by Alice Sharpe
“Is it important?” he asked and then regretted it. John wouldn’t have given this woman his number if he didn’t trust her and if what she’d told him hadn’t struck him that her information would help. Before she could answer, he inserted, “Never mind. Should I call this number when I get there or drop in at the police station?”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly, her voice dropping in volume. “No. Before you get to town, there’s a bridge with green turrets. You can’t miss it. There’s a building on the bridge. I will meet you there after work, say, four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“All right,” he said. “How will I know you?”
“I’ll wear a black coat over my uniform and a green scarf. Perhaps you could carry something.”
He felt as though he’d just wandered into an old spy thriller! “Not necessary,” he said. “Just look for a man with a limp.”
“I see. Until tomorrow, then.”
He hung up the phone and called Skylar, disappointed when it went to her voice mail. Headache now superseded by hunger, he went downstairs and ate a light breakfast and then, following a gut instinct he had that the woman from the night before and Aneta’s murder were somehow related, decided to go find Skylar and convince her to come with him to see the police and ferret out this lead her uncle mentioned.
Frankly, he wasn’t sure what else to do. If Luca Futura was the murdering son of a bitch Cole’s brothers were convinced he was, Cole had to find some way to prove it. Either that, or exact revenge. Any which way, it was obvious Skylar wouldn’t want a thing to do with him before this was over.
* * *
HE DROVE TO THE GALLERY in his rental car and parked on the street. The gallery had a closed look to it although it was almost noon. Sure enough, when he got to the door he found a sign he knew translated into “not open.” But there was a light coming from the back where the office was located, so he rapped his knuckles against the wooden door and waited, knocking again when his first attempt brought no response.
Eventually he could see movement coming through the gallery, but it didn’t appear to be Skylar. The door opened, and he was suddenly face-to-face with a gray-haired man in his late fifties with round black glasses and a hook nose that made him look like a hungry eagle.
Doubting the guy spoke English, Cole gave it a shot anyway. “I’m looking for Skylar Pope.”
The man furrowed his brow, then nodded quickly as he touched his balding head. “You mean girl with purple stripe? No, no, she leave gallery.”
“When?”
The man shrugged. “I don’t look at clock. Not long. Five, ten minutes? She get call and rush out.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She say nothing. Okay, she say something about painting and then run out of here like feet on fire.”
“Did she go toward the bus?”
He waved his hand down the block. “That way.”
The opposite direction from the bus. “And who exactly are you, sir?” Cole asked.
“I give audit for Ms. Ables,” he said, his voice impatient. “You to come back next week.” And then the door closed and that was that.
Skylar had told him the night they went to dinner that she didn’t drive to work because of the downtown traffic. She preferred to take the bus, but that didn’t mean she didn’t occasionally drive herself. However, if she had driven, wouldn’t she have parked in the alley instead of the street? The fact she’d left through the front door and hurried away from the bus station seemed significant to him. Wherever she went was probably within walking distance, but that could cover a lot of possibilities.
What was going on?
He took off down the sidewalk, pausing to look through every business window, opening doors and checking inside when he couldn’t see through the glass, a growing sense of urgency propelling him forward.
Chapter Seven
“Where did you get this?” Skylar asked the shop owner, a man who was almost as wide around the middle as he was tall. With his closely cropped hair and pear shape, he resembled a bowling pin.
“I assure you it’s genuine. But it is not yet for sale. Another few weeks, you come back and we’ll see.”
Skylar looked through the case window at the Bartow miniature painting, unframed, resting on a small easel. Mr. Machnik’s painting.
She was in a cluttered shop where the merchandise traveled the gamut from dusty, old and worthless to electronics to this piece of valuable art. She imagined the place was the equivalent of a pawn shop back home. If so, Aneta had brought the painting here, taken a percentage of its worth in the informal terms of a loan and intended to buy it back, including interest, when the month was over.
Only Aneta would never come back.
How had she thought she could ever get away with that?
Answer? She hadn’t. She hadn’t planned to return for the painting, probably hadn’t planned to return to Traterg, period. She’d just needed cash....
And it had apparently gotten her killed.
“This is stolen property,” Skylar said. “You have to call the police.”
“No, it is not stolen.”
Skylar started to ask him what “the girl” had looked like when she caught sight of a rolled-up copy of the newspaper up on his desk behind the counter. “May I see that paper?” she asked, gesturing at the desk.
He turned laboriously, scooped up the paper in a fleshy hand and handed it to Skylar, who unrolled and divided it into sections. What she was looking for was the cover story for the Metro section, and she turned the paper so the shop owner could see the accompanying photograph of Aneta Cazo taken the year before with her much younger sister.
“Is that the girl who brought the painting into your shop?” Skylar asked.
He started to shake his head and then picked up the paper and peered at it, his expressionless eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring.
“She was murdered two days ago,” Skylar added.
He licked his lips. “Murdered?”
“Yes. She stole that painting from my aunt’s gallery. It belongs to one of our customers. Aneta brought it to you, and you gave her money.”
