by Kay Hooper
He was working at a computer on his desk, fingers flying over the keys, and muttered, “Just a second,” after glancing up to see his visitor.
“Not my business?” Daniel asked.
Alex grunted. “Yeah, but not what we need to talk about today. Just that nuisance suit. We go to court in a couple of weeks now, and I wanted to get this done.… Be with you in a minute.”
Daniel accepted that and wandered over to a window that looked out on downtown Atlanta. Not that he cared for the scenery. In fact, he didn’t even notice it. He just looked out, focused on nothing. He tended to be able to function on little sleep when necessary, but with an unusually active night behind him and growing anxiety over Laura, he was feeling more than a little edgy. Certainly too tense to sit calmly and wait for Alex, and too tense to be at all interested in scenery he knew well.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his casual black leather jacket and settled his shoulders, wishing this whole damned thing was finished one way or the other. His patience was wearing thin. And he had the uneasy suspicion that time was getting short as well, though he couldn’t pinpoint why. Perhaps because Peter’s murderer was still at large, an unknown and possibly threatening factor, or perhaps it was simply that Amelia had been too quiet lately, too sedate. That was not like her, and it rang warning bells in his mind.
And right now she was back at the house, with Laura and saying God knew what to her. Dripping sweet poison, probably. Not something he liked to think about, especially given Laura’s doubts about him.
“You know, there’s a gym with a punching bag two floors up,” Alex said. “In case you need one.”
“What I need to punch is dead,” Daniel said flatly, turning to face the younger man but remaining by the window. “The worst thing I know of Peter is that he got himself murdered before I could beat the hell out of him.”
“No, I don’t think that’s going to be the worst we know about him.”
That dry statement did nothing to ease Daniel’s mind. Nothing at all. “Oh, Christ. What have you found?”
Alex leaned back and opened the center drawer of his desk. “Well, I finally tracked down that lockbox of Peter’s.”
“What the hell took so long?”
“Hey, I think I did pretty damned good, considering the thing was in a bank outside Atlanta. In Macon, to be precise. I spent all of yesterday driving there and back. And I don’t recommend the trip.”
Daniel couldn’t help smiling a little at Alex’s indignation. “Sorry. My temper’s a bit frayed these days.”
“No, really?”
“Alex.”
“Okay, okay. The bank VP wasn’t thrilled about the situation and didn’t want to let me at the box, but since I’d had the intelligent forethought to bring along letters of authorization from you and the firm as well as a copy of Peter’s will naming me executor—By the way, how the hell did that happen? Been meaning to ask you.”
“That Peter named you his executor? The first I knew of it was when Preston told us the will existed just before Peter’s funeral. I imagine he chose you because he didn’t want to choose me.”
Alex grunted. “I think he did it just to piss me off. Must have known the last thing I’d want to spend my time doing would be wading through the garbage he left behind.”
“Knowing Peter, I doubt very much that he expected to die at all—far less before he saw his thirtieth birthday.
Are you going to tell me what you found in the box, or what?”
Alex pulled a large, bulky manila envelope from his desk drawer and placed it on the blotter. “Take a look at this.” He opened the envelope and upended it, spilling the contents onto his blotter.
Daniel stepped to the desk and looked down with a frown. In front of Alex were two bundles of cash, each bound with a rubber band, a tagged key that looked as though it would fit a safe deposit box, and a gun.
After a long moment, Daniel picked up the automatic, made sure the safety was on, and ejected the clip long enough to note that it was full. Then he replaced the clip and set the gun gently back on the blotter, and picked up a bundle of cash. “How much?”
“A hundred grand total,” Alex reported. “Any idea how Peter could have laid his hands on that much cash when he always seemed to be the next best thing to broke?”
Daniel glanced at the gun once again as he put the bundle back on the desk. “No.”
Expressionlessly, Alex said, “I would have said he was too nervous to steal. By using a gun, I mean.”
“I would have said the same thing. Peter always looked for the easy score, the fastest way to get what he wanted with the least risk to himself. Convenience store holdups were hardly his style. Is the gun registered?”
“No. And since the serial number’s been filed off, I can’t trace it. God knows where he came by it.”
Daniel nodded. “The key?”
“Another damned lockbox key,” Alex said, morose. “The tag, you’ll notice, has nothing but the number two on it. Why do I have the depressing feeling that I’m going to be chasing all over hell and half of Georgia tracking down Peter’s stashes?”
Instead of replying to that bitter question, Daniel asked, “When was this box opened?”
“Six months ago. And according to the bank records, Peter never came back after he opened it.”
“Any way to track the money, find out where it came from?”
Alex shook his head. “Old bills, well used, nonconsecutive numbers. I even had a friend of mine with the police check out a few bills just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, that they weren’t marked or whatever. He told me there was no way of knowing where this stuff came from.”
“A friend you can trust?”
“Yeah, he owes me a few favors. I didn’t tell him it was connected with Peter, and he didn’t ask. Don’t worry—he’s in a completely different department from Brent Landry.”
