Flirting With Danger

by Suzanne Enoch

  “Homicide won’t like it,” Kennedy returned.

  “We’ll be careful.”

  “Um, well, okay then. I guess.”

  Danté Partino, Richard’s estate acquisitions manager, fell in as they climbed the crowded stairs to the third floor. “It’s a mess, Rick,” he said, in Italian-accented English. “Who would do such a thing? Both of the 1190 full armor pieces, the Roman helmet, half the sixteenth-century—

  “I can see for myself,” Richard interrupted, stopping at the top of the stairs. “Mess” didn’t begin to describe the gallery hall. “Armageddon” seemed a more apt characterization. Blackened and twisted suits of armor lay where they’d fallen, lost warriors of some obscene marble-tile-and-carpet-covered battlefield. A French Renaissance tapestry, one of the first items he’d ever collected, hung in burned tatters from the wall. What little remained was hardly recognizable. Anger curled through him. No one did this to him and got away with it.

  “Jesus,” Tom whispered. “Where were you standing?”

  Richard took four slow steps forward, well beyond the outer edge of the chaos. “About here.”

  Danté cleared his throat, breaking the ensuing silence. “Rick, I want to inspect all the damaged items myself, but the insurance people act as if they own everything. They have no idea how delicate—”

  “Danté, it’s all right,” he countered, more for his manager’s sake than his own. Furious as he was, the loss of his things was only a sidebar. He wanted to know who had destroyed them. “Tom’ll make certain you’re consulted on everything.”

  “But—”

  “That’s how it is, Danté.”

  Partino nodded, fingers clenching the clipboard he carried. “Very well. But the water from the sprinklers and the hoses, it also damaged some of the paintings on the second floor. Maybe we can salv—”

  “What about the tablet?” Richard interrupted. He admired Partino’s passion, but it had been a damned long night.

  “It’s not here,” Castillo said, topping the stairs behind them. “We figure that was what she was after. And you shouldn’t be up here, Mr. Addison. This is a murder investi—”

  “Have you photographed and fingerprinted and whatever it is you do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what kind of explosive was it?” Ignoring the hiss of Officer Kennedy, Richard stepped forward, sinking into a stiff squat close to a fire-blackened hole in the gallery wall.

  Castillo sighed. “Looks like a trip wire strung across the hallway, rigged like a grenade with shape charges. You pull out the wire, and pop. Quick setup, but professional—and very effective. Perfect for covering your tracks if you’re caught before you’re out.”

  “What if she’d gotten out unseen?” Richard asked.

  “Well, it’d be a hell of a way to confuse a robbery investigation.”

  “And a hell of a risk,” Richard continued more quietly. “A couple of years for theft versus the death penalty for murder in the first degree, yes?”

  “Only if she gets caught. I might risk that for the stuff you’ve got in here.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Richard straightened, dusting soot from his hands. “Castillo, I’ll leave you to work, but please keep me apprised of the investigation. I have a few phone calls to make.”

  While Danté hovered over the carnage like an anxious mother hen, Tom and Richard shut themselves in the second-floor office. The huge windows overlooked the front lawn and pond, generally a tranquil enough sight, but now covered with uniforms and garbage. With a groan he couldn’t stifle, Richard sank into the chair behind his severe black-and-chrome desk. It was one of the few nonantique pieces of furniture in the house, and only because the seventeenth century hadn’t made allowances for computers or phones or electronics.

  “What’s bothering you?” Donner asked, pulling a bottle of water from the small cabinet refrigerator and sitting in one of the plush conference chairs at the far end of the room. “Other than nearly getting blown into itsy bitsy pieces.”

  “I told you I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “Because of the fax calls.”

  “Precisely. So I was wandering about, waiting for a decent hour to call the New York office. The gallery would’ve been my next stop, intruder or not.”

  Tom stayed silent for a beat, taking that in. “You’re firing Myerson-Schmidt.”

  “That’s not the point. She yelled at Prentiss to stop, then hit me like a bulldozer.”