“But she said the painting had been her dead grandmother’s possession and that it had passed to her.”
“Did she provide a providence for the painting?”
“Well, no.”
“Don’t you have to report your dealings to the police at the end of each day?”
His gaze shifted, and she got the distinct feeling that he’d skirted that detail of the law—at least this one time. “Did she say why she needed money?”
He met her gaze again, on firmer ground now. “To help her sister. She had to travel.”
“Where?”
“Why would she tell me that?”
Good point. “Was she nervous? Upset?”
There was a bell at the door signaling a newcomer, but neither Skylar nor the shopkeeper looked up. He shrugged. “Lots of people are nervous when they come here. This is a legitimate business, but people sometimes regard it as unsavory.”
“Hmm...well, the painting must be put in a safe until the police can get here,” Skylar said. “I’m calling them right now.”
She took out her cell, but before she could place the call, someone touched her shoulder. Startled, she turned right into Cole.
Grasping her chest with one hand, she said, “Geez, you snuck up on me,” switching to English effortlessly.
“Blame years of stealth training,” he said with a warm smile that spread an equally cozy glow through her body.
“I have to call Detective Kilo,” she said and placed the call. Kilo was unavailable, she was told, but they would send someone immediately.
“I tried calling you from the hotel,” he said.
“I’ve been running around,” she explained, leaving out the part about how she’d recognized the hotel phone number and decided not to answer his call. The night before still made her want to blush. She wasn�
��t ready to talk to him. However, that was now a moot point as he was standing here, in the flesh, as big and sexy and real as a man could possibly get. She pointed at the painting under the counter. “That’s the Bartow that went missing.”
“I figured,” he said, gazing at it. “Tiny little thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But look at the colors.”
“Are you sure that’s it?”
“Positive. I spent two hours fitting it with a frame, remember? I know every brushstroke. Besides, this shopkeeper identified Aneta from her photograph in the newspaper.”
He stood very close as he studied the painting. The shopkeeper stood off at his desk, arms folded across his curiously narrow chest, gaze averted. It was obvious he wasn’t going to move the painting until the police demanded he do so. It didn’t really matter as Skylar planned on standing there until they arrived. No way would she let Mr. Machnik’s painting get away from her twice.
What was far more disconcerting was the heat radiating from Cole. It was like he had a switch that he could turn on when he wanted to make her feel faint. But that same switch could also turn to off, giving her the unshakable impression that a war waged inside his soldier-trained body that in some indefinable way included her.
They waited around until the police showed up, and Skylar verified the painting was the one Aneta had taken from its frame. She had hoped Detective Kilo himself would come, but it was just a bored-looking guy in a uniform. When they were free to leave, she and Cole walked along the sidewalk side by side.
“How’s your head?” she asked.
As she expected he would, he passed off her concern. “It’s fine. How in the world did you find that painting?”
“By luck. One of our loyal customers haunts places like that one. She’d read about the theft and Aneta’s death, and when she saw the unframed Bartow, she called the gallery and told me about it. I rushed right over there.” She told him Aneta’s cover story, that she’d inherited the painting and needed some quick cash to go on a trip to help her sister.
“Do you think there’s any truth in it?” he asked. “I don’t mean about the painting per se but the sister part?”
“She does have a sister although I never heard Aneta talk about her. The girl looks to be in her early teens. I’ve only seen her photo in the paper. The article said her family lives in a little town northeast of here on the road to Slovo.”
“Are you familiar with Slovo?”
“I’ve been there. Just in the summer. My aunt used to take me when I visited as a kid. There’s an old castle on an island in the middle of a lake that’s been turned into a hotel. Very charming.”
He nodded, and once again, he managed to look as though he was struggling to keep things to himself. “So how did you know where to find me?” she added after several seconds of silent walking.
“The man doing your aunt’s audit described you getting the call and running off in this direction.”
“I’m surprised he noticed. When that guy gets going with his numbers, the rest of the world tends to fade away.”
Cole stopped and, gently grasping her shoulders, he turned her to face him. “Maybe the man has a thing for captivating women with colorful stripes in their hair.”
She smiled as she shook her head. “Somehow, I doubt it.”
“Listen,” Cole added, pulling her closer to the building to let pedestrians pass. “About last night—”
“Oh, please, let’s not have this conversation right now. Please.” She looked away, awkward and uneasy. She’d had hours to think about his switch from steaming hot to icy-cold and still didn’t know what to make of it except that she would never allow herself to be that vulnerable with a near-stranger again. The only thing she was positive about was that it wasn’t his bashed head or her kissing ability that had made him pull away. So what had happened?
“If that’s the way you want it,” he said.
“That’s the way I want it. I made a mistake.”
“If there was a mistake, then it was mine.”
“This is coming perilously close to talking about it,” she warned, holding up a hand.
“All right. So, new subject. Did your uncle say anything more about the lead he mentioned last night?”
She narrowed her eyes as she regarded him.
“What is it?” he asked.
