by Cassie Miles
“You told me that I tend to deny my emotions. I keep things buttoned down and refuse to feel pain. But I was so frustrated by the mistakes I made today that I couldn’t hold it inside. If I didn’t let off some steam, I’d explode. You said I should let it go.”
“I did.” When he’d cheerfully given that tidbit of advice, he’d been thinking of a heavy sigh or maybe a workout in the exercise room.
“Standing out there in the rain, I felt victorious. I don’t know what prize I won, but I was glad.”
He wasn’t sure whether he should cheer or make reservations at the nearest psych ward. He opted for the former. “Congrats.”
“I’m sorry about the kiss.” She shrugged. “Your mouth just happened to be there.”
“Back up, Gennie.” He was willing to accept her oversimplified explanation of the rain dance, but he refused to let that kiss be dismissed. She didn’t accidentally plant her lips on his. “The kiss meant something. I was there. I felt it, too. You wanted me to kiss you.”
“I did.” She stared down at her plate of rapidly disappearing lasagna. “But I don’t want the kiss to get in the way of our work or our friendship.”
Though her logic didn’t make sense, he agreed on one level. He didn’t want to jeopardize what they had. He could force himself to be patient. “I understand.”
“It’s not like we could have a relationship,” she said, “not according to Murano’s test.”
“The single question he asked?”
“That’s right, lover boy.”
He wasn’t ashamed of his response. All things considered, he’d always choose love. “I could argue that Murano isn’t the renowned authority he thinks he is. And I could point out that love and trust go together like peanut butter and jelly, but I’m not going to push.”
She gave a nod. “I’m anxious to take a look at the data Anna Rose sent.”
They changed gears, shifting to talk about the murder. His greatest concern had to be the trouble that Warrick predicted for him personally. Gennie’s former fiancé was a scumbag, liar and accomplice to murder, but he’d made a good point. Noah had been summoned to the library. Someone—probably Warrick himself—had been ready and waiting with a stun gun and drugs. What was the purpose? It seemed likely that they were trying to frame him. But why?
After they finished their dinner, he put on a pot of decaf coffee and they went into the large downstairs office/meeting room between the living room and kitchen. Originally, this cabin had been a hunting lodge with few amenities. Twelve years ago, when he’d started renovating after Josh’s death, he hadn’t been thinking of a training facility for ARC. But that was how it turned out. The first floor was dedicated to group activities, like meetings and eating. The upstairs was bedrooms with a smaller office and the workout room.
He set up a large screen computer on a long desk built into the wall. Gennie sat on a swivel chair with wheels and scooted up close to see the first image.
“Make it the letter from Ruby,” she said. “I’m dying to see it.”
“Here’s a question,” he said. “Why send a letter?”
“It’s odd and old-fashioned. Maybe she wanted to mark the occasion.”
He shrugged. “Or it could be a romantic gesture. The original might be on pastel paper, might be scented.”
“Don’t make me gag,” she said. “We’re talking about a letter to Kenneth Warrick.”
At the same time he displayed the letter on the computer screen, he made two copies—one for her and one for him. Tonight, they’d be dealing with a lot of data, and having hard copies would allow them to check the evidence at their own speed.
He was content with rapidly scanning this page. “She talks about their special night and she’ll never forget him, blah, blah.”
“There’s so much more,” Gennie said. “First, Ruby’s penmanship is lovely, almost as though she copied it from a cursive handbook.”
He didn’t see the significance. “So?”
“It shows that she took care with her writing. And she uses a bunch of pretty images, like saying that the wind in her hair was gentle as butterfly wings and bathing in the sheer radiance of pure silver starlight.”
“None of this proves anything except that she was hot for this dude.” He handed Gennie a hard copy. “Why did Anna Rose think Ruby lied?”
“Here’s your answer.” Gennie pointed to the words on the screen and read, “Your beautiful eyes, darker than mocha latte are the rich color of chocolate.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Chocolate eyes,” she repeated. “He has chocolate eyes.”
“And?”
“Slocum was platinum blond with watery blue eyes. Warrick’s best feature has always been his blue, blue, blue eyes.”
“Ruby was kissing someone else,” he said. “She lied.”
“And who is this mystery man.” She stared at him. “Any ideas, brown eyes?”
Now he was being framed for a kiss. What next?
Chapter Sixteen
Under the pretext of scrutinizing his eyes, Gennie leaned close to Noah and stared. She should have been concentrating on solving this latest clue, but looking into his eyes was deeply distracting, almost intoxicating. “Your eyes are warmer, more like whiskey than chocolate.”
“Am I off the hook?”
“Oh, please. I never really thought you were the guy who made out with the general’s wife. You’re a businessman. You’d never risk ARC’s reputation for a kiss.”
Still, he was a spectacularly good kisser. In the back of her mind, their embrace was replaying on an endless loop. When she remembered his kiss, her lips tingled, and her body temperature elevated to a feverish level. Afterward when they talked, she’d been glad that he called her bluff when she tried to dismiss their intimacy. That kiss meant something.
“What else does she say in the letter?” he asked.
“Why ask me? You can read it for yourself.”
