The Bliss Factor

by Penny McCall

  “She was a long shot anyway. An elderly woman with bad eyes? Not a good bet for this kind of enterprise.”

  “She says artificial lenses interfere with the ‘sight,’” Rae told him. “But she wears glasses the rest of the time.”

  “Still crossing her off the list.”

  “She has a pretty good track record, you know.”

  “Are you saying you believe her?”

  “My mother calls her the Jeane Dixon of the Renaissance circuit.”

  “Who’s Jeane Dixon?”

  “She predicted the assassination of John Kennedy.”

  “Anything more recent?”

  Rae frowned, coming up empty.

  “I’ll be careful,” Conn said, deadpan voice, bland expression, not taking Rae or Madame Zaretsky seriously.

  Fine, Rae thought, she’d tried. If he wanted to play fast and loose with his life, well, it was his life to play fast and loose with.

  “Answer your phone,” Madame Zaretsky called after them.

  Conn took out his cell phone, just in time for it to ring. He frowned over his shoulder at Madame, who was smiling, probably because she’d expected that reaction even if she couldn’t see it.

  “Yeah,” he said into the phone. He listened for a few seconds, then said, “Go to your booth and act normal . . . I’m sure . . . Rae’s fine. We’re both fine, and we can finish our part of this faster if we know you’re safe.” And he snapped the phone closed.

  “My mother?” Rae said.

  He chose not to state the obvious. “They identified the engraver. Cornelia Ferdic.”

  “No. Really? She didn’t strike me as the type.”

  “How about your parents? Ever think they’d be involved in something like this?”

  She got his point, even if she chose not to say as much. “So I take it she doesn’t have the plates.”

  “No.” Conn reached out and tapped the pendant Rae had bought from Cornelia less than a week before. “Judging by her merchandise, she’s good enough to make them.”

  He hadn’t actually touched her, but her heart was pounding so hard, just at the close call, that Rae had to struggle to focus on what he was saying. Concentrating on the life-and-death stuff put it all back into perspective. Keeping her eyes off him helped.

  “Your parents have done their part so I sent them back to work. Best to keep everything as normal as possible, while we close the rest of the circle.” Conn pulled out his cell phone and speed dialed, not bothering with a greeting. “Cornelia Ferdic,” he said into the phone. “She’s been with the group . . .”

  “Not more than ten years,” Rae supplied. “She joined up after I went off to college.”

  Conn relayed that information into the phone, then said, “Yeah, I know the Secret Service checked the group out before I was sent, and they came up empty. There were a lot of people to check out, especially when you factor how they come and go. Do me a favor and put one of our guys on it. Have him peel back another layer or two on this woman. Those plates are just too damn good for her to be a beginner.” And he disconnected.

  “That was your FBI handler?”

  “Yeah. He’s going to check Ferdic out and get back to me.”

  Rae frowned. “You really think she’s some sort of professional counterfeiter?”

  “There’s no way those plates are novice work, especially if they were made in the time frame your parents gave me. The Secret Service ran background checks on everyone affiliated with the group, and they came up with nothing. Now that we have a name, it’s worth taking a deeper look. If we don’t find anything, it’s just a little time lost.”

  “And if you do find something?”

  “It could give us a direction on the guys who are running the show. Get this over with faster.”

  “By all means,” Rae said dryly. “We wouldn’t want to trespass on your time any longer than necessary.”

  Conn ignored the sarcasm. “If we cut off the head of the snake, the rest of it will die with no collateral damage. The other players won’t get off scot-free, but at least they’ll be alive.”

  If there was a way to keep her parents safe, Rae was all for that. She headed for the next booth on their list, but Conn took off on a tangent that ultimately led directly to Hans Lockner’s booth, Paper Moon.

  Rae pulled Conn to a stop a hundred yards away. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Because he’s a pervert, and I want to smash his face in?”

  “Because being a pervert doesn’t make him a criminal.” She grinned. “But it does mean he has good taste.”

  “He strikes me as the kind of guy who goes for quantity, not quality.”

  Rae could have taken that as an insult, but she was too busy cluing in to the physical subtext beneath Conn’s words, the muscle working in his jaw, the way he stared, blue eyes laser sharp, at Hans’s booth, the general aura of leashed control. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said Conn had something against Hans Lockner, and it wasn’t about the case. The case was his job; this was personal.

  He flashed her a look that had her jumping to conclusions she had no business landing on under the current circumstances. And then he made a beeline for the booth, his strides too long for her to keep up.

  A teenager with black eyeliner and multiple piercings stood at the counter. When Rae walked in he was huffing out breath. “Don’t bother, man,” he said to Conn. “I been waiting here for, like, ever.” He tossed down a print of a dragon hovering over a frail-looking woman, her skirts blowing in an artistic wind and leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination. “Dude who runs this place oughta be glad I’m not of a larcenous inclination,” and he stomped out.

  Conn leaned over the counter, then walked behind it. “Kid’s right,” he said. “There’s nobody here, but this guy isn’t even trying to hide what he’s doing.”

