He held her there for a moment, then slammed his body against hers, flattening her against the wall, his breath fast and hot against her neck. In seconds her arm was numb. She couldn’t breathe. She saw smoke filtering in from the edges of her vision. It was then that the chant came back to her, the one Rocky Garcia, her last sensei, used to make all his students repeat: Don’t forget your legs, your legs, your legs, your legs.
She went slack. A moment passed, his hold still firm. She was weak, close to fainting, when finally the man bought her deception and backed off the stress on her arm, giving her room to move her hip from the wall, find leverage.
“Now we’re going to walk very quietly back to the apartment. You’re going to be a good girl, aren’t you?”
Brit accent with a Germanic inflection. It was him, the throat slitter.
She groaned as though signaling her submission.
As he drew her away from the wall, she faked a stumble, and he went forward with her. She set her feet and swept her right leg knee-high, hooked his legs, and toppled him against the cement railing. She lowered her shoulder, bulled him against the low rail, kept grinding into his chest until he tipped backward, then thrust harder, shouldering him over.
Three stories down, he thumped on his back, half in grass and half on the sidewalk. A woman walking her Lab halted, and her dog sniffed the man’s shoe. She tugged the dog away and stepped around the body and continued down the walkway without a backward look, as if men regularly fell from the sky in this neighborhood.
Harper nabbed the man’s pistol and headed down the steps. She’d always hated guns. Since Deena’s death, she hated them even more.
On the sidewalk, she halted, scanned the area to fix her bearings. Felt a swoon of bewilderment.
The man was gone.
A second later when she heard footsteps slapping fast down the sidewalk, she tossed the pistol away, pivoted, set her feet, lifted her hands. Ready position. But as the runner came into focus, she lowered her fists, relaxed her stance, and drew a long, ravenous breath.
FOURTEEN
February, Coral Gables, Florida
“What the hell happened, Harper? You’re trembling.”
Nick looped an arm around her shoulder, held her tight.
“How did you get here? Were you following me?”
“I saw you leaving the condo. We were worried, so we tagged along.”
“We?”
Nick lowered his arm, stepped away, and motioned toward the street where a yellow Prius was double-parked. The darkened driver’s window slid down, and Sal Leonardi gave her a cheerful wave.
“What’s going on, Nick? You and Sal?”
“He called me, told me you’d been to see him, the two of you were going to join forces, poke around on your own. I invited myself in. Sal thought it would be okay with you. Now what the hell happened?”
Sal U-turned and eased into a parking spot across the street.
“Nick,” she said. “This is some scary shit. You sure you want a part of this?”
“Do you even need to ask?”
They walked across the street to Sal’s car. Harper climbed into the front seat, Nick folded into the rear, and she told them what she’d learned, leaving out nothing. Finishing with, “The guy who attacked me knew my name. He recognized me.”
“So tell me about the dead guy,” Sal said, “this Jackson Smith.”
“Sharp,” Harper said. “Jackson Sharp.”
“Okay,” Sal said. “And if you don’t mind me asking, what the hell were you going to say to this guy? You have any kind of plan?”
“Hold on a minute,” she said. “What’re we doing here? What about the cops? Somebody attacked me, probably the same guy that killed Sharp and maybe Ross and Leo, and he’s getting away. We need to call Alvarez, throw a net over the area.”
Sal turned and shot Nick a look. “You tell her or do I?”
“Sal thinks we should cut loose from Alvarez,” Nick said. “Go our own way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She turned around to read his face, but Nick was staring out his side window.
“Like I told you,” Sal said. “I got good contacts. One of them, her name’s Connie Woods, she’s a secretary, high up in the chief’s office at Miami PD, so most things at that level, they get channeled through her, messages, face-to-face meetings, things of that nature. The woman knows what’s going on, got her ear to the pulse. Me and Connie, we go back. So she calls me up, heard I had feelers out about Ross’s murder; she’s suspicious, thinks there might be a leak in the office, information about the case going to a third party, a private individual outside law enforcement, messages back and forth to and from this party. Says there might be orders coming in by phone from the same individual.”