“But I probably wouldn’t notice the right things. I’m a guy, I don’t understand the code. That’s why I didn’t realize that eye color was a big deal.”
“Code? I hope you aren’t implying that there’s a girl code when it comes to describing men. If you are, I’m insulted.”
“Not an insult,” he said emphatically. “Men and women perceive the world from different angles. That’s just the way life is. You see things that I don’t. The same goes for me.”
Though she basically agreed with him, she sensed his discomfort with this topic. Noah was digging himself a hole, and she wanted to see how he’d get out of this. “What kind of things do we see differently?”
“An example,” he said. “Your first impressions are likely based on clothes and style.”
“And what do men notice?”
Without thinking, he cupped invisible breasts. His gesture disappeared in a flash as he leveled a palm at his chin. “Height, men notice height.”
And hooters. She’d been in the army long enough to know that most of the guys could tell a woman’s breast size but had no idea of her eye color. To be fair, she’d done her share of objectifying a good-looking guy with a nice firm bottom, like Noah’s. She cleared her throat. “What else do you notice?”
“Tone of voice,” he said. “Can’t stand screeching or whispering.”
“Same here.”
“And hair, natural hair—like yours—is the best.”
She fluffed her still damp tendrils. “I’ll be sure to compliment the stylist who does my highlights.”
“A woman would have known your hair was dyed.” He looked away from her, squinting at Ruby’s words on the computer screen. “We’ve gotten off on a tangent.”
She teased, “Does this mean that you’re not ready to hunker down and defend your position?”
“One thing I learned from my most
ly forgotten former marriage is how to pick my fights. This position isn’t worth defending. I’d drop it.”
He balled his fingers into fists and then snapped them open—a dramatic gesture that somehow erased the impending argument. She appreciated the way he had avoided conflict by acknowledging their differences and then moving forward. Popping her fingers open, she mimicked his release. “Let’s get back to work.”
“Now that we know Ruby lied, we should figure out why. What’s she trying to hide?”
Gennie read through the letter a couple more times. Basically, Ruby described a romantic tryst in the early evening. The location was in the mountains where there were forests and rough stones. She was up so high that she felt like she could touch the stars. The moment was special and she’d never forget him, but she loved her husband and never wanted to see Mr. Chocolate Eyes again. She signed it with fondly.
“Ruby mentions wind in her hair, so they were outside. In the mountains surrounded by trees and rugged stones, their location was up high.” She concluded, “The description reminds me of the tower at MIME.”
“Damn,” Noah said. “It was Murano.”
“His eyes are the right color.”
“It makes a kind of perverse sense. When I saw Ruby before the fund-raiser, she made it clear that she couldn’t stand Murano and didn’t want him in her house.”
“Like it says in her letter, she never wanted to see him again.”
“Fist bump,” Noah said as they tapped knuckles. “Good work.”
Thinking like a detective was new to her, and she was enjoying the mental exercise. The idea of Ruby hooking up with Murano made way more sense than sharing a tryst with Warrick, a sexy bad boy who would have been a definite downgrade on the social scale. “I feel bad for the general. He’s playing golf and throwing fund-raisers for the guy who was messing around with his wife.”
“Maybe that’s why she lied. She didn’t want to embarrass Roger. I’ve got to say, I kind of respect her for that.”
“When you were married, did your wife ever cheat?” As soon as the words came out, she regretted them. Too blunt. “Forget I said that.”
“No problem. I consider my former marriage to be a cautionary tale. Infidelity wasn’t a problem, not for her or for me. We never betrayed each other.”
So, he was trustworthy. Gennie liked that. As long as she was being blatantly nosy, she might as well get the whole story. “Why did you break up?”
“We both had strong opinions and nothing in common. Did I mention that she’s an attorney? Our arguments were epic.”
Across the room on a long table, his cell phone jangled, and he went to pick it up. After a glance at the phone’s screen, he put the call on Speaker and said, “Hey, Tony, what’s up?”
“Sorry to call so late.”
“It’s only ten thirty, and I want you to keep me posted on any developments, no matter what the time. Where are you?”
“I came back to the Haymarket house after I got a call from Zoey on the night shift. Loretta Slocum came back.”
Gennie was relieved to hear that the feisty little woman from Nashville had ended her joy ride in the deluxe SUV without further mishap. “Did she say anything?”
“Is that Gennie?” Tony asked.
“I’m staying at the cabin with Noah until the security on my house is completed. He’s got plenty of extra room.”
“Are you getting a lot of rain up there?”
“A monsoon,” Noah said. “Tell us about Loretta.”
“According to Zoey, she apologized for stealing Ruby’s car. She’d been searching but hadn’t found the documents that she was sure Dean had hidden. Supposedly, her brother-in-law had three properties, and she’d checked out the south Denver house and the rental near Boulder. She couldn’t locate the place in the mountains. She was weepy. Zoey felt sorry for her.”
Gennie had zero sympathy. Though Loretta wasn’t a blood relation to Dean, they shared a couple of traits. Both were driven by greed. Both were manipulators. “What else?”
“That’s all,” Tony said. “She’s still here at the house. The FBI has her sequestered for interrogation.”