  “Castillo figured she was trying to save her own skin.”

  “No.”

  “Then what, Rick? Really?”

  “Let’s say she sneaks in, gets through all the security and grabs the tablet—even though I have a multitude of things worth more money—pauses on her way out for five minutes to rig an explosive, gets caught at it, then tries to keep anyone from getting blown up.”

  “Tries to keep herself from getting blown up.”

  Maybe. “But if she hadn’t stopped to set up the bomb, she would have been out before anyone noticed.”

  Tom crossed his long legs at the ankles. “Okay, possibility number one: Robbery wasn’t the objective. Like you said, she did walk right past a hell of a lot of nice stuff.”

  “That makes murder the objective.” Richard could still see her eyes, the expression on her face as she hit him. “Then why drag me downstairs, out of range of the fire?”

  The attorney shrugged. “Cold feet? Or maybe you weren’t the target.”

  “So who was? Prentiss? I don’t think so.” He leaned forward, tapping his fingers on the hard black desk. “Possibility number two: She didn’t plant the bomb.”

  “All right, then we have two intruders breaking into this fortress on the same night, one through the patio window and one by…some other method. One wants the tablet, and the other wants to blow something up. To blow you up.”

  “Except that I wasn’t supposed to be here.”

  Donner blinked. “That’s right. You were supposed to be in Stuttgart until this evening.”

  “The bomb would’ve gone off during the next regular patrol of the gallery, and I wouldn’t have been here at all.”

  “Unless someone knows you left Germany early.”

  Richard scowled. “That narrows it down to just a few people, most of whom I trust implicitly. And Harry Meridien, who wanted me to stay even after I told him that I was not going to pay more than we agreed on for shares in his bloody bank.”

  “People talk.”

  “Not my people.” Pushing to his feet, Richard paced the long room. “I want to talk to Miss Smith.”

  “So does the Palm Beach PD. And the FBI, now. You know how they hate it when influential foreign businessmen from allied countries almost get blown up.”

  Richard dismissed that with a wave of his hand. The maneuverings of the FBI, little as he liked them, didn’t interest him at the moment. “I don’t care about anyone’s agenda but mine. Someone broke into my home, killed someone who works for me, and stole something that belongs to me. And ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ doesn’t begin to answer the questions I want to ask.”

  Donner sighed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll see if I can find out how close they are to nabbing her.” He shook his head. “But when we get arrested for interfering in a police investigation, I’m not representing you.”

  “If we get arrested, then I’m firing you for doing a sloppy job.” Smiling, Rick reached for the phone. “Now leave. I have work to do.”

  Two flipping days. Samantha sank into the cushions of her couch and chose another channel with the TV remote. She hated sitting around under the best of circumstances, and this was far from the best of anything. Still, the media wouldn’t give up the story. And while they had hold of it, she couldn’t turn her attention elsewhere.

  By now they’d run out of new information, and so for the last day she’d been hearing the same story with a handful of twists—the life of Richard Michael Addison, the loves of Richard Michael Addison, the philanthr
opy of, the businesses of, yadda yadda yadda. And then there were the facts they did have, and kept repeating on every news broadcast: There’d been an explosion, a guard, now identified as Don Prentiss, had been killed, and several valuable items had been destroyed. And the police were looking for a white female, height five-foot-four to five-foot-seven, weight 120 to 150 pounds, in conjunction with the investigation.

  “One hundred and fifty pounds, my ass,” she muttered, changing channels again. Wrong weight or not, she knew what it meant; one suspect being sought, one person they were blaming. Her.

  Every instinct told her to run, so she could look at what had happened from a safer distance. The problem was, if they thought she’d tried to kill Addison, there was no safe distance. And no safe way to get there. Airports, bus stations—they’d be watching everything. Well, they could just keep watching, though it didn’t make her feel any better to hear on the morning news that the police were “expecting to make an arrest at any moment.” She didn’t believe it, but neither was she willing to ignore the threat.

