If Looks Could Kill

by Andi Marquette

  The night added a chill to the air, and Ellie was glad she had worn a jacket today, even though she’d practically melted at the fashion show. She leaned on the railing, enjoying the view even more.

  “So how did your first event go?” Marya’s voice right next to Ellie sent sparks of pleasure down her legs.

  “I think pretty well,” she said, glad she sounded smooth. She turned her head to look at Marya. “Though it did get a little insane at times.”

  “Tyler said you have a knack for calming things down.” Marya gazed out over the Hudson, and took a sip from her glass.

  “That’s nice of him.” She wasn’t sure why he’d say that. She hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary.

  “Refreshing, in this line of work.” Marya leaned on the railing.

  “You’re saying that people tend to be high-strung in this industry?”

  “Not in so many words.” There was a smile in her tone as she caught Ellie’s gaze in the light that spilled through the balcony doors. A strand of hair blew into Marya’s face. She moved it with a graceful gesture, and that made Ellie burn like a woman left in a desert’s blazing sun.

  “It’s been refreshing having you around,” Marya said.

  She forgot to breathe. Instead, she took another drink. When in doubt, drink from the glass you’re holding.

  “What are your plans after your time with us ends?”

  She sipped again before answering, as if thinking about it. “Hopefully a job in the industry. But if not, there’s always ad copy. I’ll figure something out.” Oh, another Oscar in her future, for this performance, for sure.

  “And how has your experience with us been so far?”

  “Honestly, it’s been a lot more fun than I thought it would be.”

  Marya smiled, and it only added to the slow burn between her thighs and all up and down her spine. “Why is that?” she asked.

  “I’ve met some interesting people and done some interesting things. Plus, you liked my Agent Carter idea.”

  At that, Marya chuckled. Oh, God. Ellie checked her glass. She still had whiskey left. Thankfully.

  “There are lots of rumors about me,” she said, staring out over the Hudson again. “And you no doubt have heard them. Yet you applied for the internship anyway.”

  “I have thick skin.” The whiskey was warm on her tongue and tangy. And it didn’t help at all, because all she was thinking about right now was how Marya’s tongue would taste and feel in her mouth.

  “So I’ve noticed.” Marya pushed off the railing. “I particularly like how you interact with me.”

  She gave Marya her full attention.

  “You’re definitely not the starstruck type, and you have no idea how nice I find that.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “And I could make a position for you. Now, if you’d like.” She paused.

  Ellie waited for her to continue.

  “But I find I’m reluctant to offer one.”

  She stared at her, not sure where this was going. So Marya would hire her, but not? She was suddenly aware that it was only the two of them out here, on this balcony in the September night.

  And then Marya stepped closer, until there was barely a foot between them. “I have a policy, Ms. Daniels.”

  “Ellie,” she said automatically, her heart pounding. “A policy about what?”

  “If I hire you, then I can’t act on this interesting attraction I have for you.”

  Wait. What? Somebody needed to do a rewind, because she was almost sure that Marya Hampstead just said she was attracted to her. But shit like that didn’t happen in the real world. Except that Marya was toying with her tie, and she was standing so close she could feel her body heat.

  “And I’d like to act on it, eventually.” Marya stared into her eyes, and Ellie wondered, if she got a running start, whether she could jump far enough out to actually hit the Hudson, because she definitely needed a cooling down. How did Marya not see the flames shooting out of the top of her head?

  “I’m glad you told me about this policy,” Ellie said, fighting the urge to pull her into a kiss to end all kisses, and she sounded like her regular self, thank God.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Because I would be so fired right now for my actions if I didn’t know about it.”

  She smiled again. “Then we understand each other.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Good. We can revisit later.” She let go of Ellie’s tie and stepped away. “Have a good evening, Ellie. See you Monday.”

  “You, too.”

  Marya turned and headed back inside, but she stopped at the threshold and looked at her again. “Call me Marya.” And then she stepped inside and was gone.

  Ellie was pretty sure her jaw had bounced off her face and fallen right off the balcony. Except she checked, and no, it was still attached to her face. How was this even happening?

  And hello, but she had a case to break.

  And it might involve busting the Marya Hampstead. Who, as it turned out, had a thing for the ladies. Not just any lady. Her. Ellie, who was working for her under false pretenses.

  She groaned softly and finished her whiskey.

  CHAPTER 12

  This was probably her twentieth piece of cinnamon candy. Rick might be right, that they were going to kill her, because her teeth kind of hurt. Could teeth hurt? Maybe they hurt because she’d been clenching them together since last night, thinking about what Marya had said to her.

  This had to be a dream. Totally. Marya Hampstead hated everybody.

  Didn’t she?

  It sure didn’t feel like it last night.

  Fuck. She got up to get another cup of coffee. She was at her desk on a Sunday, trying to figure out who H. Georgios was. So far, nothing. Not a damn thing.

  Rick looked up from his own desk when she walked past. “You hungry?”

  “Damn right.”

  “I’ll buy you lunch, since you’ve spent so much time with the ice queen.”