“What kind of orders?”
“What Connie thinks, she believes somebody might be having a say in the investigation, an outsider. Do this, don’t do that. Steering the bus.”
“Who in god’s name would that be?”
“Don’t know the answer to that yet,” Sal said.
“So the thing is,” said Nick, “with this other agenda going on, the cops aren’t kosher. From here on, we don’t trust Alvarez.”
Harper was silent.
“What I’m thinking,” Sal said. “You tell us there’s a corpse in that apartment, okay, say we leave it for Alvarez and his friends. Well, good chance things’ll get murky after that. Maybe we don’t ever find out what it all means. How it pertains to you and Ross and Leo. And now with this guy Spider whatshisname getting shot at, and this other guy showing up, knowing your name, jamming a gun in your ribs, that seals it: too many wild cards stacking up. We gotta go our own way.”
“Just walk away from the body?”
“Hell, no,” Sal said. “Process the scene ourselves.”
“Since when do you process crime scenes?”
“Everything the cops do, I got guys with similar capabilities.” Sal smiled at her and gave her a sorry-but-that’s-how-it-is shrug. “DNA, ballistics, fingerprints, you name it, all the ID stuff. My boys can handle all of it. Even clean the scene afterward, no traces.”
Harper cursed under her breath.
“It’s true,” Sal said. “My associates, they got labs, they got the skills, same equipment, sometimes even better. This way, see, you got no chance of a leak. It’s a hundred percent safe and secure.”
“Sal has lots of friends. Why not use them?”
“Sal’s private CSI crew.”
“My guys are good,” Sal said. “I’m not bragging, but, hey, lots of times they get better results doing it their way than the cops.”
“I don’t see the problem,” Nick said. “Given the investigation is compromised.”
She turned in her seat to face Nick.
“You’re sure about this, Nick? Being a part of this.”
“You can’t do this alone.”
“Can’t I?”
“Nobody doubts you. But you can depend on me. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a sickly kid anymore.”
She held his fierce gaze. He wasn’t squirming, wasn’t trying to dodge. Eyes she’d looked into thousands of times, eyes she’d always been able to read, even from the first day they met, a puny child who spoke only a word or two of English.
A boy whose earliest memories were of a dismal orphanage in Zelenogorsk, a town of shacks clustered around a single uranium-enrichment plant. That boy had dreamed madly of the bright, amazing world beyond the boundaries of his village on the desolate Kan River, warming himself with an improbable fairy tale that improbably came true as Deena Roberts appeared one January afternoon, scanning the room full of frail kids, and fell in love with young Nicholas’s dark, haunting eyes, two weeks later liberating him from the bitter gloom of Russian winter and whisking him away to a fanciful tropical city on the edge of the sea, and that was only the start of the fantasy, for year after year when she circled the globe, Nick and Harper were
in tow, Deena shooting her photos in Paris, in Rome, in London and Berlin, Singapore, Rio, Beijing, introducing the two kids to monarchs, dukes, heads of state and billionaires, rock legends and dazzling movie stars. By fifteen, Nick and Harper had become as inseparable as conjoined twins. They’d filled the pages of a half dozen passports and could finish each other’s sentences in seven languages.
All that togetherness ended when they left high school. Nick flew off to Providence, spent four years at Brown, Harper staying home at the University of Miami. After all those years of travel with Deena, Harper hungered for roots, for constancy. Not Nick. Still simmering with wanderlust, after graduation, he found his dream job.
Working for the World Bank let him continue his peregrinations, but more than that, it gave him a chance to bring some measure of fairness to rice farmers in Laos, provide fair compensation for being displaced from the land they and their families had tilled for generations, land destined to become a national highway. Or indigents exiled from their homes by a dam built in Tanzania or a power plant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. That became Nick’s work. Traveling the globe, striking a balance, as best he could, between the public good and private needs, paying fair value, giving power and voice to people exactly like the dispossessed kid he’d once been.
