by Cassie Miles
“I’ve never taken anything precious to them. I’ve heard them talking after a theft. They laugh. They say it isn’t important.”
“You hear everything, don’t you?” She remembered him quietly going about his business while Gloria flounced dramatically around her boutique. “You know all the secrets.”
“Yes,” he hissed.
“You’re the one who put that note in my purse,” she said.
“Maybe I did.”
Stan Lansky had all the answers. He was the key to opening up her investigation. She had a million questions, but she focused on the most important. “What’s going to happen? What is the crime?”
“It’s bad, very bad. I wanted to get away before anything happened. To take Tammy home.”
“Tell me, Stan.” There might still be time to prevent disaster.
“It’s not wrong for me to steal,” he said petulantly.
Molly wasn’t interested in a discussion of ethics. “Work with me. Tell me your secret.”
“I steal for Tammy. When I bring her gifts, she’s so happy.” His features crumpled with an attempted smile. “She’s like a kid at Christmastime.”
Molly heard a clicking sound from the high end of the parking ramp. Was it Adam? On bare feet, she moved closer to Stan. “Tammy would want you to tell me about this crime. She’d want to stop it.”
He straightened his narrow shoulders. “Are you going to turn me in?”
She thought back to seven years ago, when she’d stolen from Adam and he’d given her another chance. It was within her power to let Stan go free with a promise that he’d never be the magpie again. “You’ll have to make restitution.”
“Not the police.” He shuddered. “You can’t turn me over to the police.”
She stood only a few paces away from him. Her weight balanced lightly on the balls of her feet. If Stan made a move on her, she might be in serious trouble. Her long skirt, even with the slit, would get in the way of karate kicks. She hoped Adam would hurry.
“Molly,” he said, “we can make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“You don’t really care about these trinkets.”
She nodded. He was right. Though she’d been initially drawn into this wedding miasma by the investigation of the magpie, there were more important issues. “Tell me what you know.”
“And you’ll let me go?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I know everything.” He grinned. “I’m always there. Listening and watching. Nobody pays any attention to me. I’m just the tailor. The lackey. They talk. Oh my, they talk and talk. They make their plans, and I hear every word.”
“Tell me.”
“Not so fast.” He held up his hand, signaling her to stay back. “You have to swear to let me go.”
She struggled with her conscience, thinking of Adam, who would surely insist on turning Stan over to the cops. Detective Berringer would never honor any agreement she made with Stan. “I can’t make that promise,” she said. “It’s out of my hands.”
“I’ll tell you about the real crime.” Stan’s voice took on a pleading note. “Gloria’s crime.”
Molly wanted to grab his shoulders and shake the truth out of him.
Stan glanced at his wristwatch. “There’s not much time left.”
Molly heard another clicking noise from higher up the ramp. A barrage of gunfire rang out. The sound echoed inside the concrete garage like thunder.
Stan wailed. His small, skillful hands clawed at his white shirtfront. It was red with blood. He slumped against the trunk of his car, protecting his treasures with what might be his last breath.
Molly leapt toward him as more gunfire erupted. She dragged Stan to the pavement between his car and the one parked beside it, hoping to protect him.
Too late, she realized that she’d trapped herself in the narrow space between the cars. If the shooter came after her, there was no escape.
She looked down at Stan, who was still breathing. “Tammy,” he choked out the name. “I love her. I did it all for her.”
“Don’t talk,” Molly whispered. “Save your strength.”
She had to escape this trap. Unarmed, she was completely helpless against the gunman.
When she bobbed up behind the trunk to take another look, there were more shots. Bullets pinged against the parked vehicles. Stepping over Stan, she went to the hood. The nose of the car beside him was parked too close to the concrete wall; she couldn’t wedge her way through without presenting a target. But she had to move.
Acting on instinct, she dove across the hood and slid to the opposite side of the car, tumbling in a heap. Not a graceful move. But she’d made progress.
Unfortunately, the next car in line was a van. Not a white van. But a flat-nosed van that hemmed her in like a wall. If she got out of here alive, she intended to write a nasty letter to the manufacturer.
Her only chance for escape was to crawl under the van. Kissing her gorgeous blue dress goodbye, Molly went down flat on her back and wriggled on the hard concrete, inching her way under the van like a mechanic doing an oil change. Only two more cars, and she’d be at the end of the row. She could make a run for it.
Her long pearl necklace tangled in the undercarriage. She was stuck. Damn it! Struggling, she yanked at the necklace. These cheap pearls should break in a second, but the necklace felt strong as steel.
She heard a burst of gunfire. Then a single shot. And another.
Adam called out, “Molly, are you all right?”
“Go back.”
Stuck under the van, she heard the sounds of pursuit. More gunfire. Then silence.
Adam! If he’d been shot, she might as well step into the light and tell the sniper to shoot her, too. She didn’t want to live without Adam. He was the love of her life, the man she should be marrying.
“Molly,” he said. “Where are you?”
The sound of his voice motivated her. With a yank, she snapped the pearls and fought her way out from under the van.