  If he only knew. “I’ll totally let you.”

  “Greek okay?’

  “I love you.”

  He laughed. “Save it for Ms. Right.”

  “How about Ms. Right Now?”

  “That’ll do. I’m ordering now. Your usual?”

  She laughed. “Yes. And clearly, we spend far too much time together if you know what that is.”

  “Hey, I pay attention.”

  “Honey, I didn’t know you cared.” She made fake kissy noises at him.

  “Stow it. You’ve done some great work. Nobody figured it was models until you took the assignment.” He started to order online. “Should I get a couple of Cokes for you?”

  “I’m serious, dude. We should probably just get married and call it done.”

  “Don’t tempt me. Cokes it is.”

  “What? I’m kind of cute. You’d have a cute wife for work functions.” She batted her eyelashes at him.

  “Save it, O’Donnell. You’re smokin’ hot, even without all the fashion overhauls.”

  “Aw. You noticed.” She unwrapped another candy and put it in her mouth. “I could deal with you. You’re clean, for a dude. You take care of yourself. And you dress nice. I like the mix of natural fabrics. Plus, you smell good.”

  He looked at her with his “wtf” expression. “Seriously?”

  “We’re a good match. And your mom likes me.”

  He laughed again. “And she knows you’re not straight. Plus, she keeps hoping I’ll find somebody like Beyoncé, in terms of looks and business smarts.”

  “Fine. I’ll settle for having you as a work husband. Take that, Queen Bey.”

  “You’re too much.” He looked back at his monitor, and she stared at her laptop, at the hundredth search she’d done on H. Georgios, in a dozen different databases and across myriad search engines and tools. What the hell was she missing?

  “Fuck,” she muttered. “Who is this guy?”

  “Food should b
e here in twenty,” Rick said. “Let’s talk about Natalie.”

  “Cool. What’ve you got?” She pushed back from her desk, holding her coffee in one hand.

  “So, at her last show in Moscow, she was approached by a gentleman who has ties to arms dealings in Turkey.”

  “Who?”

  “Another businessman who passed her a photo to sign.”

  “Do we know what it said on the back?”

  “Kind of. The informant didn’t get the look that you did, but he remembers another name. Dimitriov.”

  “Did the guy pass her a business card?”

  “The informant didn’t say. We ran the name he provided against the Koslovs and the Petrovs and got nothing that has anything to do with what we’re looking for.”

  “Did the informant notice any numbers on it?”

  “Something like fifteen-eight.”

  “What about a place?”

  “Didn’t see.”

  Ellie stared at the ceiling. “They have to be dates. Maybe times. But for what? And where else has Natalie been that she was approached by others?”

  “Checking. It was random, this tip from Moscow. The tipster thought it was weird that somebody would approach her with his own publicity shot for signing.”

  “Yeah, same here. Did he follow the businessman?”

  Rick made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat.

  “I’m guessing that’s a no,” Ellie said as she rolled her chair back to her desk. “Okay, then.” She checked her desk drawer. She was definitely going to need more candy. So how about just doing some searches in Red Hook? Russians and Greeks, since the name she’d seen on the back of the photo was Greek. Besides, it kept her focused on the case and not thinking about what Marya had said to her the night before. Until right now. Dammit. Focus.

  Twenty minutes later she stopped. Another big, fat nothing. Rick got up and left. Even on a Sunday, he wore a nice shirt and trousers. Some straight woman would be only too glad to get a hold of that. He returned a few minutes later with a bag of food. Ellie could smell it before she could see him and realized she was hungrier than she thought.

  “All right. Souvlaki for our resident fashion queen.” He took a styrofoam container out and placed it on her desk. “Two Cokes. Extra pita.”

  “I meant what I said, bro. I love you.” She dug in before he even sat down at his own desk. While she ate, she kept trying different combinations of searches in different database. “This is so good. Thanks,” she said a few minutes later. “And it always tastes fresh, like they shipped it in this morning—” she stopped, several things clicking into place in her brain.

  He looked over at her. “You okay?”

  “Shipped,” she said.

  He gave her another of his “wtf” looks.

  “Right there. The whole time. Shipping. They’re the names of ships. What the hell else would illegal arms come in on?”

  He stared at her. “Fuck.” And then he was typing things on his keyboard. “Holy Mary, Joseph, and Jesus,” he said after a few seconds.

  “That’s mighty Catholic of you.”

  “I’ll be Catholic if it solves this case. And look. H. Georgios,” he said. “The Hellas Georgios, scheduled to arrive at the Red Hook Container Terminal Tuesday night at ten-thirty.”

  “Holy shit. Twenty-six-nine. That’s how people who aren’t American write dates. The day first, then the month.” Ellie took a swig of soda.

  “That’s got to be it. I’m guessing the guy at the event yesterday put in an order with Koslov and his dude on the other end wires the money to a European account.”

  “So is the ship bringing arms in or taking them out?” Ellie took another bite. In spite of all the excitement, she was still hungry.