She shook her head. She was thinking about her uncle’s observation that Cole happened to be at the gallery when she needed help with the painting and the suggestion that perhaps that hadn’t been an accident. Cole sure seemed interested in everything to do with Aneta.
Could he be involved in her death somehow? Is that why her killer hadn’t turned around and shot him on the fire escape? Was it possible his showing up at the gallery and every time since then had less to do with chance and her quirky charms than his own agenda?
“Do you have to go back to the gallery?” he asked.
Coming on the heels of their recent conversation, no way was she going to admit that for a few days, at least, she was as good as out of a job. He might suggest going back to the hotel or eating a quiet, intimate meal. She could tell herself she would not fall victim to his charms again, but she had to face it that it was banking on willpower she seemed to lose the minute he touched her.
“I have errands to run,” she said at last.
“Would you consider accompanying me to the police station so we can ask Detective Kilo about this so-called lead?” Cole asked.
That should be safe. “Okay.” It might be interesting seeing him interact with the police.
The trouble was that Cole confused her. She was attracted to his looks, to his strength, even to the secrets she knew coursed through his veins as surely as did his own blood. He was more than he appeared, and the safe, rational thing to do would be to ask him to leave her alone and stick to it.
He took her hand and looked down at her palm as though weighing something important. And then he laced his fingers through hers and squeezed. Her heart skipped a few beats.
Okay, so she wasn’t going to tell him to go away—not quite yet, anyway.
* * *
COLE KNEW SKYLAR WAS his ticket to an audience with Kilo, and talking to Kilo was the only thing he could think to do between now and leaving for Slovo in the morning.
Experience said several unusual things happening at once within the same perimeter were likely to be connected. So in some strange way, he was pretty sure Aneta’s apparently uncustomary foray into thievery, her subsequent murder, the half-belligerent middle-aged woman fixated on Ian Banderas and the way it all circled around the life of Luca Futura had to be somehow related.
But how?
And even if he uncovered the how, would it lead him to the irrefutable proof he needed to exact revenge? Or was it just an unimportant diversion?
Revenge. The word brought up terrible images in Cole’s mind—images of wars and suffering where one side does something terrible to the other side and they retaliate, and so on and so on. Each exchange ups the stakes, becomes more and more intense, the acts of aggression increasingly hostile and violent.
And there were always innocent casualties along the way; in this case, that would be Skylar’s aunt and Skylar herself. When the time came, would Cole have the stomach to hurt them under the banner of justice, trying to exact revenge on a deed committed three decades before?
He remembered Skylar mentioning her uncle’s policy of not allowing coworkers, especially underlings, to get too familiar. He’d reportedly said he had firsthand experience how that could backfire.
Was that experience gained when he did that very thing to his own boss? Had he learned the lesson by living it in reverse? And then there was that tune, the same one his brother Tyler admitted he’d been whistling and humming since he was a little kid, buried so deep in his subconscious now that it was a habit, a memory whose origin was vague at best.
“What did your uncle do after the ambassador was killed?” he asked Sky
lar as they approached the police station.
She cast him what he was beginning to think of as her suspicious look. Not that he didn’t deserve it. “I’m not sure,” she said. “That was before I was born, years before I even started coming here. My uncle doesn’t talk about it much. Why do you ask?”
He tried a nonchalant shrug. “Curiosity. He’s a very impressive man.”
“Yes, he is. He’s been a wonderful husband for my aunt and a good uncle to me and my brothers and sisters,” Skylar said, her gaze darting up to meet his. “That’s what Uncle Luca is to me—family.”
They entered the station and were ultimately shown into Detective Kilo’s office. The place smelled like an ashtray, and Kilo’s yellow-toothed smile of welcoming seemed a little forced.
“Sit down, Ms. Pope, Mr. Bennett,” he said. “I only have a moment or two before a meeting.”
Cole spoke up. “Mr. Futura mentioned a lead in Aneta Cazo’s murder.”
Kilo leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands on his stomach and stared at Cole. “May I ask why you are inquiring about this lead?”
Skylar sat forward. “Aneta was my coworker and my aunt’s employee. Before she died, she stole a painting from my aunt’s vault and hocked it as I’m sure you’ve been informed. We found her body. I found the painting. Why wouldn’t we be interested in how the investigation is going? Besides, if my uncle was going to discuss it with us before a business matter diverted his attention, I’m not sure why you’re so reticent.”
Kilo snapped back upright, snatched a stack of papers from his desktop and made a big deal out of stacking them, squaring them by tapping them on his desk. Carefully setting them aside, he finally spoke. “I am a policeman, Ms. Pope. Cautious is just part of who I am. As for the lead your uncle was going to mention, it is ongoing and concerns an...acquaintance of Ms. Cazo’s.”
“An acquaintance? You mean a boyfriend?”
“Exactly.”
“What about the painting and her telling the shopkeeper she needed to travel to help her sister?”
“The woman was a liar. Her murder was undoubtedly a miserable end to a squalid love affair. I am no longer on the case.”