Daniel nodded and moved back around the desk to sit down in Alex’s visitor’s chair. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think Peter was up to no damned good,” Alex replied flatly, leaning forward to prop his elbows on the desk. “But as to how he got this money … Look. We know he gambled, something the police haven’t discovered yet but very likely will. Possible enemies there, but why would any of them kill the golden goose? If he was dead, he couldn’t pay for his losses, and the people who held his markers damned sure wouldn’t be applying to his estate for payment.”
“Agreed,” Daniel said, frowning. “And since we haven’t yet been able to determine how much he owed and to whom …”
“A dead end—if you’ll pardon the pun.” Alex wasn’t smiling. “We’re also reasonably sure that Peter was less than honest in his other dealings.”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “But being less than honest is one thing, treason is another.”
“Have the schematics shown up in some nice convenient place where we hadn’t yet looked?”
“No. But we can’t be sure they’ve been sold.”
“So you haven’t reported them missing?”
“How can I? One hint of this gets public and Kilbourne Data is finished—to say nothing of the family reputation and my own. With no proof, we’d only be ruined by rumor, innuendo, and lack of trust. If, on the other hand, the design shows up somewhere in the Middle East, then it’s treason.”
“And you’re the one left holding the bag. Especially now that Peter’s gone.”
Daniel shifted restlessly in his chair. “As bad as Peter was, I still can’t bring myself to believe he’d commit treason.”
Alex shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t so bad, to Peter. Maybe he wouldn’t have called it treason. Daniel, he didn’t like answering to you. He didn’t like being on an allowance that didn’t stretch to cover things like high-stakes poker and trips to Vegas and foreign sports cars. It was galling to him that everyone knew he had no power in the family business. So maybe he decided to take a big risk for the first time in his life
. Roll the dice, everything at stake. If he won, he could live more than comfortably on some beach somewhere for the rest of his life. If he lost … well, look at this stash. To me it says one of two things. Either Peter needed to hide the money and gun for whatever reason, or else he had it laid by in case he needed to make a quick exit.”
“And you favor the latter explanation.”
“It makes the most sense to me, given Peter’s nature. If there was going to be trouble, he’d run like a rabbit.”
That was true enough, and Daniel knew it. “And the second lockbox key? Another stash?”
“Maybe. Even bad gamblers get lucky from time to time; if he’d had a run of good luck in the last couple of years, Peter could have socked away a few hundred thousand by now. Or …”
“Or?”
Alex sighed and began putting the money and gun back into the envelope. “Oh, hell, Daniel, you know what I’m thinking. That microcassette tape I found in Peter’s room. There’s only one reason a man like Peter would have taped the sex and pillow talk between him and the wife of one of the most prominent men in Georgia politics, and it wasn’t for posterity.”
“We don’t know that,” Daniel argued.
“No, we don’t know for sure. Whitney Fremont has been in Washington with her husband for the past couple of months, and neither of us is willing to fly up there and ask her if Peter was blackmailing her. Since she was attending a diplomatic reception in our nation’s capital the night Peter was murdered, we can be fairly sure she didn’t use the knife, but how do we know this cash didn’t make its way from her bank account into Peter’s hands as hush money?”
“He still had the tape,” Daniel said, continuing to play devil’s advocate.
“Yeah, he did. A copy, maybe. Or he intended to bleed her more than once before handing it over. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough to demand the tape, or maybe he lied about having destroyed it. But any way you look at it, Peter had something that lady would have paid plenty to keep secret. And to Peter, it probably looked very much like easy money. Money he could hide away in case he needed it later.” Alex paused, then added, “And I think we both know that if Peter did find blackmailing easy money, then Mrs. Fremont wasn’t likely to be his only victim. Hell, we have no idea how long this might have been going on. It was never difficult for him to get a woman into his bed, and Peter would have been amused by the idea of combining business and pleasure. So there may well be more of his victims out there, and one of them might have got fed up with paying hush money.”
Alex was saying nothing Daniel hadn’t already said to himself, but hearing it spoken aloud made it worse somehow. “The pride of the Kilbournes,” he said now rather grimly. “Lecher, gambler, thief, blackmailer—and possible traitor. It’s a wonder he lived as long as he did.”
“The question is, how much of this will the police uncover before they find his killer? And the big question is, which of Peter’s bad habits got him murdered?”
“And the biggest question of all,” Daniel said, “is how much of this is Amelia involved in?”
“ARE YOU GOING to allow me to see this one, child?” Amelia asked.
Laura looked beyond the canvas to where the old lady sat in the fan-back wicker chair, and said lightly, “Can I wait awhile to answer that? As I said, this is sort of a trial run—that’s why we’re doing it here in the conservatory. I just want to work with the oils with you as subject and find out if I know what I’m doing.”
“And as I said, Laura, I understand the difference between preliminary and final work. I promise not to judge you too harshly.”
There was little Laura could say to that except, “Very well, Amelia. I’d rather you waited at least until the end of this session, though. Give me a chance to get as much done as possible.”
Amelia smiled. “Of course.”
