Curious Minds

by Janet Evanovich

  A hint of a smile crossed Maxine’s face. “Günter might have also mentioned the one I swapped out would be really, really bad for Werner’s reputation.”

  Emerson nodded and turned to Riley. “Three things cannot be long hidden. The sun, the moon, and the truth.”

  “Did you read that in a book too?” Riley asked.

  “It’s attributed to Buddha.” Emerson paused. “Or maybe I heard it on an episode of MTV’s Real World.”

  “Do you mind if I take these gold bars?” Emerson asked Maxine.

  “Why?”

  “I want to saw them in half and see what’s inside.”

  Maxine snatched her gold bar from the coffee table. “No! Did Werner put you up to this? Tell him I’m hanging on to this until further notice!”

  “I don’t intend to tell Werner anything about this until my investigation is complete.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up my gold bar,” Maxine said. “What’s really, really bad for Werner could be really, really good for me.”

  “Possibly,” Emerson said, taking the bar that was left on the table. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  “You should put it back,” Maxine said. “It belongs in the safe.”

  “I’ll take it under consideration,” Emerson said.

  Riley followed Emerson down the sidewalk to where the Mustang was parked.

  “She’s upset,” Riley said.

  “Indeed she is.”

  “Well, so much for that question-and-answer session,” Riley said. “I’m voting for lunch next. There’s a Five Guys on Irving Street. I could really use a bacon cheeseburger with Cajun fries. You ever try that?”

  “No. And we’re not going to lunch yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re waiting to see what Maxine Trowbridge does.”

  “Can’t we find out after lunch?”

  “Rise above the hunger. I once went ten days without eating a thing.”

  “Good for you. Me, I’m hypoglycemic. If I don’t eat every three hours I get irritable. You wouldn’t like me when I’m irritable.”

  “I like you fine.”

  “I’m not irritable yet.”

  “You’re not?” Emerson said with surprise.

  “Very funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” Emerson said, examining the gold bar. He held it up for her to see. “What do you think? Real or fake?”

  “I think she took the real one from the safe.”

  “Then this is it,” he said, tapping the gold bar with his finger.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I switched them.”

  “But we were looking at them the whole time.”

  “I did it all the same.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe it,” Emerson said. “It is so.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter whether or not you say it’s so. It didn’t happen.”

  “Why would I lie about such a thing?”

  “Why, indeed.”

  His mouth curved into a sly smile for a millisecond.

  “And what’s that?” Riley asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “The smile.”

  “I find you amusing.”

  Two advanced degrees from Harvard and I’ve got a job amusing a man who steals gold bars, Riley thought.

  “The advanced degrees were a waste of time,” Emerson said. “You didn’t need them.”

  “How did you know I was thinking about my degrees?”

  “It was obvious.”

  “You’re a little scary,” Riley said.

  “You’re not the first person to express that opinion.”

  The front door to Maxine’s townhouse opened, Maxine stepped out, and closed and locked the door behind her. She was still dressed in her workout clothes, wearing Oakley sunglasses and carrying a medium-sized duffel bag. She walked down the sidewalk to a gray Nissan Maxima parked close to the corner, slung her gear in the back, got in, and pulled out.

  “Follow that car,” Emerson said.

  Riley pulled out, hoping Maxine was going somewhere for lunch. She knew that “irritable” was just around the corner. She kept a car between her and Maxine, just in case Maxine looked in her mirror. At least the muscle car Riley was driving was a conservative highland green, not flaming red. Still, a classic Mustang Fastback wasn’t the most inconspicuous car on the road.

  Maxine turned right on K Street just as the light was changing. Riley had to choose between speeding through the red light and stopping. She stopped. Her father, the sheriff, would have been pleased.

  “What do I do now?” she asked Emerson.

  “About what?”

  “I lost her.”

  “Figure out where she’s going.”

  “Well, down K Street. Across the Key Bridge.”

  “She was wearing an immersion jacket.”

  “And?”

  “She was expecting to get wet,” Emerson said.

  “Car wash?”

  “That’s a joke, correct?”

  “Criminy!” Riley said. “You are so annoying.”

  “Yes, but a woman once told me I have excellent eyelashes. Have you noticed?”

  Riley had been ready to take a right onto Key Bridge, but she followed a hunch at the last moment and turned left onto Canal Road and drove along the river, past Georgetown University. Soon the city dwindled away. Trees on her right, the C&O Canal on her left. They could have been out in the country.

  She’d been driving for a few minutes when she caught a glimpse of Maxine’s Nissan just as it veered off to the left. She maneuvered over to the left lane and took a turnoff by a sign reading FLETCHER’S COVE. Passing a white stone house that looked like it had been old during the Civil War, Riley spotted the Nissan driving down a little road into an old, dark, narrow tunnel carved underneath the canal. She turned to follow.

  “This car’s pretty wide,” she said. “Do you think we’ll fit through there?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Emerson said.

  As she drove into the tunnel she found herself inhaling, as if making her rib cage thinner would help her fit between the ancient stone walls of the passageway. They made it through to the other side and Riley exhaled in relief.