Harper stared ahead out the windshield at the breeze sifting through the palm fronds, its shadows trickling along the sidewalk like the dark, twisty tongues of serpents.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Sal, call in your CSI guys, find out whatever you can about Jackson Sharp. And that man in the apartment, he wasn’t wearing gloves. His pistol is in the grass over near the sidewalk. There have to be prints. Find out everything you can about who that man was.”
Sal smiled and gave her a quick salute. “So you’re gonna pilot the ship? Hand out the jobs?”
“You know anybody better?” she said.
“And how about you?” Nick said. “What’s your assignment?”
Harper looked at the slit of horizon showing between the two bayside condos.
“I’m going to the mall,” she said. “I need some traveling clothes.”
FIFTEEN
Early March, Côte d’Ivoire, Africa
After searching to no avail for information on Jean Luc Diallo, the first name on Ross’s contacts, she sent a brief e-mail to the address Ross had included. The second name on his list was Moussa Kouacou, a name so unique it took her only a few minutes of Googling to learn that Moussa was an agricultural minister in Abidjan, capital city of the Ivory Coast. She wrote him an e-mail, explaining that she was continuing Ross McDaniel’s research because Ross had fallen ill. Fishing for hints about what Ross had turned up.
The next afternoon she received the reply she was after.
Moussa Kouacou was most sorry to hear of Mr. McDaniel’s unfortunate sickness and would be quite delighted to meet with Harper McDaniel and escort her to the Royale Plantation, as planned, where she would interview Mr. Jean Luc Diallo, the foreman of the plantation. As previously agreed, Mr. Diallo was fully prepared to discuss grave matters that had transpired on the plantation. But Mr. Diallo insisted that such discussion occur face-to-face.
A search of Ross’s notes turned up a single reference to Royale Plantation, a cacao farm of formidable size. Jackson Sharp had told Ross that the plantation was the location where Rachel Sharp was killed. So apparently Kouacou was to be Ross’s guide and lead him to Diallo, the whistle-blower.
An exposé of child slavery, chocolate, and murder.
“You trust this guy Moussa?” Nick asked her. “Some stranger on the other side of the globe.”
“Ross trusted him.”
“And look what happened to him.”
“What do you suggest? Step away, let Alvarez take over?”
Nick continued to campaign to go along to Africa, but Harper refused. This was a fact-finding trip, nothing more. If anything looked the least bit dodgy, she’d summon Nick and wait for him before proceeding. He didn’t like it, and neither did Sal.
“Because I’m a girl, I need a strong man at my side?”
“It’s not like that. We have no idea what’s going on. You’ve been attacked already. The guy knew your name, for god’s sake.”
Sal said, “And that spy camera in your house. I been thinking about that. Only thing I can come up with is whoever took out Ross was trying to find out if he’d talked to anyone else about what he was investigating. If he told them anything, they’d be a target too. You know, like mentioning chocolate, like he did with you.”
She closed her eyes and was silent for a while, then blew out a hard breath. “I don’t care, Sal. If I’m in danger, if I’m a target, fine. Let them come for me, let them try.”
Sal nodded and winked at her. Right answer.
Moses Chonen, president of Coconut Grove Bank and longtime friend of Deena and the Roberts family, summoned the bank’s locksmith to drill open the safety deposit box that Harper and Ross kept there. There was no other choice since Harper’s own key had been lost in the fire.
She hadn’t expected to find any of Ross’s research documents stashed in the box, and there were none. But she needed her passport, and after a long moment staring into the open box, she picked up the entire stack of hundreds. A small part of her inheritance from Deena. She’d never had the heart to count it, but it was plenty. Between the cash and her credit cards, Harper could travel for weeks. Or even longer if justice was slow in coming.
