafael? Don’t you have work to do?”
“He’ll be here any minute.”
“Well, stop slacking and get on the fucking treadmill.”
CHAPTER 32 - EMMY
“SHE’S NOT WRONG,” Ana said softly from behind me.
For fuck’s sake. I really didn’t need this right now. I carried on walking, but Ana followed.
“Do you make a habit of listening to other people’s conversations?”
Ana caught up and gave me side-eye. Okay, stupid question. Of course she eavesdropped. We both did.
“I find curiosity has benefits, especially when one of the participants in the conversation isn’t listening themselves. Sky’s right. You’re not objective. The past clouds your judgement.”
Ana was right. I hated to admit it, but she was right. Sky was new to Blackwood, and apart from Ana, she was the one person in the household who had no loyalty to Black. I had to admire Sky’s thought process if not her conclusion.
“If anyone had a motive for framing Alaric for the theft, it was Black,” Ana continued. “You should applaud Sky for having the guts to tell you the truth, not punish her because you don’t want to hear it.”
“Fine, I’ll tell her to swap the treadmill for the Jacuzzi.”
“How about we focus on the more important issue?”
“Which is...?”
“The theft.”
“What? You think Black did it too? I know it wasn’t him.”
Ruining Alaric’s life and career had, by extension, impacted on me and my happiness, and Black wouldn’t have risked hurting me like that. Not to mention the fact that I’d ended up being shot at during the handover.
“Why? Because he told you so?”
“No.” Come to think of it, he’d never explicitly said he didn’t do it, but that was perhaps because I’d never asked. “Didn’t you hear me say he wasn’t even here?”
“Where was he?”
“On a job.”
“Where?”
“North Carolina. Wilmington.”
“Alone?”
“No, he was with Pale. They flew back the next day.”
Pale was one of Black’s long-standing partners in crime. Along with Nate, they’d been three of the four original Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a group of elite assassins used for jobs considered more or less impossible. After White died, the Horsemen had expanded to include me and a handful of others, but due to politics and the fact that trained killers were renegades by nature, the group was more or less dormant now. Officially, anyway. But Pale, Black, and Red were still tight. Case in point—who had Black turned to when he needed to rescue me from Ridley’s clutches? I’d woken up in the back of an RV to find Pale’s weathered face looking down at me. He ran his own team now, but he’d always help out an old buddy in a pinch.
“You saw them?”
“They landed on the airstrip out back. By that point, me and Alaric had already been used for target practice off the Virginia coast.”
“What if he got back early and left again?”
“Ana, why are you doing this?”
“Because somebody has to ask these questions and you’re not going to. We know whoever stole the money was bold as well as cunning, and who’s the most capable person you know?”
She did have a point there. Fine, we’d go through this stupid exercise so I could point out the flaws in Ana’s arguments, and then maybe she’d stop acting like a bitch with a bloody bone. The thought process might even shake some other ideas loose.
“Okay, brainstorm away.”
She looked kind of surprised at my acquiescence but led me into Riverley Hall’s gallery. Four stone pillars stood in front of the four windows, each with a rearing horse atop it. Black, Red, White, and Pale. The white horse had a black ribbon tied around its neck.
“Why the change of heart?”
“It’s easier to get this over with, and then we can focus on the real problems like you said.” I dropped onto one of the sofas, squashy beige leather that kind of hugged you as you sat. They were far more comfortable than the harsh-angled white ones in my gallery over at Little Riverley. The paintings were different too—classic oils and watercolours that contrasted with my abstract modern acrylics and sculptures. “How would you have done it?”
“I’ll let you answer first.”
“For years, I always thought it was a combination of Alaric’s boss and the crooks. I never liked the guy, but in all the time we’ve been watching him, he hasn’t put a foot wrong. No fancy holidays, no expensive cars, no drugs, no alcohol, no hookers. He fishes on the weekends.”
“But?”
How did she know there was a “but” coming? Sometimes, her thought patterns were too close to mine for comfort.
“But just lately, I’ve been wondering whether Alaric could have had some involvement.”