  Rae joined him in the back room, in time to watch him pull back a huge gray tarp and reveal what she figured must be a printing press. “Everyone minds their own business around here,” she said, deciding not to think about Hans’s estimation of her intelligence if he thought she’d ignore a hulking piece of machinery just because it was under a tarp. Then again, Hans probably thought he could dazzle her with his attributes. Yuck.

  Conn started at one end of the contraption and worked his way methodically to the other end, flipping a switch that made the machine whir to life, spitting out a sheet of paper without a single mark on it.

  “Fuck,” he said, scrubbing a hand back through his hair.

  “No plates, I take it.”

  “No plates.” He turned the machine off and replaced the tarp.

  When he started to search the small back room, Rae went to work helping him, the two of them circling the place methodically. They came up empty-handed.

  “It’s almost dinnertime,” Rae said. “If we’re going to search his campsite we’ll have to hurry. A lot of the regulars will be heading back there soon.”

  Hans owned a pop-up camper that he dragged around behind a rusted-out Chevy pickup. When Rae and Conn got there they found the place trashed, even beyond the best efforts of a complete slob. Furniture was overturned; food boxes were sliced open and emptied on the table, counter, and floor; and every storage compartment in the place was open and vomiting its contents.

  “Do you think they found the plates?” Rae asked Conn.

  “No. They would have stopped searching.”

  “Unless the plates were the last place they looked.”

  “It’s always the last place you look,” Conn said, “but the odds are against them having to tear everything apart, so we go on the premise the plates weren’t found.”

  Rae followed him outside and watched him kneel to peer under the pop-up, then the Chevy. He climbed up to look on top of both, then jumped to the ground.

  “They’d be close,” he said, turning in a slow circle and surveying their surroundings.

  Rae made a beeline for the nearest tree, an old bee
ch with gray bark and a hollow base. She didn’t look there, though, instead climbing the stubs of long-shed branches until she was high enough to reach into the canopy of yellow leaves starting to fall. “I learned this from an old guy who traveled with us when I was a kid,” she said. “He was a hobo for part of his life, and he used to hide everything he owned in a tree at night.”

  She felt around in the crotch of the first row of branches, then the next highest level. Nothing. She climbed down and moved on to another beech, not far from the first, Conn boosting her up this time. His hands lingered on her waist, slipping down to her thighs to steady her once she found her footing on a low branch.

  Rae scrambled up out of reach, before she forgot that Conn’s objective was solving the case so he could put her into his past, before she let herself slide down, into his arms, before she begged him to love her back, just for a moment, even if it was a lie.

  “Are the plates up there?”

  She smiled a little, darkly amused by her own stupidity, mooning over a man who saw her, at best, as an unwelcome burden. For as short a time as possible, which brought her full circle and gave her a swift kick in the pride. Conn didn’t want her around, the hell with him.

  She searched the branches above her head, grinning when she felt plastic-covered cloth wrapped around something hard and rectangular.

  She almost bobbled it when Conn wrapped his hands around her hips to help her down, and since her focus shifted from finding the plates to getting his hands off her she tossed him the bundle. “Good news. You’re one step closer to getting rid of me.”

  Conn took out a pocket knife and slit the wrappings along one side, peeling them back far enough to reveal a pair of metal plates taped together. “You’d make a pretty good detective,” he said.

  “I’m just an accountant with an interesting background. And I’ve had enough of the FBI.”

  “And I could do without the hostility.”

  “Then you’re in the wrong line of work.”

  chapter 27

  “LARKIN IS FBI.”

  “You sure?”

  “We overheard him talking to the woman he’s with.” There was silence from the other end of the phone, as Harry’s boss digested that news, then said, “What else?”

  Harry did a preemptive grimace and said, “He has the plates,” rushing to add, “the printer spilled, but by the time we got back to the nutfest, Larkin was already there.”

  “Get the plates, then deal with the witnesses.”

  “Deal?”

  “Who’s going to take care of your family if you go to jail?”

  Harry didn’t voice an answer, but he was shrieking, “No,” into the silence in his own head. He just wanted a job, for Christ’s sake, a normal job with a normal pay-check and a list of functions that did not include car chases, torture, or breaking federal laws. Not to mention murder. Jesus, how would he look his wife and kids in the eyes after that?

  “If you’re done whining—”

  “Watch it, or I might decide to leave everyone else alone and deal with you.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. If anything happens to me, I’ve made sure your name will come up in the murder investigation.”

  “I never agreed to kill anyone.”

  “But you will.”

  Yeah, he would, Harry decided. His heart was heavy, so was his conscience, but jail wasn’t an option Going to the feds and turning informant crossed his mind, but that would probably certainly end in jail time, and worse, his family would find out he was a criminal. He just couldn’t face that. “I want a larger share, or you do your own dirty work.”

  “It always comes down to money,” Morris Greenblatt said with a papery accountant’s chuckle.

  “Keep laughing,” Harry shot back, “but don’t forget you’re no better than me.”

  “I’m the one who put this whole operation together. Without me you’d be panhandling on a street corner.”