Laura turned her gaze back to the canvas, where the shape of Amelia was pale flesh and hair and stark black clothing, with no texture yet, no shadows or highlights. Not even a face, really, just the shape of one, featureless. For some reason, that last made Laura feel uneasy, and she immediately began working on Amelia’s dark eyes.
“You seem distracted today, child. And you look tired.”
Laura had expected Amelia to comment sooner or later on what she knew was obvious, so she was ready with a casual answer. “I’m like a cat when it storms, restless and uneasy. I didn’t get much sleep last night. But I’ll be fine, Amelia.”
“I see we share some of the same traits. Storms make me fidgety. This time of the year, with so many of them, I usually end up walking the halls of the house all night. As I did last night.”
Laura looked at her. How the hell do I paint those guileless eyes? Was it you in my room, Amelia? And if it was, why don’t you say so? Why play with me like a cat with a mouse? Is that just something you like to do—play with people? But all Laura said, calmly, was, “You should have knocked on my door. We could have played cards or worked on the sketches.”
She half expected Amelia to call her bluff, but all the old lady said was, “Now that I know storms make you restless too, I’ll remember that. Next time.”
Going back to her painting, Laura could only hope that her own expression was as blandly innocent as Amelia’s. But she doubted it. She was tired, and in the bright light of today, last night’s events—all of them—seemed dreamlike. Now, thinking about them, letting the memories filter through her mind, they seemed even more unreal. She could hardly believe she had gone to Daniel’s room, that they had spent hours together and made love with such intensity that even now there was a lingering soreness in her muscles and an unfamiliar and unnervingly sensual feeling of languor throughout her entire body.
She could hardly believe she had as good as told him he could—with her blessing, yet!—keep the truth from her. What was the hold the man had over her that he could persuade her to accept things against all rational thought?
She hadn’t seen him at all this morning; he’d already left the house when she came down to breakfast around eight-thirty. And she doubted he’d be home before afternoon. Was his appointment this morning ordinary business, or would he have declined to talk about it if she had asked?
“Laura?”
She frowned at painted dark eyes that still weren’t right, then lifted her gaze to meet the real ones. “Hmm?”
“I need to go check on lunch, child. Can you do without me for a little while?”
Laura was a little startled to realize so much time had passed, and even more surprised when she saw how much work she had done on Amelia’s face in the painting. Her fingers quite definitely had ideas of their own and seemed to work better when guided by—she assumed—her subconscious attention. God knew her thoughts had been elsewhere. “Yes, of course,” she murmured, studying the shading and highlighting that had caught those distinct cheekbones and the gracious but somewhat enigmatic smile and the elegant nose. But those eyes still weren’t right.…
Amelia let out a little laugh, but said nothing else, just rose and went into the house. Laura, knowing that she’d have to stop work soon for lunch, stood back studying the painting as she absently cleaned her brushes.
“Hey, that’s pretty good.”
She wasn’t startled this time, but only because she’d heard Anne’s clunky boots on the tile. “Thanks,” she said, looking at the older woman. “Still a lot of work to do, though.”
In the restless way of someone who didn’t know what to do with her hands, Anne shoved them into the pockets of her long skirt, and fixed her gaze on the painting. But Laura doubted she was really looking at it, because when she spoke it was about something else entirely.
“I guess you think I’m pretty awful.”
So, it’s my turn to accept the olive branch, huh? Anne had been determinedly and methodically making peace since last night, singling out the members of her family one by one, and though Laura didn’t think the attempts were mere lip service, she did think it said a lot about
Anne’s self-centered nature that she wanted her transgressions forgiven. By everyone, even a visitor in the house.
Mildly, Laura said, “I think Peter was very charming and very hard to resist.”
Color burned across Anne’s excellent cheekbones, and she shot Laura a swift, almost resentful glance. But then she seemed to remember that she was here to redeem herself, and drew a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, he was. He knew just what to say to you to make you forget … things.”
Laura didn’t ask what things, preferring to steer the conversation away from the bedroom. “Anne, you said once that Peter was killed because of the way this family does business. What did you mean by that?”
Anne frowned, her gaze still fixed on the painting. “They’re ruthless, both of them. Daniel and Amelia. Winning is all that counts. It’s the way Kilbournes have always done business.”
“So Peter had to win?”
“He was being closed out, pushed out by Daniel. Treated like an idiot, like what he thought didn’t count for anything. And Amelia used him to run her errands, for God’s sake, as though he were a servant. He couldn’t take that, could he? Not a Kilbourne.”
Laura could almost hear Peter’s smooth and charming voice, see his incredibly handsome face, as he told all his troubles to his cousin, winning her sympathy and her loyalty. Eventually getting her into his bed, surely a triumph since their blood relation would have made the brief affair even more titillating to a man like Peter. She wondered if it had occurred to Anne at all that a man of nearly thirty who complained of being treated badly by his family even as he seduced his own cousin was not a man who could be counted on for truth.
“What did he do?” Laura asked softly. “You said he had plans.”
Anne had her hands out of her pockets now and was rubbing her thin upper arms absently as though she were cold. “He did. Big plans. He told me. As soon as the money came in, he was going to show everybody.”