Bone-tired from eighteen hours of air travel, Harper was in no mood for this get-acquainted dinner date or whatever it was Moussa Kouacou had in mind, but she agreed to it because, damn it, she needed this guy.
On the endless flight she’d been racked with doubts and misgivings. So far from home on a quest with such a vague target, so unlike anything she’d ever attempted before. She considered turning back, going home, letting the professionals handle it. But in the cab from the airport to the hotel, in a sudden rush of recognition, the doubts fell away.
She was traveling in Ross’s footsteps, taking over the task he’d set for himself. Completing his arc, making it her own. In this way, giving his death some kind of meaning, and her own journey a purpose beyond mere revenge.
She checked into her room, took a quick shower, arrived at the hotel restaurant at nine thirty, their agreed-upon hour, then waited with growing impatience for thirty minutes before a man appeared at the entrance and the maître d’ pointed him toward Harper’s table.
He was tall, narrow-shouldered, in his middle thirties, with a long face and a shaved head that gleamed in the honeyed light. He wore a pale-blue caftan and matching pants embroidered in reds and greens.
He halted at her table and introduced himself in French.
Harper gestured at the seat across from her. With old-world formality, he half bowed and settled into the chair, then reached out, a large box of burgundy and gold in his hand. Chocolates.
She smiled her thanks and set it beside her glass.
Moussa’s caramel eyes matched his skin, and despite his smile, in the depths of those eyes, Harper detected the same mix of sadness and distress she’d witnessed in many eyes since she’d arrived in this West African nation, as if he and his countrymen shared a communal dread that their homeland was about to slip into chaos.
The restaurant, however, Le Toit d’Abidjan, on the twenty-third floor of the Sofitel Hotel, with its sweeping views of the Ébrié Lagoon and the chic Cocody district of Abidjan, seemed far removed from the strife in the streets below. Lights set romantically low, quiet piano music filtering in.
Harper had traveled to Africa a dozen times, but this was her first time in the Ivory Coast. Moussa had offered to be her driver and guide. Though she disliked being dependent on anyone, especially a stranger, she’d agreed to the arrangement because navigating the back roads of this country had grown increasingly risky since the failed coup and the rise in extremist terror groups. And by god, she wasn’t about to let some re
gional political turmoil derail her mission.
Harper took a breath and tried out her rusty French.
“Mon français est délicat. Il a été de nombreuses années.”
“No, no. I understand you most perfectly.” Moussa smiled, showing brilliant teeth. “But we can converse in your language if it pleases you.”
“Either way is fine with me,” Harper said.
“Is that a Parisian accent I detect?”
“Paris, yes,” she said. “When I was young I spent time there.”
“With your mother,” he said. “The world traveler. The rock star.”
“Ross told you that?”
“Oh, no. I have been a great admirer of your mother’s work for many years, you see.”
“Well, my mother . . . ,” Harper began, then decided to soften her reply. “My mother photographed rock stars, but she wasn’t one herself.”
“But notorious, yes?”
“I suppose. Notorious in some circles.”
The waiter appeared, distributed menus, and Moussa ordered a local beer. With a flourish the waiter topped off Harper’s glass of sparkling water. All very civilized.
Looking out at the harbor lights and the twinkle of boats moving across the lagoon, she imagined she was home in Miami, not this bedraggled port city in a small tortured country on the Gulf of Guinea. Liberia to the west, Ghana on the east, and Burkina Faso and Mali closing off the northern border.
“You shouldn’t have bothered,” Harper said, touching a fingertip to the box of chocolates.
“Something for later. I believe you will find this item alone worth your journey. A Belgian product made of Valrhona cocoa, blended into a creamy ganache, then hand rolled with a dark truffle on the inside and finished with a dusting of cocoa powder.”
She thanked him again.
“Ah, it is my pleasure. But please save it for a private moment.”
“Of course,” she said. “Now, we need to talk.”
When They Come for You Page 8
