Flirting With Danger
Page 25
Taking a deep breath, she nuzzled her cheek against his warm shoulder. “You’re not going to like it,” she murmured.
“I figured that. Try me.”
“I think some of the files are missing.”
“Samantha, I’ve collected antiques for better than sixteen years. That’s a thousand files of past and current acquisitions. And even if a file is missing, it doesn’t mean—”
“Do you have a master list somewhere, or do I need to go through the rest of these?” Her hunches were wrong on occasion, but they were right often enough that she had no intention of ignoring them.
“Stubborn, aren’t you?” he muttered, freeing his arm from around her and opening the top left-hand drawer of Danté’s desk. “Anything to convince you to come back to bed, then.”
She followed his gaze. “If that’s where the list is supposed to be, it’s not there. I already looked.”
“The police must have it, then. I’ll get a copy tomorrow.”
“Rick, there’s something wrong here.” Grumbling, she returned to the file cabinet. “Partino’s got a room at the estate, doesn’t he?”
“Down in the servants’ quarters. He almost never uses it—it’s just for nights he works late or wants to stay the weekend.”
“It’s the nights he works late that interest me, Brit.”
He blew out his breath. “This way, then.”
“You don’t have to come. It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Yes, I do. It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
The files weren’t in the small room Partino used for his rare overnight stays at the estate. As she looked through the near-empty chest of drawers it was difficult to miss the difference between the lavish suite Rick had loaned her and the tiny room with its twin bed and half bath that the estate manager had for his use.
“I would suppose the next step is to do an item-by-item check to see which of the files is gone.”
“If any of them are gone,” Rick amended, yawning again. When she didn’t answer he gazed at her for a long moment, his face shadowed in the dark room. “All right. How certain are you that we have a problem here?”
Sam grimaced. “I’d bet your Bentley that something’s not right with this—and that if we could figure out which files are missing, we’d know what the problem is.”
“Let’s go check the files, then.”
God, that would take hours. And while it would confirm what she already believed, it wouldn’t answer one large question—where the other files were, if they weren’t at the estate. “I have a better idea.”
“If it involves what’s under your shirt, I’m all for it,” he said, taking her hand in his as they returned to Partino’s office.
He liked to hold her hand. She’d noticed that right away, and while it made her feel…confined, it also gave her a rush every time he went out of his way to touch her.
“Let’s say I’m already sure that the files aren’t anywhere here at Solano Dorado,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll accept that.”
“So, let’s also say I suggest that I go to Partino’s house and take a look there.”
Rick came to a stop so abruptly that she stumbled at the pull on her arm. “Beg pardon?”
“The cops will have been there, but they’re only looking for something to link him to explosives and to the tablet. Those files are important—Partino’s so anal that he wouldn’t have pulled them out of order in the file cabinet otherwise. And he couldn’t have destroyed them without giving himself a heart attack.”
“Samantha, you’re suggesting breaking and entering. B and E. Whatever the devil you call it.”
“And your point is?”
Rick glared at her in the moonlit hallway. Waking up to find her gone from the bed had sent him into an odd almost-panic, even though logic told him she would stay until she’d figured out what was going on. At the same time he’d been dismayed to realize that he was beginning to draw the investigation out. How many “wait until tomorrows” would she accept? Still, this seemed insane. “No, Samantha. We’ll talk to Castillo about it tomorrow.”
She returned his gaze for a heartbeat, then nodded. “Bed, then.”
As she started past him, he yanked her hand, turning her back around. “How stupid do you think I am? No, Samantha.”
Samantha put her hands on his shoulders and gazed up at him, her green eyes luminous in the moonlight. “Look at it this way, Rick. I owe you one. So unless you have a dungeon with a really good lock on it, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I will not—”
“If you don’t want me to come back, I won’t,” she interrupted. “But I am going to figure out what’s going on. I know that Partino tried to kill me. He had a reason, and if what I’m starting to think is true, it wasn’t jealousy.”
“Sam—”
“You keep saying what’s happened is personal. Well, it is. To me. And now that I have a clue, I’m going to follow it. I’ve never had much faith in cops.”
Turning on her heel, she strode down the hall toward her suite. Her tools were there, and she was right about his odds of stopping her.
“I’m going with you,” he muttered blackly, following her.
And so half an hour later Rick turned off the SLK’s lights and drove the last half block in darkness. “I feel like a felon,” he murmured, parking around the corner.
“You’ll be one, if you go in there with me and get caught.” Samantha pulled on a pair of black gloves and yanked a dark baseball cap down over her hair. “Why don’t you just wait out here and be the wheel man? You’d probably get probation for that.”
Christ. She was comfortable enough with what they were about to do to crack jokes. “I go where you go.” He outfitted himself with his own pair of leather gloves and a ski cap.
“Nice. Remind me to get you a baseball cap, though. It hides your baby grays better.” She slipped out of the car, closing the door gently behind her. “Don’t lock it,” she cautioned. “Noise, lights, takes too long to get back in, all kinds of bad stuff.”