  And so she sat on the couch, sipping a soda and eating microwave kettle corn, watching the tail end of the midmorning news—and tried to figure out what had happened. As a thief, she was exceptionally gifted. Her father had said so, as had Stoney, and a few of the discreet clients she’d worked for.

  She enjoyed the independence that her skills provided her. She enjoyed the challenge of her chosen profession, enjoyed the feeling that temporarily possessing some of the world’s rarest objects gave her. And she enjoyed the money she received as payment, careful as she had to be about spending it. Retirement, her father had repeated endlessly while he taught her the skills of the trade. Work toward twenty years from now, not for tomorrow.

  That goal was why she lived in a small, neat house outside of Pompano Beach, and it was why she worked for a pittance as a freelance art consultant for some museum or other. And that, quite simply, was why she didn’t kill. People who killed in the quest for inanimate objects didn’t get to retire peacefully somewhere in the Mediterranean and employ handsome houseboys.

  All of which made one thing clear. If she wanted to retire, she needed to figure out who had set that bomb. She’d either been played for a fool, or she had the worst luck in history. Either way, she wanted payback. And she needed to be able to prove that she hadn’t done it. Solving this mess just to satisfy her own curiosity wouldn’t keep her out of prison.

  The news ended with no break in the story, and she finally found something worth watching. With Godzilla 1985 roaring and stomping Tokyo on WNBT in the background, she scooted off the couch for her computer, logged on, and checked messages. Since she wasn’t interested in either penile enlargement or a free trip to Florida, she deleted them, went into a search engine, and typed in Richard Addison’s name.

  The preview page flooded with images, a backlog of articles on various newspaper and magazine Web sites, from Architectural Digest to CEO to Newsweek. “We get around, don’t we, Addison?” she murmured, scrolling through the first page and calling up the second.

  Most of the articles used similar pictures, as though Addison had sat for one photo shoot and left the publications to sort through the results. Despite the slightly too-long, dark, wavy hair just touching his collar, he looked like a multibillionaire, and not just because of the black Armani suit, black tie, and dark gray shirt. It was the eyes, mostly, dark gray and glinting. They said power and confidence, looking directly into the camera and announcing that this was a man to be taken seriously.

  “Not bad,” she commented. Okay, so maybe that was an understatement. Maybe he was gorgeous. And he’d definitely looked delicious in nothing but sweatpants, even covered in soot and blood.

  Annoyed at herself for getting distracted, she clicked on the third page. Now that the references were becoming a little more obscure, she slowed. Purchases of antiques, a site dedicated to yacht enthusiasts, and an entire page of www.divorcegladiators.com, hosted not by Mr. Addison, but by Patricia, the ex–Mrs. Addison. Ouch. Samantha knew she had more pertinent things to discover about the man who’d dumped her into the middle of a murder investigation, but she clicked on the Web site anyway.

  A photograph of Patricia Addison-Wallis flashed onto the screen. A petite blonde with the sculpted good looks that cost a thousand dollars per visit at a salon, the ex–Mrs. Addison answered e-mail questions and gave advice on how to avoid being taken to the cleaners in a divorce, in hopes that others would profit where she hadn’t. Considering that just over two years ago Addison had caught her bare-assed with Sir Peter Wallis at his villa in Jamaica, Sam privately thought Patricia had gotten off easy. Not all cuckolded husbands would allow their ex-wives and new spouses enough funds to at least keep a nice home in London.

  Her phone rang. Sam jumped, trotting into the kitchen to pick it up. “Hola.”

  “Samantha Jellicoe,” the voice returned, male and heavily French. “So this is where you’ve been hiding.”

  Her heart thunked, then began beating again. As if she didn’t already have enough trouble. “Etienne DeVore. I’m not hiding, and how the hell did you get my number?”

  He made a derisive sound. “I know my business, cherie. And stay out of mine. It’s dangerous.”

  A siren drifted into hearing a few blocks away, then cut off. The hairs on the back of her neck pricked, and Sam pulled aside the lace curtain to gaze out the small kitchen window at the street. Nothing, though the timing of the phone call had just become very interesting. “That was you at Addison’s! You nearly killed me!”