  “Not sure. If they’re bringing them in, then maybe the buyers move them to other ships and send them along. Maybe the containers just sit there on the pier for a while until the Koslovs round up buyers.”

  “Which means there’re people on the piers that are involved.”

  He nodded. “Speaking of, we’ve had a tail on Jonathan Hampstead since last night.”

  “Oh? What’s he up to?”

  “Meetings at banks. Seems legit.”

  She snorted. “Please. He’s probably in Red Hook right now killing the fuck out of people on the pier where the Georgios is scheduled to dock.”

  He laughed so hard that, once he was done, he had to take a drink of water. “We already checked,” he managed. “He is, in fact, in banking meetings. But I do appreciate the image.”

  She finished one of the pitas that had come with her meal. “I want in on this.”

  He swiveled in his chair to look at her. “Surveillance op. If we can get evidence on film of arms dealing, then we can follow it and see how deep this shit goes. And yes, you’re going because if anybody shows up from Fashion Forward, you can ID them. But you’re going to stay with the team.”

  “I want to be on the docks.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “When will this happen?”

  “We’ll scope it out today and tomorrow, and if it’s a go, we’ll start setting up Tuesday morning. As for you, go to Fashion Forward like usual. Leave around lunch on Tuesday and go to the apartment and we’ll get you wired up and ready.”

  She nodded and took a bite of the other pita.

  “And check this out. The Dimitriov is another cargo vessel. It docked in Red Hook August fifteenth,” he said. “Fifteen-eight, European date style.”

  “So Natalie gets the ships and dock dates of the arms and passes them to buyers at fashion shows. And they hand her a card with whatever info for her records and Lyev’s. That’s slick.”

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. There have to be other models involved.”

  And probably fashion moguls, Ellie thought, dread filling her gut like bad Chinese food. She needed to get over this. Whatever she felt for Marya Hampstead, it was just an attraction. Tons of people were attracted to Marya, after all. She cultivated that. But she’d also admitted an attraction for Ellie, and nobody in the world had yet figured out that Marya had a thing for women, too, so that was something, that Marya had trusted her with it.

  Did that mean anything? Or did she know that because Ellie was basically a nobody on the fashion circuit that nobody would believe her for a minute if Marya took her to bed?

  Oh, God. There was an image that made her almost pass out. But seriously, maybe she took women to bed all the time. Maybe she picked women who were nobodies on the circuit so she could get away with it. And sitting here, thinking about her, Ellie would totally let her do it. She opened the other Coke and took a long drink. Focus. They were so close to maybe breaking parts of this case.

  So how come she was dreading it?

  It didn’t matter. This was her job. Nothing personal. She finished her food in silence while Rick called the rest of the team and doled out instructions. They’d only just clued in to what was going on, and they’d want to figure out as much as they could about who was involved, where the arms went, and they’d alert officials overseas, and it would go on for a while. All of that ran through Ellie’s head. As did the fact that Marya didn’t want to hire her on, which would put a crimp in the operation. And Ellie would have to tell Rick that she’d gotten closer to Marya than she should have, and that was a problem.

  Of course, Rick might think it was great, and he might encourage her to hook up with Marya to get even closer, and get even more information.

  And that made her feel even worse, because she was genuinely attracted to her, and she hated the thought of passing information along in a situation like that. Even if Marya herself had popped those Petrovs, Ellie was having a hard time seeing past the ice queen’s not-so-icy eyes and her teasing little smiles.

  This was so fucked up.

  She finished her food and decided to wait until after the Georgios docked. At that point, she’d re-assess where things were with the investigation and see what
role she should play. She was not looking forward to it.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ellie finished making another cup of coffee and was on the way back to her office when Tyler intercepted her.

  “We’ve got some mock-ups on the proofs that we’re looking over. Are you interested?”

  “Sure.” She followed him, and instead of the conference room where she’d had her first meeting, they went to Marya’s office. The door was open, and Tyler walked right in. She brushed at her blouse, as if there might be some kind of lint ball clinging to the fabric, and went in. She wore trousers today again because the bruise on her shin was the size of a softball, but she had opted for heels.

  “Have a seat,” Tyler said, pointing at Marya’s table. Khalil was there, but no sign of Marya.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She nodded a greeting and sat down across from him.

  “So…” Tyler spread the mock-ups out over the table, “here we go. They need some tweaking, but this is basically where we’re going.”

  “The font needs a little work here and here.” Khalil pointed. “But I like the placement of the images. It’s kind of retro, but not.”

  She looked them over. It was cool, to see an idea she’d thrown out transformed into something like this.

  “There is still work to be done,” Marya said as she entered, and a little jolt of pleasure went up Ellie’s spine. “Having said that, I admit that I’m pleased with this first run.” She took the seat directly to Ellie’s right, at the head of the table. “What do you think, Ellie?” she asked.

  Ellie looked at her, surprised that she’d referred to her by her first name.

  “I like that it has a Forties movie-poster feel, but with an upgrade. Kind of a merging of retro and modern, like Khalil just said. And the colors—I like how you notice them, but they’re not overwhelming.” She had this lingo down.