Higher up the concrete ramp, she saw Adam. He was kneeling beside the prone body of another man, but Adam appeared unharmed. Pure relief washed over her. Thank God, he was all right. If anything had happened to him, she would have died.
In her mind, she was running toward him. But her feet were slow to move. It felt as if she were in shock as she approached him.
When he stood and took out his cell phone, he turned toward her. There were splatters of blood on his white shirtfront.
“Are you hurt?” She came more swiftly toward him. “Adam, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said tersely. He spoke into the phone, giving instructions to the 911 dispatcher. Then he knelt again beside the man he’d been forced to shoot. “He’s still alive.”
“Who is he?” Molly asked.
“I don’t know. He’s unconscious.”
Adam stood. He holstered his sidearm and tightened his fists to control the tremors that radiated up and down his arm. What the hell was going on with him? It couldn’t be fear. He’d never been afraid for himself. Molly’s safety was another matter entirely.
When he’d approached the garage and heard gunfire, he’d felt panic—the ice-cold chill of a terror he had never experienced before. Not in combat. Not in any circumstance.
If she’d been shot… He shook himself, not wanting to face that dire possibility. He reined in his emotions, set aside his fear and turned toward her.
She was a mess. Her shoes were gone. Her hair tumbled down around her face. And her dress was filthy.
He smiled. “You’re beautiful.”
She leapt into his arms, clinging tightly as though she’d never let go. And that was fine with him. He couldn’t imagine a better future than to be with Molly night and day. “I love you,” he said.
“Oh, Adam.” She released her stranglehold. Her blue eyes shone brightly. “I love you back.”
Once again, he might have chosen a better place and
time to make this declaration. He should have been standing by a waterfall with birds chirping in the background.
Instead, they were in a concrete garage. One man lay injured at their feet. And Stan Lansky was making loud groaning noises.
Molly glanced down at the sniper. “You’re not going to get in trouble for shooting him, are you?”
“Self-defense,” he said. He pointed toward a high corner of the garage near the ceiling. “I’m sure it’s all been caught on videotape.”
“Too bad this guy is unconscious,” she said. “He could have answered some questions.”
“We’ve got one answer already,” Adam said.
“What’s that?”
“We suspected that a professional assassin stabbed Pierce in his office. This sniper fits the bill.”
She broke away from Adam’s embrace and knelt down beside the unconscious man. Without the slightest hesitation, she plunged her hand into his trouser pocket.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked.
“Looking for identification,” she said. “There’s got to be some kind of clue.”
“Wait for the cops, Molly. From now on, it’s their investigation.”
“I don’t think so.” She dug into another pocket. “Right before Stan was shot, he promised to tell me about the crime. He said it was Gloria’s crime, and there wasn’t much time left. Something is going to happen now. Immediately.”
She found a wallet and handed it to Adam. While Molly continued to search, he flipped it open. “Colorado driver’s license.”
“Is he Phil Prath?”
“His name is John Simpson.”
Adam ran his thumb across the laminated surface of the card. There was something wrong with this identification. The mountains in the background were a strange shade of blue, almost turquoise. And the name, John Simpson, didn’t fit the sniper who looked Asian. “This might be a fake.”
Molly looked up, wide-eyed. “Ronald said he’d made fake IDs. He said they were for Gloria’s friends.”
“When did you talk to Ronald?”
“In the ballroom. Just as I was leaving. He looked really nervous when I mentioned Phil Prath.”
“I don’t like the way this is shaping up,” he said. “You mentioned Phil Prath to Ronald. And to Denny Devlin. Within minutes, you’d been attacked by a sniper.”
She shook her head. “But he shot Stan Lansky. I was standing right there and he didn’t—”
“What was happening when he shot Stan?”
She swallowed hard. “He was about to tell me about the crime.”
Stan Lansky was the first victim, Adam thought. And Molly surely would have been the second. “Thank God you called me.”
In the pocket of the sniper’s blazer, she found a small flat booklet. “A passport.” She opened it. “He’s from Bangkok.”
Adam had a sense that this was significant, but he couldn’t remember why. “What’s the connection?”
“The wedding gowns.” Molly scrambled to her feet. “They’re handsewn in Thailand.”
“And?”
A brilliant smile lit Molly’s face. “Gloria’s crime is smuggling.”
Chapter Nineteen
Molly heard the wail of sirens approaching the parking garage. There wasn’t much time; she had to talk fast. But so many thoughts churned inside her brain that she couldn’t find the words to explain her conclusion.
“Sparkles,” she said. “Glitter.”
Adam looked at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses. “Are we playing some kind of word association game? Charades?”
Frustrated by her own lack of coherence, she glared at him. In contrast to her own grease-stained appearance, he was incredibly cool. Adam stood there in his tuxedo with a semiautomatic gun in one hand, looking like a sexy movie star version of an action-adventure hero. An all-American James Bond.
“Remember,” she said. “When you talked to Pierce in the hospital, he mentioned glitter.”
“And we assumed he meant Lucien Smythe’s diamond necklace.”
“But it wasn’t the necklace,” she said. “Pierce was talking about the glitter on Heidi’s wedding gown.”