  “I did not expect you’d take a job like this one. So complicated, you know.”

  “Well, fucks to you, mon ami.” As another thought occurred to her, she frowned. “How did you know it was me, there?”

  Etienne snorted again. “Don’t insult me. Anyone else would be dead. Even with you, it was too close, non? Besides, I’m trying to do you a favor.”

  “A fav—”

  Another siren just entered her hearing, and then shut off abruptly, rather than dropping into the typical low rumbling growl as the car stopped.

  “Dammit. I have to go. Etienne, if you called the cops on me, you’re a dead man.”

  “I don’t call the cops, ever. This is shit. Go, Samantha. I will take care of things.”

  “Yeah, right.” Her mind flying with scenarios about who might have talked and why, Sam hung up the phone. She raced into her bedroom, grabbed up the backpack she always kept under her bed, and hurried back into the living room. The computer still sat there, requesting whether she would like to subscribe, for the reasonable price of $12.95 per year, to the newsletter dedicated to following the private life and business practices of Richard Addison.

  She yanked the plug out of the wall, lifted the casing off the CPU, and pulled out every circuit board and wire that wasn’t soldered down. Shoving them into her pack, she kicked the crap out of the rest of the unit, then took another minute to make a check of the windows around the perimeter of the house. It looked clear, and she slipped out the back door. Hopping her neighbor’s fence, she hiked herself onto Mrs. Esposito’s roof, wincing as the motion pulled at the wound on her thigh, and ran.

  She’d left the Honda parked in the Food for Less market two blocks away, and she reached it just as a police helicopter, a news helicopter close behind it, powered overhead in the direction of her house. Her former house. Starting the car, she drove another mile and a half before she pulled into a lot crowded with hamburger and pizza and Cuban food restaurants. The pay phone worked, though she wouldn’t vouch for its cleanliness. Dropping in a quarter, she dialed Stoney’s number.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jorge?” she said in a thick accent. “Está Jorge alle?”

  She heard his intake of breath. “Look, lady, I keep telling you, there’s no Jorge here. No está aqui. Comprende?”

  “Comprendo.” Her hands shook as she hung up the phone, and she clenched them together. They’d found Stoney, or
at least were keeping an eye on him. A close eye. Which meant they’d probably try to trace her call. Cursing, she hurried back to the car and headed north. How in the hell had the police found their trail so fast? She knew she hadn’t left prints, and even if Addison had managed to give a good description of her, they had nothing to match it to. She believed Etienne when he said he hadn’t turned her in—that wasn’t his style. The cops’ arrival, though, hadn’t surprised him, either. Someone had talked, and they’d implicated both her and Stoney. She narrowed her eyes. No one played her for a fool. No one who didn’t regret it later.

  This was out of control. Rich people had things stolen from them all the time. That was why they’d invented insurance. What rich people didn’t have, however, were people trying to blow up their houses, and perhaps even them. Damn Etienne. She remembered Addison’s face as she’d hit him, the startled look that had replaced the mild amusement in his gray eyes. He had to know she hadn’t tried to kill him. Just the opposite. She’d saved his life.

  Samantha’s heart jumped. He was the only witness to her involvement in any of this, as far as she knew. Etienne might have said he’d take care of things, but in her experience, that meant only things that concerned his own ass. If he followed his usual pattern, he would disappear for a few weeks and emerge counting his cut. Which was fine, except that it left her with a shitload of trouble. And so she needed Addison. She needed to convince him that she was innocent—or relatively so, anyway. Someone needed to take the blame for this fiasco, and she didn’t intend for it to be her. It looked as though she was going in over the wall, after all.

  Four

  Thursday, 9:08 p.m.

  “This is ridiculous,” Richard said, hanging up the phone after his conversation with the chief of the Palm Beach Police Department. “It’s been two bloody days, and still all they’ll say is that they have a few leads but nothing they’re free to tell me.”