“I don’t intend to make a career out of this.” He closed his door, pocketing the keys. “But thank you for the lesson in criminal behavior.”
He could name a few of his own business ventures that hadn’t been entirely aboveboard, but he also used what he acquired to help the less fortunate, to fund causes he found worthy—and he figured that kept him on the plus side of good. Samantha was quite simply a thief, with any number of motives and plans she kept concealed from him. Yes, she had her own morality; she didn’t steal from museums, didn’t like guns, and she frowned on people killing or dying for an object. But she was still a thief. A damned good one.
She spent a moment looking up and down the street, then strolled up the sidewalk. At Danté’s front walkway she turned in, going right up to the front door with Richard trailing behind her. Considering that it was nearly four o’clock in the morning, he felt amazingly alert. He’d never tell Samantha, but he could almost see why she did this on a regular basis. Knowing that they could be caught at any moment, that they absolutely were not supposed to be there, made this moonlit stroll more exciting than any bank deal or leveraged buyout.
Samantha knocked on the door, and his heart nearly went through his chest.
“What are you—”
“Shh. I’m not going to break in if his elderly mother is here to support him in his time of need, or some other shit,” she whispered back.
“Right, right.”
They stood there for what felt like an hour, and then she put both hands on the doorknob. In the dark he couldn’t quite see what she did, but a second later the door opened. “Come on.”
“How did you know there wouldn’t be an alarm?” he asked.
“There is one,” she said as she went in. “He put a sticker in the front window. If it’s standard, we have thirty seconds to turn it off, or the whole neighborhood wakes up. Coming?”
On th
e wall at the far end of the entry she went straight to a small, glowing box. This time she produced what looked like a small battery with wires and clips. She popped the front of the unit off, and a few seconds later it beeped.
“Cool. Fourteen seconds to spare,” she muttered.
“Now what?”
“Have you been in here before?”
“No.”
“Then we look for an office.” She started forward, then slowed to glance over her shoulder at him. “Out of curiosity, why haven’t you been here before? Even if you and Partino weren’t good friends, he has worked for you for ten years.”
“Do you really want to have this conversation now?”
“Did he ever invite you over and you refused, or has he never asked?”
She wasn’t just chatting, he realized; she was still looking for clues, hints, to answer her questions about Danté. “I don’t recall that he’s ever asked.”
“So you really weren’t friends at all, then.”
“He came to my wedding.”
“I bet the Queen came to your wedding,” she shot back with her quicksilver grin, and slipped through a doorway.
“Her Majesty is very polite, that way,” Richard returned, amused despite himself.
“Here we go,” she said, and he followed her into a large, neat office. She was already at the tall filing cabinet and gestured him to the desk. “Let me know if it’s locked.”
He could bloody well open a desk on his own. The top drawer was secured, and as he jiggled it he heard the file cabinet door slide open. She was good. He’d realized it before, of course, but seeing her in action was supremely impressive. He rattled the drawer again, lifting and pulling, and with a low crack of splitting wood, it came open.
“Subtle,” she said over her shoulder.
“Hey, it worked.”
Richard reached in to flip the latch and unlock the rest of the drawers, and began his search. Personal receipts, movie rental stubs, tax information—everything had its own, alphabetized file. Even the pens were segregated by color.
“Look for weird deposit receipts, anything that doesn’t fit with what you pay him.”
“We’re looking for art files, Samantha. Nothing else. Let the police do the rest of the investigating.”
“Are you being noble, or are you afraid you’ll find something?”
“If he did what you think he did, I am not going to jeopardize the trial that will send him to prison for a very long time.” Rick had to slow when he came across a neat file of Catherine Zeta Jones photos. Interesting, though he made a point of not lusting after married women, himself. Not everyone subscribed to that doctrine. “That was my philosophy with Patricia and Peter—give them enough rope to hang themselves.”
“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” she returned, closing a drawer and diving into the second one. “So which of them pissed you off more?”
“Shouldn’t you be concentrating on something else right now?”
She gave a faint snicker. “Did I mention that B and E gets me really hot?”
Christ. “Peter did.”
“But Patricia was your wife.”
“She was unhappy, and she told Peter. Instead of telling me, he decided that fucking her would be the way to go. My friends don’t shake my hand while they’re screwing my wife.”
“But you dumped her, too.”
Rick drew a breath. “My wife doesn’t sleep with other men.”
Her responding surprised silence didn’t surprise him; even three years after he’d walked in on them, he still remembered the sounds, the smells, the abject astonishment that he’d been fooled so easily. She’d asked, though.
“Ah. Bingo,” Samantha murmured a moment later.
He pushed the desk drawer closed. “What did you find?”
“Your files. Files with the same numbering system as the ones at the estate, anyway.” She pulled a handful free, setting them on the desk, then a second stack and a third. “About thirty or so, I’d say.”