Why hadn’t she made this connection before? When she’d been in Pierce’s hospital room, Heidi had been chattering about how she wanted dozens of sparkles sewn onto her bridal gown. Molly should have figured it out. She should have known.
The cops would be here any second. She had to pull herself together. She clasped Adam’s free hand and held on tight, grounding herself. Then, she said, “Gloria orders her gowns from Thailand where they’re handsewn, supposedly with cheap decorative sparkles. But here’s the trick: the gems are real. High-quality diamonds.”
“Illegal diamonds. She’s involved in a diamond smuggling operation,” Adam said. Finally, he was on the same page with her. “This is big, Molly. Trading in illegal gems is a multimillion dollar business, especially now when international terrorists need to transfer their funds undetected from one country to another.”
Molly shuddered. She hadn’t even considered the terrorist aspect. “These stones are hidden in plain sight on the wedding gowns when they go through customs.”
“Go on,” Adam said. “What happens next?”
“When a dress arrives in Gloria’s shop, she removes the gems, and Stan replaces them.” She was absolutely certain that she was right about this. “The very first time I visited Gloria’s shop, I noticed a dress that had just been delivered. It had loose threads in need of repair.”
“Was Pierce in the room?”
“Yes. He must have noticed the threads.” And Pierce must have known enough about his ex-wife’s smuggling scheme to confront her. “He figured out what she was doing. That’s why he was attacked.”
Molly remembered how she and Adam worked out the probable logistics of what had happened in the assault on Pierce. He’d been facing the door, talking to someone. That someone was Gloria. Then, he was knocked unconscious from behind, then stabbed. Probably by the professional assassin who lay at their feet.
Molly’s gaze lowered. Though she’d gone through this man’s pockets, she hadn’t looked at his face. His eyelids were closed. His complexion, sallow. She should have felt more sorry that he’d been shot and might be near death. Instead, she was detached. She had the attitude of a real detective. “Do you think it was him? Did he attack Pierce?”
“Yes,” Adam said.
She tightened her grip on his hand, appreciating his decisiveness when she felt as if her brain were flitting like a hummingbird from one conclusion to the next. “But why did he use a knife?”
Adam held up the semiautomatic, a lethal-looking weapon. “This makes a lot of noise.”
But a knife? The use of a high-carbon, stainless steel knife pointed toward Denny Devlin. How was he involved? Before Molly had a chance for any more thinking, the ambulance raced up the ramp in the parking structure.
For the next several minutes, the paramedics efficiently did their work, providing aid for Stan and the sniper, then loading them into the rear of the ambulance.
One of them approached Molly, “Are you okay, miss?”
“I’m fine. I just look like hell.”
He didn’t bother to say otherwise. With a wink, he tipped his cap and ran back toward the ambulance.
Frowning, Molly poked at the rat’s nest on top of her head. She didn’t dare look at the damage to her dress and her torn pearl necklaces. This outfit was never meant for crawling under parked cars.
She scanned the floor of the garage. “Somewhere around here, I dropped my purse and matching shoes.”
“I knew those shoes were worthless for running,” Adam muttered.
“Speed wasn’t the problem. The heels made too much noise on the concrete.”
She spotted the purse and the shoes. She was slipping into her pumps when two cop cars squealed into the garage.
In addition to her natural reticence about police interviews, Molly had another
concern. She returned to Adam’s side. “We can’t spend a lot of time with the cops. We need to act quickly. Stan said something was going to happen soon.”
“What’s supposed to happen?”
“I’m not sure. What’s the next logical step?”
Adam filled in the blank. “Let’s assume that Gloria, the owner of a bridal boutique, isn’t really an experienced diamond smuggler.”
“Probably not,” Molly said. Though she didn’t like Gloria, she couldn’t imagine her as an international criminal mastermind.
“That means she’s working with someone else.”
“And?”
“The next thing that should happen is Gloria turns over the smuggled gems to the real criminals and gets her payoff.”
When Molly last saw Gloria, she was inside the Brown Palace ballroom, talking with Denny Devlin. Surely, she wouldn’t make the exchange there. Not with a whole ballroom full of witnesses.
As Ted Berringer sauntered toward them, Molly deliberately turned away. She whipped her cell phone from her purse and punched in the number for the hospital. The phone in Pierce’s room rang half a dozen times before it was picked up by a nurse.
“Is Pierce there?” Molly asked.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “He signed himself out.”
“You’re joking! He didn’t look well enough to stand on his own two feet, much less to be out of the hospital.”
“I agree, but he insisted. I took him downstairs in a wheelchair, put him in a cab and handed the cabby a note with the address where Pierce wanted to be dropped off.”
“Do you remember that address?” Molly asked.
“I don’t remember exactly, but it was downtown.”
The loft! Pierce was going to the loft!
That had to be where Gloria would turn the gems over to the smugglers. But why was Pierce going there? Either he was involved with the smugglers or he was walking into an ambush. Molly suspected the latter. If Pierce went to that loft, he’d be in mortal danger.
She came toward Berringer who stood with his arms folded across his chest, watching as the crime scene forensic investigators fanned out across the garage. Police procedure could often be a tedious process, and they didn’t have much time.