“This time, they need to hang on to her,” Noah said.
Gennie cringed inside. She was to blame for Loretta’s first escape—a mistake she’d never make again. There was such a thing as being too trusting.
“What are you doing at the cabin?” Tony asked.
“Going through the documents that were on Loretta’s phone. If we’re lucky, we might find something that will lead us to the mountain property.”
“I could help,” Tony said.
“I’d rather have you stay in town and keep an eye on the mansion. In the morning, we’ll be headed down there. We’ll see you then.” He ended the call and returned to the computer. On the long desk were two stacks of papers—his and hers copies of the information from Loretta’s phone. He passed one of the stacks to her. “I’ve barely glanced at this stuff, but I think we can sort it into categories.”
Rifling through the loose sheets, she saw a photograph of what might have been a naked man and woman clutching each other. She turned the photo horizontal and then vertical again. “It looks like this picture was taken through half-closed blinds. I can’t exactly tell what I’m looking at, and the people are unrecognizable.”
“It’s hard to believe Slocum could get a blackmail payment using this photo.”
In her mind, the whole arrangement was unbelievable. This man and woman were betraying their partners and compounding the original lie by engaging in a cover-up. Equally sleazy was Dean Slocum. There were four other photos, similar in the sense that faces weren’t shown and random body parts squeezed against each other.
Noah set the photos aside, facedown on the desk. “I don’t think we’ll learn much by studying those pictures.”
“And they’re gross.” She stood, stretched and yawned. “I suddenly feel the need for a shower.”
“I’ll come upstairs with you,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind changing out of these clothes.”
She grabbed her little suitcase at the front door and followed Noah up to the second floor. She vividly remembered the layout from her first experience breaking into the cabin to “rescue the hostage.” They walked past the office at the top of the stairs and went toward the gym at the end of the hall.
Noah opened the last door on the left across from the gym. “This is the master bedroom, my bedroom, the only one with an attached bathroom. You have your choice of the guest bedroom across the hall and the one next to mine.”
She chose to sleep in the room beside his. In the morning, her room would have the same exposure to sunlight as his, and they’d wake at the same time. “I’ll clean up and meet you downstairs.”
Inside her cozy bedroom, she went directly to the queen bed with a knotty pine frame and collapsed onto the firm mattress. The rain splattering against the windowpanes made a soothing rhythm. It would have been easy to close her eyes and drift off to sleep, but she wanted to stay awake. Not only was she curious about the blackmail documents but she wanted to take advantage of this time alone with Noah.
Usually, there were a half dozen ARC employees hanging around, demanding bits of his time and asking questions. More than a boss, Noah Sheridan was their leader. Tony might be capable of doing the supervisory basics, but he’d never fill Noah’s shoes.
While she rinsed herself in a steaming hot shower, Gennie considered the stack of ugly information Slocum had compiled on his acquaintances and associates. This evidence of his extortion plots provided ample motives for murder. Most likely, one of the people he was blackmailing had reached their limit. They snapped and killed him.
How could they possibly guess who?
She dressed in colorful layers, starting with yoga pants patterned like blue, red and pink ocean waves. He
r T-shirt was purple and yellow. The lightweight cardigan she wore on top was turquoise. She replaced the wrap on her ankle and slipped on a pair of worn sneakers that felt like they’d been custom-made for her feet.
After she dragged a brush through her hair, she glanced in the bathroom mirror. Her lack of makeup was obvious. Though Gennie dyed her hair, she was a natural blond with blond eyelashes that were almost invisible. Should she take a moment to apply mascara and liner? If she did, he might think she was trying too hard. If not, she was too plain.
No time to worry about her appearance. She wasn’t staying at the cabin to further her relationship with Noah. This was work! She turned away from her unadorned face in the mirror and tromped downstairs in unsexy sneakers and loose-fitting workout clothes. Bottom line: she wouldn’t mind seducing her boss but wanted to pull it off without appearing to be seductive. Might be impossible; she really didn’t have feminine wiles.
He’d beaten her downstairs. His short hair was spikey wet from a shower, and he’d dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. He took a position in front of a whiteboard. Across the top, he’d written headers. “These are the basic reasons for blackmail. Scandal is the most obvious, usually involving sex and cheating.”
“And that’s where we file those creepy photos.”
“You guessed it,” he said. “Lies come next. These are mostly business lies or military lies that somebody told to get ahead or to throw an enemy under the bus.”
She read the next header aloud. “Secrets? Give me an example.”
“Things that happened in the past.” He passed her an email. “This tells the sad story of how one sister tricked the other out of the family inheritance.”
“Motives,” she said. “These secrets are all motives for murder.”
“I figured if we broke it down into three categories—Scandal, Lies and Secrets—we could put these documents into some kind of order.”
Carrying her designated stack of data, she returned to her swivel chair and sat with her feet up on the long desk, reading through one sordid tale after another. In most of them, the names had been redacted, which explained why Loretta was desperate to find the originals. Apparently, Slocum didn’t trust his sister-in-law to keep her hands off his business. “I’m guessing that the FBI will have more luck than we will in matching identities to the documents.”