  The Nissan pulled off the road and parked in a small lot next to a ramshackle boathouse. Beyond the boathouse, the banks of the Potomac looked wild and untamed.

  “Hard to believe we’re a scarce ten minutes from Georgetown,” Riley said, idling just short of the lot entrance.

  Maxine got out of her Nissan, collected her duffel bag from the backseat, and walked over to the service window of the boathouse. Rental kayaks were stacked next to the building, and a number of red rowboats could be seen bobbing offshore, the occupants fishing for shad and catfish.

  It reminded Riley of fishing spots her dad used to take her to on the Brazos River. She took a deep calming breath of country air with only a whiff of exhaust fumes in it and sighed. So near and yet so far.

  Maxine concluded her business at the boathouse and took the path that led through the woods to the dock. The instant she was out of sight Riley pulled into the lot and parked. Emerson was immediately out of the car, following Maxine, with Riley scrambling to keep up.

  “Did you know where Maxine was going?” Riley asked Emerson.

  “Of course.”

  “Mental telepathy?”

  “Bumper sticker,” Emerson said, passing by Maxine’s car, pointing to her bumper sticker reading I’D RATHER BE FISHING AT FLETCHER’S COVE.

  “That is so cheating,” Riley said.

  They followed the path to the dock, pausing at the sound of men’s voices, and Emerson motioned for Riley to follow him into the woods where they’d be lost in deep shadow. They crept closer to the voices, and saw that Maxine stood on the jetty, arms out. A man in a dark suit patted her down, and another man in an equally dark suit looked on, with no visible ex
pression on his face.

  When they were done with her, Maxine climbed down into a small canoe. One of the dark suits handed over her duffel bag and pointed downstream. Setting the bag on her lap, she adjusted her sunglasses and paddled off, driving through the water with determined speed.

  “Interesting,” Emerson said, moving back onto the path, power walking to the boathouse. “We need to rent a boat and follow her.”

  “All we got left are two-person kayaks,” the attendant told Emerson.

  Emerson looked at Riley. “Do you know how to kayak?”

  “I know how to canoe. It’s pretty much like that, right? Except the kayak paddle has two blades, one on either end. That seems one more than necessary.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Emerson said. “How hard can it be?”

  Riley and Emerson left their shoes at the boathouse, slipped on their rented life jackets, and climbed carefully into the little lozenge-shaped boat that was resting in ankle-deep water. Emerson got in front, and Riley took the backseat. The attendant shoved them into deeper water, and they bobbed around for a moment, establishing their balance.

  It took a few tries to coordinate their paddling rhythm, but soon they were cruising off downriver, in pursuit of Maxine. Moving quickly through the clusters of red rowboats with their fishing rods dancing above the water, Riley was struck with how different kayaking was from canoeing. In a canoe, you felt like you were riding on top of the water, but in the kayak you felt like you were sitting right in the water and cutting through it, like a hot knife through butter. She liked the sensation.

  They followed a bend in the river and left most of the fishermen behind. In the woods along the riverbank, a bearded homeless man watched them sail past. Clothes tattered and worn, a slouch hat on his head, a crazy look in his eyes, he stared at them accusingly, a silent reminder that they were still in a metropolitan center after all, pastoral surrounding notwithstanding.

  Up ahead, they could see Maxine. Her orange canoe was moving through the water toward an isolated rowboat, where two middle-aged men in fishing vests sat with their casting rods dangling over the side.

  Emerson stopped paddling, so Riley stopped too. There were three other rowboats looking strategically placed at intervals around the two fishermen. With their dark suits under their orange life vests, their sunglasses and earpieces, the occupants of these boats looked awkwardly out of place in the idyllic surroundings. They might as well have been wearing big signs around their necks that said PROTECTIVE GOON SQUAD.

  All the men in black touched their earpieces and kept their eyes on Maxine as she approached the fishing boat. No one seemed to notice Emerson and Riley.

  Emerson steered their kayak toward the riverbank. “Look like you’re fishing,” he whispered.

  “I don’t have a fishing pole,” Riley whispered back.

  “Imagine the fishing pole,” he said, pulling an odd pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and slipping them on. They were huge and black and looked like a visor that a robot warrior from space would wear.

  “What the heck are those?” Riley asked.

  “They’re ‘zoomies.’ They work like binoculars.”

  “Why don’t you use binoculars?”

  “These are less conspicuous,” Emerson said.

  “Are you kidding me? You look like RoboCop.”

  Emerson sat tall and cocked his head. “Really? I don’t usually think of myself in that way, but it’s an appealing comparison.”

  He’s sort of charming, Riley thought, in an out-of-the-box, geeky-twelve-year-old-boy kind of way.

  Emerson maneuvered the kayak into a stand of cattails while in the distance Maxine steered her canoe up to the rowboat. The two men greeted her in a friendly manner. One of them had a ring of gray hair around a shiny bald head. What hair he had was cut in a military style around his ears, and he carried himself with the bearing of an officer on parade, even sitting in the fishing boat. The other man was smaller and softer. He was wearing a tan brimmed fishing hat and a matching fishing vest. Something about both of them looked familiar to Riley, but they were far away and she couldn’t put names to the faces.