  That didn’t sound as bad to Harry as it had a few months ago. Too bad he’d opted to put his nuts in a wringer. “Okay, Einstein, explain to me how we’re going to get those plates?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “In my imagination this guy is still built like a truck, and now that he has his memory back, he’ll be ready for us.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Greenblatt said, “I have a secret weapon.”

  CONN TOOK ANNIE’S CELL AND COPIED A NUMBER into his. “I’ll call Harry in the morning, let him know we have the plates, and set up a meet. The three of you are going to—”

  “Have your back,” Rae said.

  Conn cut his eyes skyward, but God wasn’t in a facilitating mood. Conn knew that, because it was the fourth time he’d tried to convince the Blisses—father, mother, and daughter—to stay somewhere safe while his negotiations with Harry and the Stooges played out. And it was the fourth time they’d refused to listen to reason. As if he hadn’t done this sort of thing dozens of times before.

  “I’ve done this sort of thing dozens of times before,” he said—out loud this time. It had more effect that way, or it would have if he’d been dealing with reasonable people. “I’m still here.”

  “There are three of them and one of you,” Annie said. “Remind you of anything? Now that you’ve got your memory back, I mean.”

  “There’s no call for sarcasm.”

  “How about food?” Nelson set a tray of hamburgers and hot dogs on the table, alongside Annie’s potato salad and the corn he’d taken off the grill a few minutes before.

  “Will you be more agreeable once you’ve had dinner?”

  “No.” Rae took a hamburger, dumped some ketchup on it, and then ignored it altogether, along with the rest of the food she put on her plate.

  “There’s nothing you can do to help,” Conn said, sliding her plate over in front of him.

  “Hey!”

  “You’re not going to eat it anyway.”

  She pulled her plate away from him and took a bite of the burger, just to spite him. She raised her eyes to his as she finished chewing and swallowed, the corners of her mouth lifting in reluctant amusement.

  Conn felt something shift inside him, like a puzzle piece settling softly into place and completing a picture that was a complete revelation, but at the same time somehow familiar. He wanted to stay in that moment, even as he told himself no good could come of it.

  So what if they connected on levels he didn’t want to explore? So what if he saw something in Rae’s eyes in unguarded moments? She didn’t trust him, and she was right not to. He wasn’t suited for anything but what he was doing, and even if she would’ve been willing to go with him, he’d never ask her to walk away from the home and life she’d worked so hard to create just so he had a warm place to land between missions.

  “We were talking about this death wish you have,” Rae said, not about to be sidetracked.

  “I don’t take unnecessary risks, but I can’t watch your back and mine at the same time. With you hanging around my chances of coming through this in one piece drop drastically.”

  Rae pushed her plate away again. “Don’t spare my feelings.”

  “I’m the expert, remember?”

  “You said it yourself, sweetheart.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Rae said, still holding Conn’s eyes. “I guess that means you and Dad are going to make yourselves scarce, too.”

  “Oh, well . . .”

  Rae’s phone went off. Even if Conn hadn’t recognized the money song she used for her bosses, the look on her face would have given it away. She flipped the phone open and put it to her ear, her expression changing to one of cautious relief. “Mr. Greenblatt?”

  Her gaze shifted to Conn’s, she sank her teeth into her bottom lip, and he almost forgot what he was trying to do. Almost. Possible death was pretty hard to lose sight of.

  “Can you hold on a minute?” she said into the phone, then put her finger over the mouthpiece. “There’s a new client coming in for a meeting
tomorrow. The governor is giving big tax breaks to film companies that open studios in Michigan.”

  “Tell him you’ll be there.”

  “But—”

  “You still want to make partner, right? He’s giving you a sign of confidence.”

  She started to shake her head.

  Damn her and her stubbornness. “The debate is over. I don’t work with a partner, and I sure as hell don’t work with a team.”

  Rae lifted her chin, putting the phone up to her ear. “I’ll see you in the morning, Mr. Greenblatt,” she said, getting to her feet and keeping her eyes on Conn’s until she turned and walked away.

  “Well, son,” Nelson said, “you got what you wanted.” Yeah, Conn thought, he’d gotten what he wanted. Rae wouldn’t be around to split his attention tomorrow. Now all he had to do was figure out how to stop thinking about how pissed off she was.

  JUST AFTER DARK A HUGE BONFIRE WAS LIT IN THE center of camp. Lawn chairs, camp stools, and hollow logs ringed the fire, occupied by the members of the Bliss’s traveling group, most of them still in costume. If not for the various motor vehicles and somewhat modern campers parked in the gloom beyond the firelight, it might have been the sixteenth century. Conn’s attitude certainly fit the picture.

  “Still mad at me?” he said, parking himself on the ground beside her low beach chair.

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “You don’t deserve my best.”

  “C’mon, take a couple of cheap shots. It’ll make you feel better.”

  It would make her feel better. The question was, what was Conn getting out of it? “I thought you wanted to be alone.”

  “I want to work alone,” he said.

  “The two sort of go together.”

  “That would have a lot more oomph if you tacked jerk on the end.”

  She gave him a dirty look. “We done here?”