“Despite what you told Sky? What makes you say that?”
There was no judgement, only curiosity.
“Honestly? Because we’ve more or less ruled out everything else, and a few weeks ago, I found out…” I closed my eyes for a moment because I still couldn’t believe he’d omitted to tell me about such an important part of his life. “I found out he has a daughter. A fifteen-year-old daughter.”
“That’s…unexpected?”
“Understatement of the year. And I keep thinking that if he kept me in the dark about that, what else didn’t he tell me?”
“Maybe he had a good reason?”
“We dated for eight months. He’d made noises about transferring to the Richmond field office so we could spend more time together.”
We’d even looked at houses in the area. Not for me to move in with him, because that would have been a big step—too big a step—but I could definitely have seen myself staying over.
“What if he didn’t know he had a kid? Sam didn’t realise for two years that he was a father.”
“That was different. You were locked in a jail cell and you also thought he was dead.”
“I’m just saying that the mother might not have told him.”
“I guess it’s possible,” I grudgingly agreed. I’d been trying not to think about the logistics. What was the girl’s name? Did she look like Alaric? “But that still doesn’t change the fact that he told his personal assistant of one week all about her and he didn’t so much as mention her to me.”
“Mudak. And stealing the contents of the briefcase would have been straightforward for him.”
“Yes. But I’m still struggling with a motive. It cost him far more than he would have gained. His job, his reputation, his inheritance.”
Me.
And why would he still be looking for Emerald if he’d been responsible for letting her slip through his fingers back then?
“So who did gain?” Ana asked.
I was getting better at this. “Black.”
“Assume for a moment that Black is the culprit. In the same way that it would have been easier for Alaric than anyone else to replace the pay-off, Black has the advantage when it comes to breaking into his own home.”
“But he’d still have to bypass the security system, and it’s monitored in real time by the Blackwood control room.”
“Every door?”
“Yes.”
“Every window?”
“Yes.”
“What about the roof?”
“Pressure sensors.” Ever felt all the colour drain out of you? It’s like a slow chill that starts at your hairline and works its way downwards through your forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin. “Except…”
“Except?” Ana asked. “What’s wrong with your face?”
“Around that time, we had a new roof put on the guest house. The tiles were old, and… It doesn’t matter. But the sensors got removed and replaced too, and each building has an escape hatch onto the roof.”
“So somebody could have climbed up onto the roof?”
“No, that’s not possible. We have cameras at the roofline.”
“What about dropping down?”
“From where?”
“A tree?”
“There aren’t any trees tall enough, not nearby.”
“A plane? You say Black arrived in one.”
“Is that even feasible?” We stared at each other. Both of us had made plenty of parachute jumps, but the guest house roof wasn’t all that big. “It was daylight when me and Alaric went into the bedroom, and the windows face the stables, not the guest house. I suppose… I suppose that theoretically, someone could have landed there.”
And Black had known the bare bones of the FBI operation. On the phone the evening before, I’d mentioned that Alaric would be bunking at Little Riverley overnight, although he’d arrived earlier than I thought he would.
“Were the sensors replaced before or after the theft?” Ana asked.
“I can’t remember. When do I have time to organise building work?”
“Would Bradley know?”
“About the roof, sure, but I doubt he’d have got involved with the sensors. That’s Nate’s domain.”
“So we have to ask Nate?”
“We’re not asking him. Are you crazy? He’d go straight to Black and ask him why I wanted to know.”
“There must be some kind of record. Emails, text messages… Nate wouldn’t just turn up one day with a pile of sensors.”
“Probably, but Nate’s got more layers of security on his devices than you have on your house.”
And considering even Quinn set the alarms off on occasion and he lived there…
“Well, somebody needs to find those details.”
“Fuck.” I wasn’t a bloody hacker. Mack could do it. Or possibly Agatha, but I didn’t want any of our Blackwood clan getting involved. Asking them to split their loyalties wasn’t a route I was willing to go down. There was only one person I could ask. “I’ll speak to Luke. He might be able to help.”
That would still be hella awkward since he was married to Mack, but we had history and he owed me favours.