“Let’s take a look.”
“We could,” she returned, “but it’s almost daylight.” Pursing her lips, she looked from him to the files. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t these actually your property?”
“Yes. But what happens if he ends up on trial for something we find in these files, which he knows to be in his house?”
That stopped her for a minute. She’d probably never taken anything with an eye toward its later legal use, before. “How about if we find something, we tell Castillo our suspicions and ask him to get a search warrant? I can always slip the files back in here, if I need to.”
Richard shook his head. “Let’s get them to the estate and take a look first. We can decide how important they are later.”
That earned him a smile. “I kind of like having a partner,” she said. “With a little practice, you might make a good thief.”
“Horniness factor aside, no thanks.” Gathering up the stack of files, he gestured her to lead the way out. “Let’s go.”
She disengaged her wires from the alarm and scooted out the door, closing and locking it while she counted quietly to herself. “Clear,” she said as she finished.
They slipped back down the street and into the car. As he started the engine, Samantha leaned over, grabbed his chin, and kissed him hard on the mouth. He kissed her back, wishing both that they’d taken a car with a backseat, and that they weren’t parked thirty yards from a broken-into house.
“Does it always go that smoothly?” he asked, trying to return his mind to the drive home and away from the keen discomfort in his crotch.
“No. You’re good luck.” With another deep kiss she sat back to slip off her gloves and hat. “And thanks.”
He pulled into the street, turning on the headlights once they’d rounded the corner. “Thanks for what?”
“For trusting me enough to go through with that. I know you didn’t like it.”
He hadn’t liked the theft, but the thrill of it hadn’t been so bad. Telling her that, though, seemed distinctly unwise. “We’ll see whether it was worth it or not.”
Less than an hour later they sat on the floor in Danté’s office, stacks of manila folders around them, and went through the captured files. They looked practically identical to the ones left at the estate, and Samantha frowned. “This sucks. I know there’s something here.”
“We need to look at the art that goes with the files,” Rick said, grabbing one of them and flipping through it again.
She started over, looking first at one of the estate files, then at one Partino had absconded with. Everything looked in shape, until she flipped to the page of comparable market values. In the recovered file Danté had been diligent to the day for the entire three years of the item’s presence at the estate—until seven months ago, when the notations stopped.
Frowning, Sam opened the previous file and looked at it once more. As with all of the others she’d checked so far, it had been updated through last month. Okay, that was interesting. Setting the file aside, she went on to the next one.
It showed the same termination of market value figures, but eleven months ago rather than seven. The comparable value had continued to climb steadily until then, so it didn’t look as though he’d written the painting off as a loss and simply forgotten it.
“Rick? Take a look at this.”
She showed him the figures on both sets of files, watching his expression grow darker and harder as she went. “You were right,” he finally muttered.
“Maybe. We still have to see the artworks before any of this means anything. And we’ll have to go through every file that’s still here to make sure it’s not some accounting glitch.”
“Let’s get to it, then.”
Richard’s weariness had buried itself into a hard, heated anger. Samantha kept repeating that she could be wrong, but he’d already learned to trust her instincts.
“How many is that?” he asked, stretching his back.
“I don’t understand why you’re defending him. He tried to kill you. Besides, the only files with missing figures are the ones he had at his house. And he didn’t stop making the entries all at once. He didn’t forget anything.”
She grimaced, retying her hair yet again into the ponytail that only seemed to hold for five minutes before it collapsed. “I…It’s…It’s like a code of honor. I break the law on a regular basis, Rick. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, ratting out somebody just like me.”
Rick leaned forward, cupping her cheek in his hand. “You’re not just like him, Samantha. In fact, you’re not like anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Don’t get mushy,” she muttered, pulling back so she could stand. “I’m going for a soda. Do you want tea, or coffee?”
With a groan he rolled onto his haunches and used the desk to climb upright. “I’ll go with you.” Bending down, he collected the “questionable” files. “And these are coming along, too.”
“Nobody knows they’re here,” she said, opening the door for him. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere this morning.”
He caught her hand in his free one. “Nothing else is getting away from me,” he said, wondering if she understood exactly what he was saying.
“We still need to check the actual items that go with these,” she returned, jabbing a knuckle into the stack of files. “You may need to call someone in.”
“No. I’m calling you in. If we’re wrong and it gets out, it could ruin the value of my entire collection. If we’re right, I still want to be the one deciding how much the police need to know and figuring out who the bloody hell else is involved.”
He understood what she’d said about her “code,” though it bothered him a little. To this point she’d been fairly forthcoming with her theories, but she seemed to need to prove them to herself before she mentioned anything to him. And even talking to him was different than talking to the police. Richard could only imagine her reaction if she was asked to testify at Partino’s trial or something. She’d run, and he’d never see her again. He hefted the files. All the more reason to be absolutely certain where they stood before they brought anyone else into this little mess.