  Words were exchanged between Maxine and the men, and the mood went from friendly to wary. Maxine dragged her duffel bag out and opened it. The men looked in and recoiled. The man in the hat pulled back and looked around, as if he was worried that the guards could see what was in the bag. The bald man went on the attack, grabbing for the bag. Maxine snatched the bag back, then the man lunged out of the boat and struck her across the face.

  Their boats bobbed and lurched about in the water. Maxine righted herself in her canoe and the men in the rowboats converged on her.

  “Holy moly,” Riley whispered.

  “Holy moly, indeed,” Emerson said. “Do you recognize him?”

  Riley shook her head and Emerson removed the robot glasses and slipped them onto Riley’s face.

  “The one in the hat. That’s William McCabe,” Emerson said.

  Riley adjusted the focus with a knob on the temple of the glasses. That was McCabe, all right. She knew the face from numerous appearances on CNN and MSNBC. William McCabe, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Like many other central bankers currently working at the Fed, he was also a former employee of Blane-Grunwald.

  “The other man is Hans Grunwald,” Emerson said.

  “I bet she showed them the gold bar,” Riley said.

  “Most likely.”

  The men in the rowboats had guns drawn and were almost on top of Maxine. McCabe waved the men off, and Riley let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding. Maxine wasted no time putting distance between her and the men, moving the canoe upstream to the boathouse.

  Emerson shoved his paddle into the mud, pushing their kayak farther into the cattails where they wouldn’t easily be seen by Maxine as she cruised past them.

  “What’s the chairman of the Fed doing in Fletcher’s Cove?” Riley asked.

  “Fishing,” Emerson said.

  He poled them out of the reeds, and Riley looked back to where the two older men sat in their boat, peacefully fishing as though nothing had transpired.

  Emerson swung the kayak around and in minutes they were past the bend in the river, heading toward the flotilla of red rowboats and, beyond them, the dock.

  Emerson stopped paddling and held his hand up for Riley to also stop. The homeless man was still in the woods by the shore, looking out at them.

  “Use the magnifying glasses,” Emerson said to Riley.

  Riley slipped the zoomies back on and focused on the homeless man.

  “It’s Günter!” Riley said.

  As if with one mind, Emerson and Riley changed course and paddled the kayak toward the shore. The boat plowed through the goldenrod that lined the bank and slogged into a foot of muck.

  “He’s gone,” Riley said. “He took off as soon as he realized he was recognized.”

  “Odd,” Emerson said. “He seemed so stable in all my dealings with him.”

  “At least we know he’s alive.”

  Riley hadn’t been close to Günter. She’d known him a short time on a strictly professional level, but he’d been extremely nice to her, generous with both his time and patience during her internship. It was comforting to know he was alive, but disturbing to see him looking like a half-crazed vagrant.

  “Should we go after him?” Riley asked Emerson.

  “No. He has a good head start on us and we haven’t any shoes. We’d never be able to chase him down in the woods.”

  “What do you suppose happened to him? We should do something! I’m sure he needs help.”

  “I’ll make a call and send someone to scour the woods along this stretch of river.”

  Riley’s phone chirped, and she glanced at the caller ID. It was Werner Grunwald. She ignored the call and slipped the phone back into her pocket.

  By the time they made it back to the boathouse it was almost four o’clock. They return
ed the kayak and walked back to the parking lot. Maxine’s car was gone, and there were no guys in dark suits hanging around.

  Emerson stopped at the spot where Maxine’s car had been parked and picked a pair of sunglasses off the pavement. A lens was shattered and an earpiece was askew.

  “Oakleys,” he said. “Maxine was wearing Oakleys.”

  “Lots of people wear Oakleys.”

  “Yes, but not many people carry gold bars around with them in a duffel bag,” Emerson said.

  “So you think someone conked her over the head and took her gold?”

  “I think she’s placed herself in a dangerous situation.”

  —

  The next morning Riley ate a handful of Cap’n Crunch out of the box, went out to her car, and drove toward Rock Creek Park.

  She was two blocks from her apartment when Werner’s assistant called.

  “Mr. Grunwald needs to see you,” he said. “Immediately.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there in a half hour.”

  Bummer, Riley thought. Now what?

  She turned right on Park Road instead of left and cursed the traffic all the way to Constitution Avenue.

  Thirty-five minutes later she got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor of Blane-Grunwald and went directly to Werner’s office.

  “I’m sorry I missed your call yesterday,” Riley said to Werner. “I was with Mr. Knight.”

  “The call wasn’t important,” Werner said. “I asked my assistant to check in with you to make sure Emerson was comfortable with our arrangement. Unfortunately, the call this morning is of a more unpleasant nature. Maxine Trowbridge has been murdered. I got a call early this morning from the New York office. She was found on Liberty Street, in the Financial District. She was stabbed. Apparently. The details are pretty sketchy.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “I know it’s a shock.”

  “No. It’s not possible. How could Maxine be in New York?”

  “We’ll never know. I suppose she went up there yesterday.”

  Riley sensed movement on the far side of the room and realized there was another man in the office. He’d been sitting quietly in one of the Eames chairs that flanked the window.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Werner said. “This is my brother Hans.”